Sweet Romance18 min read
The Girl No One Claimed, the Girl Who Took the Sky
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01
"Call us Uncle and Aunt from now on." The porch light pooled around Candace May's shoes as she pronounced it like a final law.
"That can't be," I said, though I knew why she wanted it.
"Why?" Eden's voice was small, thin with pain. "They're my family. They raised her—"
"They raised a son, not a stranger." Marshall Gonzalez cut in. "We agreed: you kept your child when you could. We agreed."
"Mom—" I whispered from the shadow behind the door, the word slippery on my tongue. Eden sighed and knocked with the lightest fist I have ever heard.
"Panpan, I'm leaving now." She called my old nickname in the way only a mother can: rough with love and shaking.
I had practiced leaving for years. I didn't move.
"Panpan—" she tried again.
I held my breath until the elevator doors closed and the building hummed with all the ordinary noises of people who belonged somewhere. I rushed out, video in hand, but got there too late; the elevator rose, the buttons blinking, and Eden stood back turned, her coat already zipped.
"Mom, I won't study," I blurted, because I couldn't say the other thing: I won't let you be alone, I will take care of the bills, I will find the money—
"Don't you dare say that," she cut me, and her palm slapped my cheek. "If you say you won't study, I'll beat you. Do you want to end up like me? Do you want the rest of your life to be digging, washing, and paying for hospital bills?"
"Mom!" The word came out raw.
She shoved me toward the elevator doors. "Don't come back unless you pass. And don't call me mom in front of them. You call us Uncle and Aunt. You are nothing to them."
When the doors sealed, she turned and wiped her eyes hard with the back of her hand. The sound the elevator made eating the space between us felt like swallowing hope whole.
I was left with my suitcase—old and scratched, its handle at a tilt. The threshhold felt small and enormous at once.
Candace May opened the door slowly when I knocked.
"You're making a fuss," she said, like she couldn't be bothered.
"I'm staying," I told her. "I will sleep in the storeroom. I will help. I will—"
"Storeroom it is." She shoved the key and flung the door, already rolling her eyes at me like I'd done something embarrassing. "Clean it up. Your clothes, your bed. We don't have time for coddling."
Marshall watched me with a face of mild calculation. "From now on, call us Uncle and Aunt," he said.
"Okay," I said. The word tasted of dust.
I scrubbed, I dusted, I folded sweaters into corners. The storeroom smelled of old boxes and lemon oil. When I leaned against the wall, sweat almost froze as the moon slid across the cracked glass of my tiny army bed.
Li Panpan—no, Melody Graham—keep your hopes small, I told myself. That way you won't be disappointed. If they don't love you, you'd better learn how to love yourself.
02
School was a cold world. I arrived late to the new semester, my uniform still stiff from being folded by hands that did not care how it fit. The other students already had their laughter and their pairs, the easy gestures of people who belong. Old Teacher Eliot Alston introduced me with the kind of tone that wanted to be peppy but felt like a medical announcement.
"She used to be good in her old school. Please—be kind."
Be kind, my desk-mate said, but his eyes were a smirk.
"Looks like the village sent a sleek new scarecrow," muttered a boy with blue-gray dyed hair—Alexander Huang's neighbor used to call him "street-cool"—but the color made him look like someone who had never lifted a hoe in his life.
"Sit there," he said, offering the empty seat beside him with a hand that said both "welcome" and "catch you if you fall." For some reason, I said yes.
"Don't bother being nice," the smirker had said earlier. "We already chose."
"You're the one with the brash mouth," I replied, because the best defense I had was to be a little sharper with words than my presence.
He laughed, a small sound. "I used to think I'd be bored here."
That laugh would surprise me later. For now it was just a small thing—like someone throwing a pebble into a pond.
03
They mocked my tan. "Village girl," Alexandra Clemons and the girls circled like they were pointing out a specimen under glass. "Did you carry rice baskets?"
"Yes," I said simply. "One hundred a day."
They laughed as if it were a joke worthy of their time. In the classroom, they compared summer vacations—concerts, trips abroad, first-hand experiences of city life. "My summer tutor was from the city; we practiced for the test."
"Mine too," the girls said. But my summer had been hospital corridors with Eden, shoveling buckets of water and collecting prescriptions while a pulse machine whispered out the same tired melody doubt and hope.
