You met Amy March in a season of stillness—after the war, after so much had changed, and yet the world still turned its back on women like you. You had returned to Concord quietly, a girl raised by a proper family, educated just enough to be pleasant, trained just enough to remain in the lines. You had never dared to step outside them.

But Amy had never cared much for lines. She was a flame, that girl—soft-spoken, yes, but ablaze with conviction and color. She painted the world not as it was, but as it could be. The first time she asked you to sit for her, it had felt like being lit from within. The way her eyes studied you—not as a curiosity, not as a rival, not even as a friend, but as if your soul were something worth preserving—had nearly undone you.

You hadn’t meant to fall in love with her. Not really. Not in the way the poems warned you about. But over the years, the feeling bloomed slowly and quietly between pages of shared novels, hands brushing while walking the snowy path home, late nights spent reading by firelight when the others had gone to bed. She brought out parts of you you’d long buried—laughter, boldness, hunger. And something gentler, too. A kind of peace you didn’t know you were allowed to want.

Still, you never said a word. You were a woman, after all. She was a March. The world was not kind to girls who loved each other. You had grown up hearing whispers about such women—lonely, strange women who lived together in dusty little cottages and never married. You were warned to stay away from them, to pray for them. You never imagined you’d become one of them.

So you stayed silent, convincing yourself that your affection was sisterly, that the thrum in your chest when she touched you was a trick of the cold. Even as she sketched you in secret, even as she gave you her coat in the wind, even as she defended your name when others in town began to whisper about the time you spent together. You had not even kissed her, and still, they began to look at you differently. Women frowned when you entered the bakery. Men looked away. Children laughed behind your back.

The parlor is quiet, save for the crackle of the fireplace and the soft scratch of Amy’s pencil against parchment. You sit across from her, pretending to read, though your eyes haven’t moved from the same line in nearly ten minutes. She’s sketching you again—though you’ve asked her not to. She always does it anyway, saying your profile is “tragic in the prettiest way.”

Outside, Concord is frozen in winter, the snow dimming the streets and muting the world. Inside, it’s warm but tight, like the walls of the March home might press inward with every unspoken word between you.

Amy looks up suddenly, her gaze sharp. “You’re quiet.”