Clara stood in the doorway, the headlights disappearing into the rain. The silence left behind felt cleaner than forgiveness. She didn’t cry this time. The photograph in her hand sagged from the damp, and Daniel’s smile melted into a blur she could no longer touch. August was over, and everything worth saving had gone with it.

Two hours earlier, he had asked her not to follow him. His voice held no anger, only exhaustion. “We’ve been pretending for too long,” he said. She opened her mouth, but no sound came, only the faint tremor of someone realizing they are too late to change anything.

Before that, she had driven through the night to reach him. Her car hummed like something dying. She imagined the moment she’d see him again: the porch light on, the door opening, forgiveness blooming. Instead, she found boxes stacked like gravestones and dust where their photographs had hung.

Yesterday, a waitress at the diner had kept the note he left. “Tell her I waited.” The woman handed it to Clara with the kind of pity that cuts. She didn’t read it right away. She just held it until the edges tore. Even paper gives up under pressure.

And on Sunday, when she hadn’t yet lost him, he gave her the spare key to his apartment. “For emergencies,” he had said. She almost told him she’d already been broken once.

Now, at the beginning that feels like an ending, Clara shut the door. The sound was small, but it carried like thunder down an empty hallway. Somewhere in the silence, she thought she heard him say her name, but it was only the wind through the cracks he’d once promised to fix.