When exam cards were handed out, my hands shook. The question formats were different from the county school. There were curveballs, leaps and traps I did not recognize. I wrote until the eraser became soft, until the last pencil stubbled.
After, Teacher Eliot Alston stood before the class and slammed the test packet like a judge making a point.
"Only five people in this class scored above 550," he said. "Our class average is—" The voice paused. "Not what we wish."
All eyes drifted toward the usual contenders: Alexandra, the neat girls, the honors crew. They waited for praise.
"Alexandra, 590. Good. But our top..." His face turned to me. "Melody Graham—605."
The room gasped like a wave. Alexandra's smile froze and then cracked into a small, brittle thing.
"You're the first? The first," someone murmured.
Alexander smirked, genuinely surprised. "Not bad."
"Not bad?" Alexandra sneered once her pulse steadied. "She was lucky."
"Luck doesn't come with a pen," I said. I did not look triumphant. Triumph felt like a paper crown; if you wore it, wind would lift it away. Still, the shift in the air was real: whispers, new looks, the taste of being seen.
04
At home, the dinner table became a stage. Candace piled the best pieces in Calhoun Nelson's bowl like he was made from porcelain and meant to be preserved.
"Calhoun, study hard. Top the rank."
I put my plate down. "I got 605," I said into the taut air as if counting the number would make it smaller.
Candace and Marshall's faces moved the way clouds do—shading, then clearing, then shaded again. "Six-oh-five," Candace said slower, tasting the number as if she'd never seen such currency.
Calhoun reddened and slammed his spoon like a hammer. "I had a private tutor!" he accused. "How could she outscore me?"
"She probably cheated." Marshall's voice was small and mean, a trick of someone who uses accusation to hide shame.
"Cheating?" I laughed, a short bark. "Ask me for help if you want, I can teach you."
"Don't be so arrogant," Calhoun said, but the room had shifted and their arrogance looked thinner somehow. Their jokes ricocheted off a resilient thing inside me and I answered with another: "I'll help you. One hour a day, tomorrow."
They tensed, then retreated into their practiced roles of patronizing hosts.
05
Competition settled like dust into my days. Calhoun became cruel in private—doors slammed, pens broken in my bag, my phone carelessly thrown into a sink. When it shattered I felt something break inside me too; it was more than a device. It had photos of my dad—my real dad, the one whose last gift to me had been that phone—his last laugh frozen in a corner. I chased repair shops through rain and alleys and got turned away every time.
"You're crying on the street as if it's your funeral," Alexander said when he found me, soaked and small.
"My phone," I breathed. "It's gone. I can't find the data."
Alexander's hands were steady as he picked the phone up. "Let me look." He examined it like a surgeon. "It's not a miracle case, but—" He held it up like a small prize. "It works."
"You're keeping your promise," I said, stunned.
"I never break promises," he said with a half-smile, half-warning. "Unless you are so outrageous I change my mind."
He took me home that night like someone walking me back from a cliff. I felt the air around him warm. But next morning the water was shut off while I was still in the shower. Calhoun's laugh cut through the paper-thin wall. "Cold now? Tough luck."
I refused to let him see me broken. I went to the exam with fever and a throat like scrunched paper. I refused to take pills because they made my head foggy. I wrote with burning determination, and something inside me said: every ounce you give, the world will owe you in silence later.
06
Results came like a sunrise: slow, sudden.
Teacher Eliot Alston read classes like someone unveiling trophies. "This semester's first among the parallel classes: Melody Graham, 38th in the grade, top among peers. Melody is transferred to Class A."
Class A—Aaron Rousseau's class—where the light was different, the air more perfumed with seriousness. Calhoun's face turned Hades-red; he stammered on the brink of protest. "She can't—"
"Class rules," Aaron said with a voice like a gavel. "Next time you work to beat her. For now, move your desk."
Calhoun looked like he might strangle a smile, then his hands trembled as he slid desks away. I felt an odd empathy for him; he'd been taught to be first by being told he'd be the center. Now someone else held that center and it made him smaller.
In Class A, the students were sharp, hungry. The atmosphere was cold machine efficiency, but it was the kind of cold that could be melted with work. Alexander found me in the doorway after class and handed me a small paper note.
"Welcome," it read. "I won't let you be lonely here."
"I don't want to be your charity case," I said, but my fingers closed around the paper like a talisman.
