Aberdeen, United Kingdom. The Granite City. Its steely gray skyline, carved from ancient stone, mirrored the wild North Sea beyond it. Seagulls wheeled overhead, their cries sharp as blades of cold wind. Oil rigs blinked like distant stars on the horizon, a reminder of the city’s industrial heart. Streets of cobblestone wound through echoes of old battles, Viking raids, and the soft murmur of voices carried down from generations past. Aberdeen was a city of contradictions — ancient and modern, hard-edged yet softened by the relentless sea air.
This was the backdrop for the story of Isla Fraser and Callum Hart. Their meeting was ordinary. Their love was not. And through it all, a single keyphrase echoed like a whisper through the corridors of their lives: “Everything that breaks, leaves a mark.”
The rain came sideways that morning, needling the faces of hurried pedestrians. Isla Fraser stood by the window of a small café on Union Street, watching the raindrops carve their paths down the glass. Her eyes, dark as loch water, followed the patterns in quiet contemplation. She had always been like this — seeing things others missed.
The world moved quickly outside, but Isla moved slowly, deliberately. At 27, she was a quiet storm of intellect and calm wisdom. Her students at the university called her “Professor Fraser” with a mix of respect and fear, for her mind was sharp as the north wind. Yet those who knew her well — few as they were — spoke of her kindness. She had a heart that absorbed pain like stone absorbs rain, wearing it over time but never breaking.
That morning, as she stirred her tea, she noticed a figure across the street. A man. He stood out, not because of his looks but because of his stillness. He was staring up at the gray spire of the old church, face tilted toward the sky. While everyone else hunched against the cold, he faced it head-on. His hands were shoved into the pockets of a battered green jacket, and his dark hair, messy from the rain, clung to his brow.
“Odd,” Isla murmured to herself. “Everything that breaks, leaves a mark.”
That was when he turned, eyes locking onto hers through the rain-streaked window. It wasn’t the glance of a stranger catching a stranger’s gaze. It was longer, heavier, as though he’d been searching for something and finally found it. Isla’s fingers stilled on her cup. For a heartbeat, they stared at each other through the rain and glass.
Then, like a gull caught on a sudden gust, he was gone.
Two weeks passed. Isla had nearly forgotten him. She was a woman with too much to do and too little time to linger on brief encounters. Her students’ essays on “Memory as a Shaper of Identity” sat like an unfinished symphony on her desk, each one begging for a red slash of correction. The university halls were cold, echoing with the footfalls of students. She buried herself in the rhythm of lectures and grading.
Until one afternoon, a knock came at her office door.
“Come in,” she said, not glancing up from the essay in her hand.
The door creaked, footsteps slow and unsure.
“Professor Fraser?” a voice said.
Her heart paused, like a bird at the edge of flight. She looked up, and there he was. The man from the rain. Up close, he was taller than she’d expected. Dark hair, yes, but his eyes — blue, so blue they reminded her of frozen seawater. He rubbed the back of his neck like a boy caught in mischief.
“I’m Callum Hart,” he said, eyes darting from her to the window, as if calculating his escape route. “I, uh… I’m looking for a course in creative writing. They told me you might be able to help.”
Isla set her pen down. Her eyes didn’t blink. “This isn’t the enrollment office, Mr. Hart.”
He smiled then, a crooked grin like a crack running through stone. “No, I figured as much. But I thought you might point me in the right direction.”
Her eyes narrowed, studying him. People didn’t walk into her office without reason. Not like this. But something about him, the way he hovered between confidence and uncertainty, made her lean back in her chair.
“Creative writing, is it? Why?”
He shrugged, glancing at the spines of books on her shelf. “Because everything that breaks, leaves a mark.”
Her breath caught.
He saw it. His gaze sharpened, and for the first time, she felt truly seen.
“Not many people say that,” she replied slowly, her voice soft as falling snow.
“No,” he said, eyes still locked on hers. “But I reckon you know it better than most.”
Weeks passed. Callum did enroll in the creative writing course. Isla saw him sometimes on campus, often sitting alone on a bench with a notebook in his hand. Their conversations were brief but layered with something unsaid. He wasn’t like her students — he was older, mid-thirties, rough around the edges. The kind of man you’d find working offshore on an oil rig or fixing trawlers at the harbor. She learned bits and pieces about him, like chipping away at granite.
