MELTING ME SOFTLY

Renna Rose Lancaster never searched for love.

She stumbled into it long before she was old enough to know what to call it.

It lived inside flower crowns that barely survived a minute on his head. Pebbles he slipped into her pockets because every treasure deserved a keeper. Muddy races neither of them remembered winning. Skinned knees that somehow stopped hurting the second he frowned at them like they were his responsibility to fix.

Every version of tomorrow she ever imagined already had him in it.

Not because anyone promised forever.

Because some things feel too ordinary to ever disappear.

Aadam Alaric Callahan never trusted forever.

Forever belonged to grown-ups who said one thing and lived another.

He trusted things that left couldn't lie. The rough scrape of bark beneath his palms. Rainwater collecting inside his trainers. The sting of scraped elbows after climbing somewhere he definitely wasn't supposed to. A little girl who somehow appeared wherever he went, carrying wildflowers in one hand and another impossible question in the other.

He never wondered why she followed him.

She simply always had.

A presence so constant that the thought of losing her never once entered his mind.

Children never hear the sound of their lives breaking in half.

One day laughter becomes memory.

Familiar roads begin leading somewhere else.

And the person who once knew every unfinished thought becomes the stranger who remembers your oldest name.

Some distances aren't counted in miles.

They're counted in the people you had to become just to survive them.

So what happens when the only place you've ever called home is standing right in front of you...

...but one of you still believes they were never meant to return?