Rain blurred the city lights into watercolor smears outside the terminal window. The droplets traced erratic paths down the glass like tears that didn’t know where to fall. Jeff pulled his coat tighter, but it wasn’t the cold that made him shiver. It was the ache. The one lodged behind his ribs ever since she stopped looking at him the same way.

Beside him, you stood silent, hands in her pockets, face unreadable beneath the grey sky.

He’d written every song with her in mind. Not just the words. She was the reason he sang at all.

In tiny motels with buzzing lights, in green rooms where the air reeked of stale beer and nerves, her laugh echoed in his memory like a chorus he couldn’t stop chasing. In midnight studios, her absence filled the booth louder than the music. Her laugh, her silence, her silhouette in the kitchen light haunted every lyric. Especially the ones from Grace.

"This is our last goodbye..." Jeff hummed the line under his breath, bitter irony flooding his chest. The line that used to be just a song was now prophecy. It hurt how true it had become.

His fingers brushed hers, but she didn’t take his hand. That absence said more than any tear or word could. It was a soft rejection, the kind you can’t argue with. He looked at her—not like a man about to board a plane, but like a boy searching a broken horizon for a sign, any sign, that home was still there. That she was still there.

“You okay?” he asked.

She nodded. Too fast. Too practiced. Like she had rehearsed it on the drive here. Like she needed to be fine so he could leave with a clean conscience. Her lips twitched in a ghost of a smile, one that died before it reached her eyes.

They hadn't talked about it, not really. Not about how she stopped humming his songs under her breath. How their silences became longer than their conversations. Not about how her eyes wandered in conversations, or how her smiles never reached her eyes anymore.

But Jeff felt it. Knew it. And yet he was still in love, blindly, achingly so. He loved her the way the ocean loves the shore—even when it’s pushed away, it keeps coming back. And she… she loved him like someone remembering a feeling, not living it.

Did you say no this can't happen to me? Did you rush to the phone to call?

But she hadn’t. Not once. When he told her about the world tour, her smile had been calm, too calm. The tour dates had stretched across continents, and not once did she beg him to stay. Not once did she ask when he’d come home. Not once did her voice catch in her throat. And he tried not to hate how easy it seemed for her.

And still—he kissed her forehead, his lips trembling against her skin, her rain-wet hair cold against his face. A kiss meant for love, meant for something sacred. But her skin was cool, unmoved. She didn’t flinch, but she didn’t lean in either. That stillness—God, it screamed.

“I’ll call you,” he said, voice cracking. It was a promise he meant with everything in him, even if part of him feared she wouldn’t pick up.

“Okay,” she whispered. Just that. No “I love you.” No “I’ll miss you.” Just a word so light it almost broke.

Silence.

The PA called final boarding. He looked at her one last time, searching for something in her eyes—remorse, longing, anything. Some flicker that this was hard for her too. But all he saw was goodbye. And a part of him hated himself for still hoping.

Was this their silent breakup? Or just a lull before healing? He didn’t know. Neither did she.

They were standing on the edge of something they couldn’t name. It wasn't rage or betrayal. It was the soft death of something once beautiful. The kind that doesn’t shatter, but fades.

But as he walked away, the rain washed the world quiet, and Last Goodbye played in his head like a funeral hymn.

Every lyric now felt like a wound. Every memory of her a verse he couldn’t unsing. And still, his love for her followed him like a shadow, into the rain, into the silence, into the departure gate.