"Not charity. Company." He smiled that half-smile that sometimes was brave, sometimes mocking. "Also, don't mess up my last-place ranking; I like it playful."
07
Time sped like a bicycle on a steep road. I worked until the skin under my eyes shone like dusk. Every night I studied with the ferocity of someone building a ladder to the sky. I could see Eden's hands sorting bills in memory and my father’s laugh from a photograph I kept in a cheap frame. Those ghosts were not ghosts now; they were fuel.
Exams came and went. For a while, a rumor started that people behind my back were making bets: "She showed up from nowhere; how long before the bubble bursts?" The more they tried to speak me small, the louder the truth became. Scores climbed and climbed. Alexander—the boy with dreamy gray-blue hair and teeth sometimes missing a perfect edge—began to study like a man with a map and hunger.
"You'll ruin your looks," Alexandra said once, flicking a corner of her hair at me.
"Won't mind," I told her. "Knowledge doesn't ruin faces. It gives them an edge."
She tilted her head, like a queen judging a peasant. "It'll be funny when you're dragged back down to size."
"If you think fame is a trap, you should worry only about your own plans," I said. My answer was thin, but it landed in her face like a thrown coin.
08
Alexander and I had a habit of quarrelling like an old married pair in small ways and comforting like a pair in larger ones. He'd tease me with absurdity—"Eat ice cream before kissing me," he'd order—and then step forward with unexpected help when my mother needed dialysis payments fast, when the hospital doctor deferred calls like time could be bullied by bureaucracy.
"Don't panic," Alexander said, because his hands knew how to steady someone else. "Money can be arranged. My mother has connections."
"She shouldn't," I said. "I can't accept—"
"You're my friend," he said simply. "Friends don't make lists before they offer help."
His mother, Aurora Bolton, called and arranged things with a businesswoman's speed. For the first time in weeks, Eden's pale face relaxed. Alexander was my anchor; he wavered sometimes, but he did not let go.
09
High school is cruel and generous in the same breath. The district mock exams rattled like thunder. I placed first in the district. Teacher Aaron Rousseau shook my hand like a man who had seen a plant take root in impossible soil.
"You've done it," he said. "Keep steady. Imagine nothing else but the next question."
Alexander's scores climbed too. He went from an amused skater to a man who wore scholarship letters like armor. We filled each other’s gaps with stubborn humor. When you are exhausted, jokes glue you back together.
Calhoun, meanwhile, burned. He would rage at night, ripping up my practice sheets when I left them on my desk. Once he tore a paper with my mother's hospital bill scrawled on it. I found it shredded in the trash.
"I won't stand in the way," I told him once, finding him in the kitchen with his eyes full of a child's darkness.
"You never stood in the way before," he spat. "You shouldn't now."
"You taught me to be small," I said, "and now I'll be large enough to be seen."
He paled and turned away like a child who had been told the truth of a parent.
10
Exams narrowed down to the final surge. "The last mock is the closest to the real thing," Aaron announced with a stern smile. "This is where we find out who has the grit."
I had grit. I had nights that stung, library lights that blurred, ink-stained fingers. I had Alexander's breath on my neck sometimes, but mostly I had the slow accumulation of steady work.
Then, a week before the national exam, a message came through Calhoun's smirk like an arrow. "Your real mother hasn't been doing dialysis," he sneered over the phone. "They said it's because you're too expensive."
"No." My voice broke.
I called the hospital two times, then three. The doctor murmured something about financial policy before breaking into something that sounded like a confession. Eden had stopped going because she didn't want to be a burden to me; she had lied to protect me. The news hit me like an earthquake.
I could not focus. Alexander sat with me at night, his hand wrapping mine like a lifeline. "Go see her," he said. "I'll manage things."
"Are you sure?" I whispered.
"Of course," he said. "You go. Exams can be delayed in the worst case. But your mother—no more delays."
He was the one to pick up the phone to Aurora Bolton, who called people and moved things in a way that made the hospital suddenly feel small and efficient. Eden was found the next day. I sat by her bedside and let her rest on my shoulder like a child again.
11
"Do you want to stay or go back to them?" Eden asked in that moment between sleep and wakefulness where people speak honest things.
"I will go where I need to go," I answered with the same truth.
"I wish I'd have done it differently," she said, voice crumpled.
"You did all you could," I told her, which was both mercy and a lie that made the room less sharp.