He was from Stonehaven, a fishing town down the coast. Former diver. Lived through something terrible, though he never said what. The marks were there in the way he spoke in fragments, never offering too much. But Isla knew how to read silence. She’d spent her life doing it.
One evening, after the last student had left her classroom, she found him leaning against the doorframe.
“Got time for a story, Professor?” he asked, a challenge in his voice.
“That depends,” she replied, packing her papers into her bag. “Is it worth telling?”
“That,” he said, pushing off the doorframe and stepping closer, “depends on who’s listening.”
She tilted her head, meeting his gaze. The distance between them felt like a thread pulled tight. A fragile line that could snap or bind them together.
“I’m listening,” she said quietly.
He smiled then, not the crooked grin from before but something smaller, more real. He took a seat at one of the desks, hands folded in front of him.
“I used to dive,” he began. “Deep sea. Oil rigs mostly. Rough work, hard pay. One day, something went wrong with the air mix. Five of us went down. Only three came back up. I was one of them.”
Her breath slowed. She could feel every shift in the air.
“It messes with your head,” Callum said, tapping his temple. “Pressure does things to you. The deeper you go, the more you feel it, pressing on every part of you. Sometimes, you hear things down there. Whispers, like ghosts talking. You think you can ignore it, but you can’t.”
He paused, glancing at her.
“Everything that breaks, leaves a mark,” he said softly.
This time, Isla felt it hit her chest like a stone thrown into still water.
“You’re not wrong,” she whispered.
The sea gives, and the sea takes away. It was something Isla’s grandmother used to say, her hands working dough at the kitchen counter. Aberdeen knew this truth too well. The city bore its grief in statues of men lost at sea, in plaques mounted on cold gray walls.
By now, Isla knew Callum’s story was as much about what he didn’t say as what he did. He’d been broken, crushed by the weight of pressure and loss. But he’d survived. The mark it left was visible only if you knew where to look.
And Isla knew where to look.
“People like us,” Callum said one night as they walked by the harbor, mist swirling around them, “we don’t heal clean.”
“No,” Isla agreed, her hand brushing his for the first time. “But maybe we don’t have to.”
“Everything that breaks, leaves a mark.”
The words hung in the air, carved into the stone of their shared silence.
And for once, neither of them turned away.
The harbor lights cast golden ripples across the surface of the water, shifting with each wave. It was quiet except for the distant clang of metal against metal — fishermen securing their boats for the night. Isla and Callum walked side by side along the pier, close enough that the mist carried the warmth of his breath to her cheek. They hadn’t spoken in a while, but the silence was not empty.
Callum stopped, his gaze fixed on the water below. She followed his eyes and saw nothing but the gentle churn of the sea. But he was seeing something else. The past, perhaps. Memories pulled up from the depths.
“You ever feel like you’re still there?” he asked suddenly, his voice rough but steady.
“Where?” she asked.
“Where it happened.”
Isla knew what he meant. Not the oil rig. Not the accident. He meant there — the place where everything broke. The place that left the deepest mark.
She glanced at him, her face unreadable but her eyes sharp. “Yes,” she said. “Sometimes it feels like I’m still in that moment. No matter how much time passes, I’m still standing there, watching it happen.”
Callum exhaled through his nose, a bitter laugh escaping him. “Aye. Same for me.”
The sea sloshed against the pier below them. For a while, neither of them spoke. Their breath mingled with the mist, two ghosts watching the water.
Then he turned to her. “What was it for you?”
Her fingers curled in her coat pockets. She felt the weight of the question settle over her like fog. Her eyes stayed on the water, as if it might carry the answer to her.
“My sister,” Isla finally said. Her voice was as smooth as worn granite, but Callum heard the crack beneath it. “Car crash. I was sixteen. She was twenty. She was driving me home from school.”
He didn’t move. He didn’t say, “I’m sorry.” He didn’t fill the silence with the kind of hollow comforts that people so often offered. Instead, he let it sit between them, heavy and unspoken.
“I still hear the sound sometimes,” Isla continued. “The crunch of metal. The way it echoes. People think it’s the screaming you remember, but it’s not. It’s the sound of something breaking that stays with you. It never really leaves.”
“Yeah,” Callum said, his voice like the scrape of iron on stone. “I know it.”
Her eyes flicked to him then, sharper than a blade. “Do you?”
He met her gaze without flinching. “Yeah, Isla. I do.”
For once, she believed him.
