The following Thursday, Evelyn didn't show. The mist rolled in thick from the sea, curling around the town like an ominous breath, and the library grew colder with each passing hour. The fire in the hearth sputtered and died, but Mr. Aldridge didn't bother to stoke it. He waited, like he always did, but her absence gnawed at him in ways he couldn't explain.
The townspeople spoke of her in hushed tones, as if she had never truly belonged to them or to him. To them, she was a fleeting vision, a strange girl who had wandered into their lives only to slip away as quickly as she had arrived. They spoke in whispers at the market, at the local inn, in the alleys where gossip thrived. She was a brief dream, a girl destined to vanish.
And though they spoke with a sort of detached curiosity, there was an undercurrent of relief in their voices. Evelyn had always been the sort of person who didn't fit neatly into their little world—a shadow they couldn't hold, a figure too wild, too untamed for their simple, beige lives.
Mr. Aldridge, however, was left to stew in his guilt. The weight of her disappearance settled like a heavy stone in his gut. He couldn't shake the sickening feeling that he had driven her away, that he had somehow pushed her into the corners of his own fears and reservations. The guilt twisted inside him, churning like a sick animal. He replayed every moment in his mind, every glance, every word, every silence—wondering if he had misread her, if he had closed off too soon, too abruptly, if he had been too cold. He could not rid himself of the sickness that crawled beneath his skin, the knowledge that he might never see her again, and he was left to sift through the wreckage of his own making.
Her unfinished poems, her notes, still lay scattered across the library—fragments of her, moments frozen in ink, like relics left behind by a ghost. He picked up one of the poems, a jagged, raw thing about loneliness so vast it felt as if it were the whole world. He read it aloud to himself, each line cutting deeper than the last. It was as though she had known this moment, knew the emptiness that would follow her absence. In those words, he felt something stir—a familiarity that chilled him to the bone.
That night, he found himself standing by the shoreline, her journal gripped in his hands like it might slip away from him too. The waves broke at his feet, the cold water rising with each step he took, but he barely noticed. His gaze was fixed on the horizon, where the sea and sky blurred together, a seamless expanse of gray that seemed to stretch on forever. In that moment, he finally understood the loneliness she had written about. Not just the absence of another person, but the aching, hollow emptiness of existence itself. The kind of loneliness that was vast and inescapable, that swelled within him like a tidal wave, threatening to drown him.
He felt it then, truly felt it—an overwhelming, unbearable weight pressing down on him, the kind of loneliness that didn't need company to be felt. The kind that clung to your skin, soaked into your bones. It was a feeling that had no name, no shape, just a raw, gaping void that existed within and without him.
The mist rolled in thicker then, a cold fog that swallowed him whole, and for a fleeting moment, he thought he heard her voice again. But when he turned, it was only the sound of the waves crashing against the shore, and the world fell silent once more. And just like that, the loneliness was back, and he was once again alone, left to drift in the emptiness she had left behind.
She slipped right through his fingers like the mist that rolled in from the sea.