The exam came, the two days that felt like the entire world had condensed into a handful of hours. I wrote with a calm so fierce the pages seemed to obey me. At the end, I felt drained, like a cup wrung dry but also like something had been poured into me.
Results came late in the evening. The school sent a message: Melody Graham, top of the province. The number was so large my mind hesitated before reading it. Tears came hot and sharp, but Alexander was there, laughing like it was a ridiculous joke finally proven true.
"You did it," he said, wrapping me in an embrace that was firm and sure.
"We both did," I corrected, because his name was on the scoreboard whether he wanted the credit or not.
12
Special PA announcements followed. Our faces photographed and hung on school boards. The image of me and Alexander graced the school's posters as if we had been modeled in achievement. At home, I returned only to pack.
At the gate, Candace and Marshall wore smiles that were suddenly practiced. "You did well," Candace said, fanning herself like a woman who had been saved from a small nuisance. "We knew you'd make it. It's just—"
"It's just what?" I asked.
"Just that this is the chance to show everyone," Marshall supplied. "You understand, right? Image matters."
I nodded. Their words were light as paper but meant like iron.
I came to pick up the rest of my things. They put on a bouyant display—red banners, neighbors gathered like flies around honey. The entire neighborhood knew: the poor girl's daughter had won. It was a story worth telling over hot tea.
13
The punishment had to come. The rules of the world demanded it: those who derided must be seen undone. I had thought that my silence, my grades, my departure would be sufficient punishment for their cruelty. It was not enough.
So I planned.
"Why are your hands shaking?" Candace asked as I placed a cardboard box on the table.
"Because I'm nervous." I smiled. I wanted it to be believable.
"Don't make a show of this," Marshall told me. "We don't need public spectacle."
"Public seems appropriate," I said.
I had called Teacher Aaron Rousseau and old Teacher Eliot Alston. I had called neighbors who had once whispered about "that family" when they thought no one else could hear. I had called reporters—no, not reporters. I had called the student council and the principal, and I told them everything: how Eden had been told not to call me "mom" in front of them, how my father had died and how they'd sent me back like a stray thing. I told them the times Calhoun intentionally broke my things and when Marshall mocked my lunchbox like a joke. I had the hospital receipts. I had messages. I had the shredded bill. I had patience and paper and truth.
On the square beneath their balcony—Candace had told the neighbors that I was "her distant relative" and they loved the idea—people gathered. The excuse was: a congratulations celebration for "our Melody." They brought red lanterns and cheap fireworks and bowls of tangerines. Calhoun stood by the gate like a carved statue, his face painted to the teeth for appearance.
The principal was there—Aaron Rousseau in a decent jacket and Teacher Eliot Alston with his habitual gravity. The student union had brought banners that read: "Hard Work Matters." They were careful, tentative, polite. The air smelled of soy and hot sugar.
I stood in the doorway. "Thank you for coming," I said. My voice was measured. "I'd like to say a few words first."
"Sure." Candace grinned, expecting the conventional.
"Melody?" A neighbor leaned forward, ready for the feel-good story.
"I want to start with the truth," I said. "When I was a child, I was told not to call my own mother 'mom' in front of my foster family. I was told to call them Uncle and Aunt like they were strangers. When I was left to live here, I slept in a storeroom. I was mocked for my skin. I was told I wasn't part of the family. I had to scrub, cook, and accept humiliation to keep a roof over my head. But I studied. I worked. If any of you had seen me counting medicine and saving small coins, you would know why I am here."
"That's not entirely true," Marshall interrupted, voice tight. "We took her in when—"
"—when you wanted a cheap laborer," I finished. "Yes. You told me once, 'We're not relatives.' You made me call you Uncle and Aunt in public because you wanted to erase responsibility. You told my mother: 'Give her back, she's trouble.'"
Candace's face lost the practiced smile first. "You shouldn't speak like that," she hissed, voice thin.
They began the expected denials: "We loved you," "We raised you," "We did our best." The neighbors shifted. Some looked surprised; some crossed their arms.
I held up an envelope.
"These are all the receipts—for my mother's hospital bills, for the clothes you gave me that you insisted I say were gifts, for the money I counted to pay for my own repairs. I recorded voicemails where you say, 'If she doesn't score high she can't live here.' I have them."
A neighbor murmured, "No way."
