Three years later, the penthouse in Bonifacio Global City feels like a mausoleum. No matter how many times Soren Hayes opens the floor-to-ceiling windows, the air never changes. It’s still cold. Still hollow. The framed photos lining the hallway—engagement shots, candid smiles, hands reaching for each other—look more like tombstones than memories now. Every one of them asks the same thing: Why didn’t you stay?

Ariella’s presence down the hall is more ghostly than grounding. She’s lived in the guest room ever since he found her in that pristine hospital room at St. Lucias—hooked up to machines, her mind teetering between past and present. Soren brought her back because he couldn’t leave her behind again. Not after what it cost. But there was no rekindling. No love. Just mutual grief and the quiet burden of surviving what they never should’ve had to endure.

He’s built a life from the ruins—one gallery fund at a time. Noah’s, in particular, runs on guilt money Soren sent anonymously. He never asked for repayment. He owed Noah that much. Because when you woke up from a car crash coma 2 years and 6 months ago, it was Noah who was there. Not Soren. It was Noah who helped you stand again in a world scrubbed clean of their love.

Soren couldn’t face you, not after that day at the church—the rain, the silence, the look in Camille’s eyes when she found him there, ring still in his pocket.

“You left her,” Camille said, voice brittle with fury. “You chose a ghost.”

And maybe she was right.

That guilt resurfaced one week ago. Ariella, holding a mug of chamomile in trembling hands, finally whispered, “I think I’m ready to leave.”

Soren had only nodded. She was never meant to stay.

The same night, a nondescript envelope slipped into the hands of Noah at the Luminaria Gallery. Inside: a torn wedding invitation and a Polaroid of you. Caught mid-laugh under an umbrella in Serendra, rain falling around you. Behind you, blurred but unmistakable—Soren, watching from afar.

Camille confronted him days later at the courtyard of the old St. Elara's Church. The same place their future collapsed.

“She remembers fragments,” she said, stepping into the downpour like it didn’t bother her. “Names. A man with a silver ring. A letter. A cold morning with no answers.”

“Does she remember me?” Sorenasked, his voice small, shivering.

Camille only shook her head. “She remembers pain. The ache before the name.”

That was all it took.

With Noah and Camille’s help, an invitation was sent. A private showing—Memory and Time II. Just you. Just quiet. Just familiar photographs without dates, curated to whisper to something buried in your bones. The centerpiece, The Almosts, sat in silence: soft glows on photos of a half-read letter, a forgotten boutonnière, a veil’s edge left in motion. And one final image: Soren, alone at the altar, eyes glassy, rain streaking down marble.

You stood still before it for too long.

“I don’t know him,” you finally said.

Behind you, Noah’s voice broke through the quiet. “You did.”

The rain began again that night—soft at first, like breath on glass. The gallery emptied. Even Noah stepped away.

And then the door creaked open.

Soren stepped inside, rain-slicked and silent, his presence a wound reopening. He didn’t rush to speak. He just looked at you—like seeing sunlight through a memory. You turned toward him, gaze uncertain, but he could feel it—the ghost of recognition stirring.

And for the first time in three years, he let his heart speak through cracked ribs and unfinished vows.

“I didn’t come to steal anything back. I just needed to see you... one last time.”

Then, gently, he pulls a sealed envelope from his coat pocket. “If memory never finds its way back to me,” he murmurs, repeating the words from a letter he never had the courage to send, “I’ll still love you. If I’m nothing more than a stranger in your story... I’ll still love you. And if all that’s left of us is almost—”

He places the letter on the counter. “I’ll still love you.”