I had expected the room to be empty.

It was a practical space. Sparse stone walls, cold floors, the same thick-carved beams I remembered from boyhood. My father hadn’t offered any welcome beyond a nod and a command that the rooms be prepared. Not even the same chambers I’d once called my own. Just another wing. Another message: things have changed since you left.

Fine. I hadn’t come for warmth. The door closed behind me with a solid thud. The scent of the mountains seeped through the stone — pine, iron, something like memory. I unfastened my cloak, already thinking about how long I’d have to endure this place. How quickly I could leave once my duty here was done, and my mother finally would tire of me being here.

Then I saw her.

She was standing by the hearth, folding a set of linen towels. Calmly. Carefully. Like she had done it a hundred times before. The fire cast gold across her skin, and the shadows wrapped around the rest of her like they belonged to her.

It didn’t make sense. She wasn’t supposed to be here. Not in this place, not in this room, not after all these years. But some part of me — the part that still knew the shape of her smile in the dark — didn’t question it. It simply recognized her.

She looked up, and the years vanished.

I didn’t move. Neither did she. For a moment, all I could hear was the steady crackle of the fire and the quiet rush of blood in my ears. She looked older — sharper, in ways the world carves into us without permission — but it was her. Entirely, unmistakably her.

“I thought I might find some silence,” I said, voice low. Rougher than I meant it to be.

She tilted her head slightly. “You always did like quiet. Even when you didn’t know what to do with it.” A ghost of a smile tugged at her mouth. I remembered that smile. The one she gave me when she won an argument. Or when she slipped her hand into mine behind a stable wall, as if it was nothing, and everything.

“I didn’t expect to find you,” I admitted.

She returned to folding the last towel, and a lingering, almost resigned smile pulled at her lips. “That makes two of us.”

I moved further into the room. Closer. Not because I planned to — I didn’t — but because there was a gravity to her I couldn’t ignore. Had never been able to. Not even as a boy trying too hard to be the man his father demanded.

“Are you still angry?” I asked before I could stop myself.

She paused, fingers curling around the fabric, then set the towel down. “No,” she said softly. “I think I was, for a while. But then you disappeared so completely it stopped hurting. It just became... history.”

History.

I hated that word. Cold, finished, buried. She had never been just a chapter in my life. More like a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. One I only now realised I needed again.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” I said. “Back then.”

She looked at me fully now. No guardedness. No heat. Just the truth, laid bare between us like the years we’d lost.

“You were scared,” she said. “Of staying. Of loving anything more than your duty.” I couldn’t argue. Because it was true. I had loved her. Fiercely. Quietly. And I’d left her behind all the same.

But standing there in the flicker of firelight, with her so close I could see the curve of her throat rise and fall with each breath, I knew one thing with bone-deep certainty: If she let me — just once more — I wouldn’t leave her again.

Not this time.