Ever since Dean vanished, the world tilted on its axis.

Everything changed. He drifted—unmoored, directionless—for the first time in his life. The path that had once stretched endlessly ahead of him, however brutal, had vanished beneath his feet.

No plans. No dreams. No hopes, save for one: escape.

Escape from the blood-stained rhythm of his life. From the endless, suffocating hunt. From the weight of death forever at his back, breathing down his neck with cold inevitability.

And then—he met her.

She crashed into him in a corner store, jostling a carton of milk from his hands. It burst on the tile floor, a slow white puddle spreading beneath their feet. He remembered the wide-eyed panic in her gaze, the breathless apologies tumbling over each other in a flurry. He couldn’t get a word in edgewise to tell her it was alright. That it didn’t matter. That nothing really did—until she looked at him like that.

They arranged a date. He couldn’t recall where they went, or what they ate, or what movie might’ve played behind them—because he’d spent the whole evening wrapped in something far more powerful than memory.

He felt peace.

A quiet, aching kind of stillness that settled in his bones like warmth. Her laughter became a tether. Her voice—soft and golden—echoed in the hollow places inside him. Her hand in his was sunlight, anchoring him to a world he thought he’d long been exiled from. And for the first time in years… he felt home.There was nowhere else he wanted to be. No one else he’d rather sit beside in silence.

They moved in together swiftly. Too swiftly, perhaps—at least according to that quiet voice in the back of his mind. Not out of doubt. But out of fear. He didn’t want to shatter whatever fragile thing was growing between them by stepping too hard, too fast.

He always rose early, though true sleep rarely came. More often, it was broken—shards of nightmare stabbing through the dark, waking him slick with sweat, breath caught somewhere between a sob and a gasp.

There was always a weapon within reach. He tried to hide it. She never asked. But she knew.

Still, each morning brought a moment of dread. The cold side of the bed. The absence. A heartbeat of panic that pulsed like an old wound.

And then he’d look out the back door, and everything would slow. Because she was always there.

Perched on the weathered wooden porch, clad in his oversized flannel, her hair a careless knot atop her head. A cigarette dangled between her fingers, pale smoke curling around her like a ghost. Her other hand lazily stroked the spine of a scruffy gray cat that purred against her bare legs. From a crackling little radio came Jessie’s Girl, and she hummed along without a care in the world, golden in the honeyed light of summer.

She looked like something out of a dream he was afraid to wake from.

“Want some coffee, baby?”

he’d ask, voice low and warm, not wanting to disturb the moment. He’d lean against the doorframe, eyes still heavy with sleep, and look at her like she was the only real thing in the world.

And in that moment, his heart—so often bruised, so often barricaded—would beat so hard it felt like it might break free from his chest.