After Solene left, something in Nathan cracked.
Not loud, not dramatic—just a quiet breaking, like the sound of frost splitting a windowpane. He didn't tell anyone. He simply folded the note she left, slipped it between the pages of a book, and kept going.
But he wasn't the same.
He stopped drawing. Stopped listening to music. Even the café, once a place of warmth and quiet joy, felt hollow. Customers still came and went. The bell over the door still rang. But the colors seemed duller. The walls, quieter. Her absence became an invisible thread through every day, tugging at him when he wasn't paying attention.
Weeks passed like shadows. He worked. Walked. Slept. Repeated.
And then one day—he looked in the mirror and didn't recognize himself.
---
It started with his mother.
She'd been coughing more often, forgetting ingredients when cooking, wincing when bending down to reach a pan. His father, still strong, still steady, had aged more too. There were more grey hairs in his beard, deeper lines around his eyes.
Nathan realized then: while he had been drifting, they had kept the house, the life, going. And now it was his turn.
He began rising earlier. Cleaning dishes before they piled up. Organizing the medicine shelf. Replacing broken light bulbs, shopping for groceries, helping his mom with her slippers, brushing her hair gently when she was too tired.
These weren't heroic things.
But they were *real.*
He found something solid in the rhythm of care—of choosing, each day, to show up even when everything inside him still hurt.
---
Then came the park.
One evening, after picking up medicine for his mother, Nathan sat on a bench near the playground, watching children chase each other through puddles from last night's rain. He noticed one boy sitting alone, his face tight with held-back tears, a scrape blooming red across his knee.
Nathan approached slowly, unsure.
"You okay?" he asked.
The boy didn't answer. Just looked up with wide, wet eyes.
Without thinking, Nathan knelt, took out a clean napkin, and dabbed gently at the wound. The boy flinched at first—but let him. Nathan pulled a small bandage from his pocket (he had learned to carry one, just in case), and pressed it gently over the scrape.
"It'll sting less tomorrow," he said quietly.
The boy nodded, then whispered, "Thank you."
And in that moment—something flickered.
Not happiness. Not yet. But... warmth. Like a candle lit in a cave.
---
It wasn't long after that Nathan found the youth center.
A place where kids gathered after school—some loud, some shy, some bruised by the world in ways no one else could see. He walked in one day, hoping to offer help. Just a few hours a week, he said. Maybe tutoring. Maybe cleaning.
They handed him a clipboard and a box of pencils.
He stayed.
Because in those noisy halls filled with laughter and spilled paint and missing shoes, he saw something pure. Children who still believed in good things. Children who were messy and honest and *unafraid.*
And in them, Nathan found pieces of himself again.
---
He learned how to draw again—not for art, but for joy.
He learned how to play again—tag, dodgeball, silly card games.
He learned how to *listen*, not with his gift, but with patience.
Sometimes, kids would come sit beside him, not saying a word. Just sitting. And that was enough.
Other times, they'd pour out their hearts in simple sentences
"My dad's gone."
"My mom works all night."
"I don't think anyone likes me."
Nathan would nod. Offer his hand. A joke. A distraction. A drawing of a cat in space.
And slowly, they began to smile.
---
One day, as he walked home with streaks of blue paint on his sleeve and a crumpled drawing in his pocket (a child's gift: him riding a dinosaur), Nathan paused in the middle of the sidewalk.
The wind blew softly. The sun warmed his face.
And he smiled—real, unforced, quiet.
He was still carrying grief. Still haunted by what-ifs and echoes of voices he couldn't forget.
But he was moving.
---
That night,He applied to college two weeks later.
He wasn't sure what he'd study. Psychology, maybe. Or social work. Something that allowed him to understand and help in a way that mattered. He didn't tell anyone at first not even his parents. with his mom asleep in the next room and the house wrapped in gentle silence, Nathan opened his laptop.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He wasn't sure what to write in the college application's essay section.
So he told the truth.
He wrote about the silence. The loneliness. The strange gift of hearing thoughts that no one else could. He wrote about Solene, without saying her name. About falling and getting back up. About kids with scraped knees and mothers with tired eyes. About how love isn't always loud—and strength doesn't always roar.
He clicked "Submit" with a quiet breath.
---
Weeks passed.
One cold morning, the letter came. He opened it on the front porch, hands trembling slightly from the wind.
Accepted.
No fanfare. No music. Just ink on paper. But to Nathan, it felt like the turning of a page.
A promise that the story wasn't over.
That maybe—just maybe—he was finally beginning the chapter he was meant to write for himself.