Page 30 of Stolen Harmony

“I'll try to do better,” I promised, the words feeling like a prayer. “With him, with myself, with this whole mess we're calling life. I can't promise I won't fuck it up again, but I'll try.”

The silence after was heavy, but it felt less cruel. I knelt and traced my fingers over the worn lettering of her name, the cold stone grounding me. The ache in my chest wasn’t gone, but it was quieter, like the hush after a storm. I closed my eyes, letting the last warmth of sunlight sink into my skin, letting myself breathe.

A gull called overhead. The grass shifted around me, and the sharp scent of the sea crept in again, mingling with the memory of her laughter, her impossible forgiveness.

“I miss you,” I whispered, barely more than a breath. “But I’m still here. I’ll try to make that mean something.”

When I finally stood, the sky had deepened into dusk. I brushed the dirt from my knees and turned toward home, feeling a little less lost, a little more certain that even if I didn’t know how to fix anything, I could keep going. Step by step, I walked away, the wind at my back and her memory carrying me forward.

Chapter 9

Recognition

Rowan

The community center gym smelled like disinfectant and decades of teenage desperation. I pushed through the glass doors, already rolling my shoulders to work out the tension that had taken up permanent residence there since coming back to Harbor's End.

The space was exactly what I'd expected from a small-town community center: a handful of ancient weight machines that looked like they'd been purchased a decade ago, a few free weights that had seen better days, and motivational posters that were so faded they'd achieved the opposite effect.

Perfect. The last thing I needed was a fancy gym full of people who might recognize me and want to chat about my mother.

I dropped my water bottle on the floor and grabbed a pair of twenty-pound dumbbells, muscle memory from years of trying to work off my anger taking over. The weights felt good in my hands, solid and honest. You couldn't lie to iron. Either you could lift it or you couldn't, and right now I needed that kind of simple truth in my life.

Then there was Elias, and the fact that I couldn't figure him out.

The problem was, every time I thought I had him pegged as just another guilt-ridden widower playing at being helpful, he'd do something that threw me off balance.

What really got under my skin was how he didn't give up when I pushed. And I had pushed, hard. But Elias just... absorbed it. Not like a doormat, but like someone who understood that anger was just grief with nowhere else to go.

It was infuriating. I didn't want his patience. I didn't want his understanding. I wanted him to fight back, to give me a reason to write him off and go back to New York with a clear conscience.

Instead, he kept being decent to me, and that was somehow worse than if he'd been an asshole.

Fifteen reps. Switch arms. Focus on the burn in my bicep instead of the burn in my chest.

Except every time I tried to focus on the physical discomfort, my brain wandered back to Elias. To the way his voice had gone rough when he talked about building the studio for her. To how he'd looked sitting in that chair across from me, like he was afraid to take up too much space in his own living room.

Twenty reps. Both arms. Move to chest press.

I lay back on the ancient bench, which creaked ominously under my weight but held. The ceiling above me was water-stained and peeling, but it gave me a place to stare while I worked through my complicated feelings about my dead mother's husband.

Because that's what he was, right? Just the man who'd married her. The guy who'd been there for the last three years of her life while I'd been in New York, stubbornly pretending I was too important and too busy to answer her calls.

So why did I keep thinking about the way his mouth hadcurved when I'd made that joke about his tea collection? Why did I remember exactly how his laugh had sounded, surprised and genuine?

The barbell felt heavier than it should have. I gritted my teeth and pushed through another set, sweat starting to bead on my forehead despite the autumn chill that seeped through the community center's crappy insulation.

Music drifted through the walls from somewhere else in the building. Guitar chords, simple and repetitive. I tried to ignore it and focus on my workout, but there was an acoustic guitar mixed in with what sounded like several smaller electric ones, all playing the same basic progression.

A voice joined the guitars. Not singing, exactly, but talking over the music. Too muffled for me to make out words, but the tone was patient, encouraging. Someone teaching.

I sat up on the bench, wiping sweat from my face with the bottom of my t-shirt. The music stopped for a moment, then started again, a little cleaner this time. Whoever was teaching knew what they were doing.

None of my business. I had my own shit to work through, and eavesdropping on some community center guitar class wasn't going to help with any of it.

Except the voice started up again, and this time I could make out a few words. “...better. Remember, the rhythm is more important than getting every note perfect...”

Something about that voice was familiar. Not the words, but the cadence. The particular way the sentences rose and fell.