"Is this true?" Teacher Eliot asked Candace in a clear voice meant for public record.
Candace's lips trembled. "We... didn't mean—"
"Did you mean to break her phone in the sink?" I asked, and the question landed like a bell.
"I... I didn't—"
"Calhoun, your mother told me you called her 'a burden' while she sat by the hospital," I said. "Shall I read the messages she saved in case she needed proof?"
Candace slammed a hand on the table. "Stop this performance!"
The crowd leaned forward. "Why would she make this up?" a neighbor said. The old man near the gate spat, "I saw the girl scrub floors; I saw her go to the clinic."
Marshall opened his mouth, like a man about to vomit an alibi, but his voice evaporated.
Calhoun's face went from anger to blankness, and then to panic. "That's a lie," he said, the word small as a pebble thrown against a wall.
"Is it?" I held the envelope high. "Here is the bank transfer from when you claimed to have paid for extra tuition but didn't. Here is a message where you told my mother to stop visiting the dialysis center. Here are witnesses who will speak."
Neighbor after neighbor stepped forward. "She helped me with my laundry when my back hurt," said a woman with grey hair. "She paid for my child's fever medicine from her own pocket." A teenage boy from the council said, "She tutored me last winter for free."
Calhoun's hands shook; his jaw worked like a trapped animal.
"I came here with nothing," I said softly. "You told me to be small. You called me 'not of the family.' Tonight I will do something I should've done before." I reached into the box and pulled out a stack of banknotes I had saved from scholarships and prizes—more than their weeks of scorn could buy. "This is everything you spent on me, counted to the last cent." I handed the envelope to Candace.
Candace's fingers closed on the notes like a drowning person grasping a plank. "What are you—"
"Two thousand is for rent," I announced. "You spent more than that. Consider this a final accounting."
Candace's expression collapsed from triumph to shock. "How dare you!" she sputtered. "We raised you!"
"Raised?" I lifted my chin. "You raised your son and returned me, then kept me as a servant. You denied my mother's name and told the world I was your distant cousin. You are good at pretending."
Her nostrils flared. "We were protecting you. We raised you properly."
The crowd made little sounds—some laughter, some clucks.
"Shall we hear from the principal?" Aaron asked, calm official. "We will document everything."
People began to record on phones. "You're famous now," a neighbor said to Candace, and then—"You even threatened to beat her if she didn't study," someone else called.
At first Candace's face burned with betrayal, then her eyes went glassy and wide, then thin. "You can't prove—" she whispered.
And there it was: the sequence of change. The smugness drained away; the small, sharpened knives of practiced cruelty dulled into something rawer. Candace's voice roared for a fraction before cracking. "I never—"
"I have witnesses," I said. "I have receipts. I have the truth."
Calhoun started to cry—not the big theatrical cry of someone trying to earn pity, but the ugly, thin kind that comes from being exposed. "She—she's ruining everything!" he wailed. "We gave her food!"
"You gave food," I said slowly, "and made her wash the dishes, scrub the floors all night, and then were surprised she grew strong enough to stand. When you humiliated her, you taught her resilience. You made her a scholar." The neighbors shifted like a school of fish finding light.
A few in the crowd who had known me from childhood—an old vendor, the woman with a limp—turned and said outright, "You treated her wrongly." A murmur rose. The principal took out a notebook. Alexander stood at the corner of the gathering, arms folded but his face shining with pride and something like relief.
Candace tried to retake control. "Neighbors! She's blackening us. Our family is honorable. She is being dramatic."
"Do you want to go on record?" Teacher Eliot asked, his professional voice crisp. "Are you contesting the receipts?"
Candace's face flushed scarlet. Her defenses crumpled not because she was weak but because the world was not willing to stand by silent as I told the truth. The neighbors began to murmur into their phones; someone whispered, "Put it on the group chat." A dozen small shoves of community pressure made the family look suddenly absurd—like a cheap play performed at wrong time.
Calhoun lunged forward toward the money and Candace's hand. "Give it back!" he screamed.
"Stop." I stepped in. "You keep your pride. I keep the dignity of knowledge. Take the money if you must. I'm done being small."
His face bowed into his palm, a child expecting a slap and receiving only silence.
Candace let the envelope clatter from her hands as if it burned. For a long second, the air tasted like metal. Then, like a dam opening, neighbors' judgment flooded in: whispers, pointed fingers, and the small blessed harshness of being recorded.
