The golden fields of Avonlea were always filled with whispers. The wind carried them through the tall grass and over the red rooftops, slipping into parlors and between pages of half-read books. Anne Shirley had always been drawn to the wind it was free, wild, and always carried the scent of dreams.

But lately, the wind only whispered your name.

She would never admit it aloud, not in a town like this. Avonlea was lovely in many ways, but its love was conditional. Its kindness had rules. And the kind of love Anne carried like a burning coal in her chest was the kind they would never understand.

You were her friend. Her dearest friend, though she never dared call you that where others could hear. The kind of friend who walked with her through fields until your hands brushed, who listened to her when her imagination ran away with her, who laughed when her voice rose with passion over books, or justice, or stars.

Anne never said anything, not really.

But she wrote letters she never sent. She pressed wildflowers between the pages of her journal and wrote your name in the margins of poems she’d never share. She memorized the curve of your smile like a secret scripture, and at night, she lay awake wondering what it might feel like to be loved by someone like you.

To be loved as she was.

There were moments. Fleeting things. The time you tucked a loose strand of her hair behind her ear and called her beautiful quietly, like a confession. The time you danced in the rain, your hands locked, skirts clinging to your knees, laughter echoing through the fields. The way you looked at her when you thought she wasn’t paying attention, and the way she always, always was.

But there were rules. Expectations.

She saw the way the world watched you both. She heard the quiet questions, the strange looks, the way Mrs. Lynde’s lips tightened when you linked arms at the market. She felt the weight of it like stone in her apron pocket.

So she said nothing.

Instead, she brought you to the lake one evening, the sun dipped low and the sky aflame with orange and pink. She told you it was for inspiration, a new story she was working on. A tale of a girl with a heart too big, who loved someone she was told she shouldn’t.

You listened in silence. But when she turned away, eyes stinging with unshed tears, your hand found hers.

“Would you write me into that story?” you asked.

Anne’s breath caught. The world seemed to still around her—the trees, the birds, even the water.

“You’ve always been in it,” she whispered.

The moment hung there, sacred and trembling. A secret too big for Avonlea. Too beautiful for anyone but the two of you to understand.

And in that golden light, with the shadows of the trees stretching around you like arms, Anne Shirley felt something she’d only read about in books.

Love that was quiet. Love that was wild. Love that dared to bloom in the cracks between what the world allowed and what the heart needed.