“Everything that breaks, leaves a mark.”
Her grandmother’s voice, her mother’s voice, her own voice — it echoed through her, a whisper carved into her very bones. Callum heard it too. She could tell by the way his hands stayed in his coat pockets, fingers working the fabric like he was gripping something invisible.
They stood there for a long time, two people marked by fractures only they could see.
Winter came, sharp and biting. The cold crept into everything — stone, steel, and bone. It coated the streets of Aberdeen in frost, turning cobblestones slick as glass. Students shuffled from building to building, faces wrapped in scarves, eyes barely visible behind wool and foggy glasses.
Callum had started leaving notes in Isla’s office. Small, folded scraps of paper left on her desk or slipped into the pages of her books. No name, no explanation. Just words.
The first one read: “What breaks isn’t always the end.”
The second: “Even sunken ships become homes for something.”
She kept them all.
“Secret admirer, Professor?” one of her students teased after spotting one of the notes.
“Something like that,” Isla had said, slipping the note into her coat pocket.
Callum never spoke of them. He just watched her from across the room during lectures, his notebook open but his pen unmoving. She pretended not to notice, but she always did.
The third note arrived on a day when the fog refused to lift. It said: “Come with me tonight. Harbor. 10pm.”
No name. But she knew.
The air at the harbor was colder than anywhere else in Aberdeen. The mist rolled in thick waves, so dense it felt like walking through a dream. Isla pulled her scarf tighter around her neck as she approached the water’s edge.
Callum was waiting. He was leaning against the side of an old trawler, the paint chipped and flaking off like a snake shedding its skin. He glanced at her as she approached but didn’t move.
“You came,” he said, his breath fogging the air.
“You left a note,” she replied, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.
A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. “Aye, I did.”
He pushed off the boat and walked toward her, his footsteps crunching against the frost-covered concrete. “I thought I’d show you something.”
“Show me what?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.
He pointed at the trawler behind him. “This.”
Isla raised an eyebrow. “You brought me here to see a broken boat?”
Callum’s grin widened, a sharp line carved into his face. “Not broken. Just marked.”
She stared at him, unsure of where this was going.
He ran a hand along the side of the boat. His fingers traced the scars in the metal where something large had scraped against it, gouging it like claw marks. “This boat should’ve sunk three years ago,” he said. “Hit a reef off Shetland. Big storm. The hull cracked. Everyone thought it was done for.” He tapped the side, his knuckles making a hollow, ringing sound. “But they patched it. Brought it back.”
He looked at her then, his eyes steady. “Not every break is the end, Isla.”
The air hung still, as though the sea itself was holding its breath.
She blinked slowly, feeling something shift inside her, as if a stone had been moved after lying in place for years. “You think that’s supposed to make me feel better?”
He shook his head. “No. I think it’s supposed to make you feel something.”
Her breath came out in a cloud of mist. Her fingers tingled with the cold. But something else was stirring inside her now, something warmer.
“You’re relentless, Callum Hart,” she said, her voice quieter than before.
He shrugged. “It’s the only way I know how to be.”
“Everything that breaks, leaves a mark.”
Her eyes lingered on the trawler’s scars, the jagged, crooked lines that snaked down its side. It hadn’t sunk. It had been broken, yes, but it was still here. Still afloat.
For the first time in years, she wondered if maybe she was too.
By spring, Isla knew she loved him.
It wasn’t the dramatic kind of love — no grand proclamations, no breathless confessions in the rain. It came like fog rolling over the harbor, quiet but unstoppable. She realized it one night as they sat together on her living room floor, their backs pressed against the wall. He was telling her about his brother, a man Isla had never met, and she was watching the way his hands moved as he spoke.
Her chest ached in the way that only comes when you know you’re seeing something fragile and human and real.
Later that night, as she lay in bed, she heard his words again. “Not every break is the end.”
She had spent so much of her life thinking broken things were ruined things. But Callum — Callum was proof that wasn’t true.
She stared at her ceiling for hours, letting the words roll through her mind. She touched her heart like it was something new, like it was a scar she hadn’t realized had healed.
“Everything that breaks, leaves a mark.”
But maybe, she thought, some marks weren’t wounds.
Some marks were maps.
And she had finally found her way back to shore.
There are moments in life that change everything, but they rarely announce themselves. They arrive in silence, disguised as ordinary days.
