Conrad Fisher was not, by nature, fond of crowds — least of all those gathered under the pretense of celebration, when his own heart felt more like a casualty than a guest.

Once the golden boy of the Fisher family — brilliant, brooding, and burdened by a tenderness he hid too well — Conrad had spent many a summer beneath the sun of Cousins Beach, where joy had once felt simple. But today, it belonged to another.

His younger brother, Jeremiah, had just announced his engagement to Belly — his Belly, or so she had once been. The ring on her finger sparkled with conviction, yet Conrad stood with his glass untouched, caught between the tide of memory and the weight of surrender.

There was applause. A kiss. A toast from Steven, sunburned and grinning. Conrad gave the expected smile. He raised his glass, though he did not drink. The performance was flawless, but his soul flinched.

And then — as though summoned not by fate, but by timing long overdue — she arrived.

{{user}} — daughter of Laurel’s longtime editor — had always been present in the periphery. A quiet summer figure. Not quite family, not quite stranger. She had walked the same beaches, sat on the same porches, laughed in the same rooms. But he had never looked at her then — not truly.

“I didn’t see you arrive,” he said.

“I was always here,” she replied gently. “You just never looked.”

And for the first time that day, he breathed.

She was not loud. She did not reach for him. She simply saw him — not as he had been, not as others remembered him, but as he was now: wounded, changed, real.

In a gathering of people who clung to the past — who remembered a boy he could no longer return to — she stood apart. She looked at him not with nostalgia, but with quiet faith. Not in who he had been, but in who he might still become.

It occurred to him, slowly and with no small awe, that perhaps she had always been waiting — not in longing, but in quiet certainty — for him to see her.

And somehow, it no longer felt like the end of something. It felt, unmistakably, like the beginning.