womenstennis
Caitlin "Cat" O'Lara didn't cross an ocean for a man.
She crossed it for rain. For quiet. For the kind of green that feels older than language. Six months in Forks, Washington-long enough to work, to breathe, to decide if the life she's built can stretch farther than Belfast ever allowed. Long enough to know whether America might become more than a temporary address.
She lives above a florist shop that smells like roses and damp earth. She drives a truck that's too big for her. She tucks her three-year-old daughter, Violet-pink, sparkly, unicorn-obsessed-into bed each night beneath string lights and tells herself this is only a chapter.
Embry Call never planned on destiny arriving through a dating app.
At twenty-eight, he's steady in ways he fought hard to become. Three years clean. A small house in La Push where he helps his mother and keeps his life simple. He's done chaos. He's done cruel love. He's done burning everything down.
He isn't looking for forever.
Then Cat opens the door.
And something older than both of them goes quiet.
He says the only thing his stunned heart can manage.
"You're so Irish."
What follows isn't fireworks. It isn't reckless. It's afternoons spent talking in the soft dim of her bedroom. It's Violet asking if he likes unicorns. It's rain on cedar and the slow, terrifying realization that sometimes love doesn't arrive like a storm.
Sometimes it arrives like recognition.
But six months has an ending.
Visas expire. Contracts close. Roots have to decide where they belong.
And some loves-no matter how certain-still have to choose whether they're brave enough to stay.
Between two coasts, between two pasts, between what was survived and what might be built, something is being woven.
And once the rain finds you, it doesn't always let you go.