For Isla, that day came in early May. The sun had broken through the usual gray clouds, and for once, the Granite City seemed almost golden. Students sprawled on the green near the King’s College Chapel, their laughter carrying on the breeze. Birds darted through the sky, as free as anything Isla had ever known.
She stood by her office window, gazing out at it all. Her phone buzzed on the desk behind her, a low, steady hum. She turned slowly, not expecting anything important. It was a message from Callum.
“Come to the pier. It’s important.”
No explanation. No punctuation. It was unlike him, and that alone set her on edge. Callum didn’t leave things unfinished.
Her fingers hovered over the screen. “What’s wrong?” she typed, but she didn’t press send. Instead, she grabbed her coat.
The walk to the harbor was longer than usual. The weight of the unknown sat on her chest, making every step feel heavier. The salt air hit her as she neared the water, sharp and bracing. She spotted Callum almost immediately, standing at the edge of the pier. His back was to her, hands in his coat pockets, his shoulders stiff as stone.
Her heart quickened. Not every break is the end, she told herself, but her breath came in shallow bursts.
“Callum!” she called out as she approached.
He didn’t turn around.
When she reached him, she laid a hand on his arm. “Hey. What’s going on?”
He glanced at her then, his face unreadable. But his eyes — his eyes were raw, as though he’d seen something too big to unsee. It was the look of a man standing at the edge of something vast, too far out to swim back.
“I got a call this morning,” he said, his voice rough as sandpaper.
“From who?”
He hesitated, his eyes drifting toward the water.
“The rig,” he said at last. “They want me back.”
Her heart stopped, or maybe it only felt that way. The world seemed to shrink around them, the pier suddenly too narrow, the air too sharp.
“When?” she asked quietly, though she already knew the answer.
“Tomorrow.”
That night, Isla sat at her kitchen table, her hands curled around a mug of tea that had gone cold. The house was quiet, but her mind wasn’t.
Tomorrow. He was leaving tomorrow.
It was ridiculous, she told herself. He was only going back to work. People left for jobs all the time. But it wasn’t the leaving that scared her. It was the sea. It was what the sea had already taken from him, what it had already marked on him.
Her sister’s face flickered in her mind like a flash of lightning on a dark road. She remembered standing on the side of that road, waiting for help to come. She’d watched the world move around her, distant and unreal, like it wasn’t happening to her at all.
This felt the same.
Her phone buzzed on the table.
Callum: “You still up?”
Her fingers hovered over the keys. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know how to say, Don’t go without making it sound like a weakness.
Isla: “Yeah. Come over.”
Twenty minutes later, he was there. She didn’t ask him to sit. He didn’t offer excuses. They sat on the floor, backs against the wall, knees pulled up, just like before. It should have felt normal. It didn’t.
“I know why you’re doing it,” Isla said, breaking the silence.
“Yeah?” He glanced at her, his face half in shadow. “Why’s that?”
“Because you think if you go back, maybe it’ll stop haunting you. You think if you face it again, you’ll win this time.”
His jaw tensed. “You think that’s it?”
“I know it is,” she said softly. “I used to think the same thing about that road where my sister died. I used to think if I drove past it enough times, it would lose its power over me. It never did.”
He didn’t answer. For a while, neither of them spoke. The silence was the kind that presses down on you, like the deep sea.
“I’m not afraid of the rig,” Callum said at last. “Not anymore.”
“Then what are you afraid of?” she asked, her voice sharp but not unkind.
He let out a slow breath. “Coming back.”
Her heart cracked in her chest.
“Callum,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “You’re already back.”
His head turned toward her slowly, his eyes searching hers. He opened his mouth, closed it, then shook his head as if trying to shake something loose. “I don’t know how to stay,” he admitted.
Her eyes softened, and for the first time, she reached for him. Her fingers slid over his, their hands tangled together. Her grip was firm, solid, unshakable.
“Then I’ll show you,” she said.
The next morning, she stood at the harbor as he boarded the crew transport. The wind tugged at her hair, and the cold bit at her skin, but she stayed rooted. Callum glanced back at her before climbing on.
“I’ll be back in three weeks,” he said. His voice was louder than it needed to be, the kind of voice you use when you’re not just speaking to someone else — you’re reminding yourself, too.
“I know,” she replied, the sea mist clinging to her lashes.
“You believe me?”
“I do,” she said. “Because everything that breaks, leaves a mark. But not every mark means you’re ruined.”
