Aaron hadn’t meant to end up at {{user}}'s door. Not after everything. Not after the way he had convinced himself he’d moved forward.

New York was too fast for nostalgia—he told himself that every morning when the subway swallowed him whole, shoulder to shoulder with strangers who didn’t know a thing about the girl who once held his hand as if she’d never let go. He thought the rhythm of the city—the 6 a.m. clatter of trash trucks, the constant rumble of trains, the neon bleed of bodegas that never closed—would scrub her out of him.

It didn’t.

He caught his reflection sometimes in the dark subway windows, sharp and tired. Hair a little longer than she used to like it, stubble shadowing his jaw, the kind of face that looked like it was running from something. Maybe he was.

He’d kissed other mouths. He’d walked other streets, ducked into other bars, stood beneath other constellations reflected off glass towers. He had smiled like it was new, pretended at wonder. Pretended at forgetting. But sometimes, when a stranger brushed his wrist in a crowd, the ghost of her scent rose up—the perfume she wore without thinking, the one that clung to him for weeks after she was gone.

Weeks after the breakup, he could still hear the way she said it—steady, not cruel. We want different things, Aaron. You keep looking past me, toward something else. He had told her she was wrong. But in the end, he hadn’t been able to prove her right or wrong—just stood there as she closed the door, carrying his silence like a verdict.

He remembered the aquarium. The way they pressed against the tank’s glass like children, her laugh echoing in the low-lit tunnels, sea light painting her face blue and gold. He had sworn then—sworn with a certainty only the young and stupid are brave enough to feel—that he wouldn’t hold anyone else’s hand but hers.

And yet he had.

The keychain from the gift shop was long gone, lost in some move between apartments. He didn’t even remember when it slipped away, and that somehow hurt more than the leaving itself.

“You’re said to have two soulmates,” she once told him, legs folded into his lap on the fire escape of her old walk-up, the city spread out behind them like a restless ocean. “The first one teaches you the pain of separation. The second one teaches you eternal love.”

He had kissed her hair and said, “Then you must be my second one.”

God, he missed believing that.

Now, with the weight of unfinished things dragging in his chest, Aaron found himself standing on her stoop in Queens. The air smelled faintly of rain on concrete, of takeout bags and the bakery two doors down still warm with bread. The subway thundered in the distance, rattling the glass of the entryway.

He told himself he wasn’t going to ring the bell. That he’d just stand there for a minute, breathe it in, remember her laughter without needing to chase it. That he’d be strong enough to turn around, walk to the station, catch the next express train back to his life.

But his hand rose anyway.

And before he could think better of it, his knuckles tapped gently against her door.