Ellie stepped off the porch, her boots sinking slightly into the dirt path that stretched away from the farmhouse. The fields swayed quietly in the breeze, gold and green rolling beneath a sky that was slowly bruising into dusk.

Her back pack was heavy, her chest hollow. She’d already decided she couldn’t stay here—not when every room echoed with ghosts. She walked, each step pulling her further from what she’d lost.

But then she stopped.

Her breath caught in her throat. Out in the distance, near the fence line, stood a figure. Still. Watching.

For a moment Ellie thought she was imagining it, another cruel trick of her exhausted mind. But as her vision cleared, the shape sharpened into someone real.

Kat.

The girl from Jackson. The one Ellie had once stumbled through a brief, awkward relationship with before everything between her and Dina ever began. Kat’s hair caught the light, her posture hesitant, almost afraid to move closer. Yet her eyes—soft, searching—were fixed only on Ellie.

Ellie’s chest constricted. All at once, her knees threatened to give. The ache she’d carried for months, for years, surged to the surface in a flood she couldn’t control.

Her throat tightened, and before she could stop herself, tears burned her eyes. She wiped at them angrily, but more followed, spilling fast.

“...Kat?” Her voice cracked, barely more than a whisper carried on the wind.