He smiled, but it wasn’t his crooked grin. It was something quieter, something that stayed with her long after he was gone.
She watched the transport pull away, her hands deep in her coat pockets, fingers wrapped around one of his notes. “What breaks isn’t always the end.”
Three weeks passed slowly.
Isla went about her life as usual. Lectures, papers, the quiet hum of everyday routine. But something had shifted. The moments of stillness felt louder now. The evenings were longer. Every night, as she lay in bed, she stared at the ceiling and replayed the same words over and over:
“Everything that breaks, leaves a mark.”
She’d spent so much time believing her marks were evidence of failure. The scar of grief after her sister died. The cracks left by years of holding herself together. But Callum’s voice echoed louder than hers now. Not every mark is a wound. Some are maps.
And maybe, just maybe, she was following one now.
It was just past midnight when the call came.
Her phone lit up beside her bed. Groggy, she reached for it, expecting spam or a wrong number. But then she saw it — No Caller ID. Her heart jolted awake.
“Hello?” she said, voice still thick with sleep.
“Isla,” said a voice. Her heart sank instantly. She knew that voice. The voice of men with bad news. “This is David from MHI Offshore. There’s been an incident on the rig. One of the support lines failed. A partial collapse.”
Her fingers dug into the blanket. She sat up, breath short and sharp.
“Callum,” she said. “Is he—”
“He’s alive,” David said quickly. “But he’s in the hyperbaric chamber now. They’re stabilizing him before transport.”
Her breath came fast and shallow, panic clawing at her ribs.
“Which hospital?” she asked.
“ARU, Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. They’ll have him there by morning.”
Her hands trembled as she hung up. The room was too quiet, too still. She felt like she was back on the roadside, watching headlights blur past.
But this time, she moved.
She pulled on her coat, her keys jangling in her hand. She didn’t care that it was 2 a.m. She didn’t care about the cold. She only cared that he was still here.
Some ships don’t sink. Some marks don’t ruin you.
“Everything that breaks, leaves a mark.”
But she would be there when he returned. She would be there for every mark, every scar, every fracture. Because love wasn’t about being unbroken. It was about learning to live with the cracks.
And she wasn’t afraid of them anymore.
The fluorescent lights of Aberdeen Royal Infirmary buzzed softly, their hum blending with the distant beeping of heart monitors. The smell of antiseptic was sharp in the air, and every footstep echoed down the long, sterile corridor. Isla sat in the waiting area, fingers pressed to her lips, her elbows on her knees.
Her coat hung off her shoulders like it didn’t belong to her anymore. Her phone was clenched tightly in her hand, but she hadn’t looked at it in over an hour.
She kept her eyes on the double doors at the end of the hall. No one had come through them for what felt like forever.
“He’s alive.” The words played on a loop in her mind. She gripped them as tightly as she’d gripped the steering wheel on that night so many years ago. Her sister’s face flashed again, uninvited. She’d spent so much of her life haunted by the past, but this wasn’t the past. This was now.
Her heart thudded painfully in her chest, every beat a little too sharp.
Footsteps. Heavy ones. The kind that made rubber soles squeak against tile. She sat up straighter as a nurse appeared, pushing open the double doors.
“Isla Fraser?” the nurse called, scanning the room.
“Here,” Isla said, standing so fast she felt a brief head rush.
The nurse, a man with kind eyes and tired lines on his face, nodded for her to follow him.
“He’s stable,” the nurse said as they walked. “He took in a lot of nitrogen during decompression, but his oxygen levels are good. He’s conscious, but a bit groggy. Typical for someone coming out of the hyperbaric chamber.”
Isla nodded, but the words felt distant, like hearing waves from far away. The only thing she focused on was “he’s conscious”. Conscious meant alive. Alive meant he was still here.
The nurse stopped at a door, his hand on the handle. “He’s been asking for you,” he said with a small smile.
Her chest squeezed at that, her fingers flexing at her sides.
“Go on,” the nurse said, pushing open the door.
Inside, the world got smaller.
Callum lay on the bed, pale but breathing. Wires ran from his chest to a monitor that beeped steadily beside him. His eyes were half-closed, his hair still damp from the chamber. He looked like he’d just woken up from a long, brutal dream.
Her feet moved before her mind caught up. She was at his side in an instant, her hand hovering over his but not quite touching.