By the end of the night they were not arrested, no one dragged them to court. The punishment was worse: public truth, exposure, the neighbors' whispered "we always thought something was off" and "we saw her do the laundry" and the parade of teacher and principal who had seen the student's progress and said it aloud. They had been stripped of the story they wanted. Their faces were pale; the community's reaction was a slow, unpitying chorus.
Candace's eyes went from denial to brittle pleading. "Please—" she croaked.
"Please what?" I asked. "Apologize now? Or take this lesson and change so that the next family won't endure this silence?"
Candace collapsed into a chair, suddenly an old woman. Marshall stood for a moment more, shoulders tense like someone ready to strike, then sat down beneath the weight of everyone's gaze. Calhoun curled like a child.
Neighbors clapped sometimes—not for me but for truth. A woman at the gate who often sold stewed buns clapped once loudly and said, "Better late than never; some people need an audience to clean their souls." People laughed, some cheered. A few older folks spat.
The family tried to compose themselves after that cleansing. For weeks they were careful in public. They smiled too bright to cover the rawness. People pointed subtly; some avoided the family; teachers and neighbors exercised a patient coldness.
For them, the punishment was not violent. It was worse in a way: their petty cruelty was now a story the whole neighborhood told without them. They had to live with the knowledge that their small cruelties had been ordinary to others and visible. They had been exposed, and exposure is a long winter.
14
After that, the tone at home shifted. They tried being nice. Their sudden niceness tasted like medicine. "Don't be arrogant," Calhoun still muttered. "You still don't belong."
"You belong to whatever you build," I answered. "You don't get to decide."
They adjusted their faces to public expectation: Candace smiled like a machine, Marshall kept his distance, and Calhoun lurked. It would take more than one night to unpick eighteen years of being told you were less, but the public measure had been set. For the first time, the family was no longer free to humiliate me without witnesses.
15
Time continued to move, like homework stacked in neat piles. I moved to university with a scholarship. Alexander came with me to the same city; he had been admitted through his own fight for change. Aurora Bolton had been a quiet force behind many opportunities. She also liked to make a big pot of hot soup when exams finished and she'd come to celebrate us like a proud parent.
We learned how to live together as two people who had shared a ladder. Our moments were small: a corner shop selling single-serve ice cream, a library booth where we whispered solutions, a late-night phone call where he said, "Are you asleep?" and I would answer "No," just to hear his voice.
At graduation, we stood together on the stage as the world shouted our names. The school principal took my hand and said, "You are a reminder that talent is everywhere."
I looked at Alexander. He took my hand, and his thumb found the small place on my palm where I had once traced the edge of my father's smile on my phone's cracked picture.
He leaned in once, halfway so the world could not see, and said, "We did it."
"I didn't do it alone," I said.
"You did the brunt of it." He kissed me quick, like a promise. "And I will be there to share the rest."
Epilogue
I went back to the little house one last time to collect the rest of my things. Candace and Marshall had a red banner outside and crackers popped at my arrival as if it were a festival. The neighbors came to watch me leave again—there is a curious love in human beings for seeing endings.
I took out an envelope and placed down six thousand five hundred and sixty-two in cash—the exact amount I had calculated as their literal spending on me.
"Here," I said. "You held me as labor, called me other than my mother called me, and yet you fed me, at times. This is the receipt for your kindness and cost. Two thousand is rent; the rest is for whatever you think you deserve."
Candace looked as if she had been struck. "You can't—"
"I can," I said. "I also want you to know: I go forward. I won't be your measure." I smiled. "Goodbye."
Calhoun stood in the doorway, face twisted. "You think you can just laugh it off?" he hissed.
"I didn't laugh." I answered. "I tidied what was left." I turned. "Good luck with your future."
I left the house that night with my suitcase and a small freckle of fear and a whole sky wide open. The neighbors cheered like the world was a theater, and for once feel more like friends than foes. I had a scholarship in my pocket and a university waiting for me.
Alexander waited at the curb, his jacket like a windbreak. He unfolded his hands and offered me his arm like a modest prince.
"Ready?" he said.
I took his arm, feeling the small solidness of him. "Ready."
We walked toward the city lights—the lights that had once seemed like a cold, distant constellation, but now felt like a map with a compass in my hands.
The End
— Thank you for reading —