Page 36

Lark

T he quiet settled in fast.

Axel had been gone less than an hour, and already the cabin felt wrong. Like it was missing something essential—like oxygen or gravity.

I wandered around, doing nothing and everything at once. Straightening things that didn’t need straightening. Washing dishes that were already clean. His toothbrush was still on the counter. His jacket still hanging on the hook.

I stood there for a long time just staring at it.

I wasn’t used to missing people. I was used to leaving them. There was a difference.

My phone buzzed, and I grabbed it like it might be him, already checking in.

But it wasn’t.

It was an alert from the weather app I hadn’t deleted. A line of storms building across the Midwest. The kind I used to chase without a second thought. The kind that pulled me from hotel rooms in the middle of the night, camera gear in hand, heart racing with purpose.

Now I just stared at the radar map and felt… nothing.

No urge. No thrill. Just a hollow ache where that wild part of me used to live.

I closed the app and tossed the phone on the couch.

Maybe this was the comedown. The stillness after the adrenaline fades. I’d nearly died, again. Only this time, someone had been there to pull me back—someone who wasn’t just a rescue. He was the reason I wanted to stay.

I walked to the back door and opened it wide. The air smelled like pine needles and the promise of rain. I stepped outside, barefoot, the wood cold against my skin.

And for the first time since the accident, I let myself feel it—everything. The fear. The grief. The overwhelming, suffocating absence of a man who’d just promised to come back.

I didn’t cry.

Not really.

But my breath shook, and my eyes blurred, and I let myself sit right there on the step with my knees pulled to my chest, because there was no one to see me except the mountains.

That was the hardest part of loving someone like Axel Martin.

Knowing you’d have to let him go.

And wait.

And hope.

I stayed there until the wind picked up, brushing through the trees like a whisper.

And somewhere inside, a new thought surfaced:

Maybe I’m done chasing storms.

Perhaps now I need to learn how to weather the stillness.