“Callum,” she breathed, her voice barely a whisper.
His eyes cracked open slowly, unfocused at first, but when they landed on her, he smiled. It wasn’t the crooked grin or the sharp-edged smirk she’d grown used to. This smile was small, worn out, but real.
“Hey, professor,” he muttered, his voice rough as stone.
Her breath hitched, and she let out a laugh that was half a sob. She sat on the edge of the bed, finally letting her fingers close over his. They were warm. Warm.
“You absolute idiot,” she said, squeezing his hand so hard he winced. “You scared me, Callum.”
He chuckled weakly, his eyes closing for a second too long before reopening. “Aye. Scared myself, too.”
Her throat burned, tears pressing at the corners of her eyes, but she blinked them away. Not now, she told herself. Not here.
“You’re lucky you’re alive,” she said, her voice firmer than she felt.
“I know,” he said softly. His eyes shifted, finding hers in that slow, deliberate way he always did — like he wanted to make sure she knew he saw her. “I’m lucky for a lot of things.”
Her chest tightened again, but this time it wasn’t panic. It was something else. Something deeper.
Her hand squeezed his again, and this time, she didn’t let go.
Callum stayed in the hospital for two more days. Isla was there for every one of them. She sat by his side while he slept, her eyes never leaving his face. She read aloud from the books she kept in her bag — old Scottish folktales, stories about sea monsters and selkies that shed their skins. He didn’t respond much, but when he did, it was always with a small, tired smile.
On the second night, as rain tapped softly against the window, he opened his eyes fully.
“Why’d you stay?” he asked, his voice rasping like sand on glass.
She put her book down, leaning forward to look at him. “Because you’re too stubborn to know when to come back on your own.”
He raised an eyebrow, his gaze sharp despite the exhaustion. “That why, aye?”
“No,” she admitted, her voice quieter. “I stayed because you would’ve stayed for me.”
Silence hung between them. It wasn’t heavy this time. It felt light, like something had finally lifted.
“You’re not wrong,” he murmured.
She smiled then, a small, private smile she didn’t let anyone see.
Spring gave way to summer, and Callum recovered faster than anyone expected. His body was marked now, scarred in ways only he and Isla would ever see. But for once, he didn’t seem to hide from it.
Isla noticed it in small things. The way he rolled up his sleeves without a second thought. The way he leaned into the sun on their walks through the old streets of Aberdeen. He didn’t shrink from the world anymore. He stood in it.
One afternoon, they sat on a bench near the harbor, seagulls circling above them. Callum tossed bits of bread to the birds, watching them dive and catch it mid-air.
“You ever think about it?” he asked suddenly, his eyes still on the birds.
“About what?” she asked.
“All of it. The breaks. The things we lost.” He turned to face her then, his gaze steady. “Do you think it was all supposed to happen this way?”
Isla tilted her head back, letting the sea breeze wash over her. She thought of her sister, of the scars on Callum’s hands, of her own heart that had learned, somehow, to hold love again.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I used to think everything was either broken or whole. But maybe that’s wrong.” She glanced at him, her eyes soft but sure. “Maybe broken and whole aren’t opposites.”
He raised an eyebrow, his gaze thoughtful. “You think so?”
“Yeah,” she said, turning her eyes toward the sea. “I think so.”
Her grandmother’s voice echoed in her mind one last time.
“Everything that breaks, leaves a mark.”
But now, as she sat there with Callum beside her, she heard a new ending.
But not every mark is a wound.
It is said that the sea never forgets. It remembers every shipwreck, every storm, every soul that ever set foot in its depths. But it also remembers how to be calm. How to be still.
Years later, Isla would think of this every time she walked by the harbor. She’d see Callum there, leaning against the same trawler he once showed her. They would watch the sea together, letting the quiet fill the spaces between words.
Some days they would walk along the shore, their footprints side by side, the tide slowly washing them away.
On one of those walks, he’d stop suddenly and point to the horizon.
“See that line out there?” he’d say, his eyes squinting against the sun. “That’s where the water meets the sky. It’s not really a line, though. It’s just where one thing becomes another.”
“Yeah,” she’d say, nodding as she watched it with him. “I know.”
They would stand there for a while, silent but together, watching where one world ended and another began.
Because everything that breaks, leaves a mark.
But some marks aren’t wounds.
Some marks are maps.
And every map, no matter how broken, leads somewhere.
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