The wind clawed at the window like it wanted in.
Ella Morgan didn't look up. She sat at her kitchen table, her back hunched slightly, elbows resting on the warm wood that had long lost its varnish. The old apartment above Riley's Feed & Grain creaked with winter's stubbornness. The refrigerator hummed behind her, Button purred softly beneath the table, and the only light in the room came from her laptop screen—its glow flickering across her glasses, casting faint shadows across her cheekbones.
On the screen, a dating app login page blinked with false cheer.
Create Account. Find Someone Who Gets You.
The cursor pulsed in the email field. Waiting. Judging.
Ella stared at it like it had asked for something intimate. And in a way, it had.
She reached for her mug—lukewarm coffee, more milk than caffeine—but didn't sip. Her fingers hovered above the keyboard, uncertain. This wasn't like drafting a work email or editing a spreadsheet. This wasn't something she could hide behind data or logic.
This was personal.
And she didn't do personal anymore.
Not since the funeral. Not since her father had been lowered into the earth with nothing but dirt and her mother's favorite psalm. Not since she'd packed away every photograph of her parents into a plastic storage bin labeled "later," shoved it in the back of her closet, and stopped believing in things like soulmates and timing.
She hadn't even been on a real date since then.
Three years of polite rejections, deflected invitations, and pretending she was just "too busy." Because the truth—I'm scared someone might actually see me—didn't fit neatly into small talk.
She tapped the spacebar.
The screen refreshed.
Choose a username.
Her fingers trembled, then typed: EllaMontana87.
She stared at it for a second before deleting it entirely.
Next attempt: BookishAndTired. Delete.
Then: NoFilterElla. Delete.
Too revealing. Too sarcastic. Too real.
Her fingers paused again, hovering in that limbo between doing and undoing.
Then she typed:
SunsetHeart01
And didn't delete it.
A faint smile curved her lips—so soft it felt foreign on her face.
Her mother had loved a poem by an old, little-known western writer—one about the sun setting over an open plain, the last line etched into Ella's memory like scripture:
"The sunset has a heart, and it still beats somewhere."
It was the only romantic thing Ella still believed in—that somewhere, somehow, hearts could beat even in the silence.
Next came the profile photo.
Ella clicked through her folders, skimming past selfies she'd never posted and group shots where she barely appeared in the corner. Then she stopped on a single image.
Taken at the county fair last July. A lucky capture.
She stood on the ridgeline trail just beyond the hayfield, the sun setting behind her. Her outline was cast in soft gold and deep shadow. The curve of her cheek, the slope of her hair tied back with a ribbon. The sky behind her a watercolor of orange and lavender.
Her face wasn't clear.
Perfect.
She uploaded it.
If anyone from work was on the app, they wouldn't recognize her. If anyone from town stumbled across it, they'd just see a silhouette.
It felt right.
Felt safe.
Ella adjusted the photo placement, lowered the brightness, and clicked Save.
A small green checkmark appeared in the corner of the screen, as if congratulating her on being just vulnerable enough to be visible, but not enough to be known.
The bio was next.
Another blinking cursor. Another small battle.
She thought of lying. Everyone lied on these things, didn't they?
But her fingers moved on their own.
Reader of sad books. Believer in second chances. Only here because I've run out of reasons not to be.
She read it twice.
Then a third time.
It was... honest.
And that made her uncomfortable. But she didn't delete it.
Instead, she clicked Submit, then leaned back in her chair as if the act had physically drained her. Button meowed beneath the table, brushing against her ankle like a quiet approval.
Ella reached down and scratched the cat's head, her other hand resting on the warm laptop as the app now displayed: Welcome, SunsetHeart01. Ready to meet someone?
She wasn't.
Not really.
But for the first time in months, she didn't feel entirely hollow. The screen glowed with possibility—scary, uncertain, maybe even foolish—but alive.
She closed the laptop, stood, and walked to the window.
Outside, the Montana night had settled in fully. The wind had died down. The town lights below flickered against the horizon like stars that had forgotten they weren't supposed to shine here.
Ella crossed her arms, resting her forehead against the glass.
She whispered, barely audible:
"Sunset has a heart…"
The rest of the line faded on her lips.
She didn't know who would find her.
She didn't even know if she wanted to be found.
But she'd opened a door.
And for tonight, that was enough.
The apartment was quiet, as always.
A minimalist space in the heart of downtown Livingston, all dark woods, steel lines, and polished concrete. Weston Blake liked things clean, spare, and hard to damage. His kitchen gleamed, unused. His books were arranged by spine height. The only framed photo—his father on horseback, twenty years younger—rested on a shelf nobody ever noticed.
The windows stretched from floor to ceiling, offering a city view most people in town would have envied. Weston rarely looked out.
Instead, he sat in his leather armchair, phone in hand, scrolling through the dating app his assistant had installed without permission and then refused to delete.
"People like to see the human side of their CEOs," she'd said.
He had told her the company didn't hire him to be human.
But he hadn't deleted the app.
A month later, it still lived on his phone—tucked away, occasionally opened when he had no meetings, no bourbon, and too much silence to ignore.
His thumb moved lazily over the screen, past glossy selfies, over-captioned bios, and curated personalities that all blurred into one predictable hum. He didn't respond to any of them. He didn't need to. Weston didn't trust projections—not in financial forecasts, and not in people.
His own profile was a blank canvas by design:
Username: DustyRider85
Photo: A saddle resting on the split-rail fence behind his family ranch, shot at dusk. No face. Just worn leather, cracked wood, and a Montana sky slowly burning gold.
Bio: "Hard to impress. Easy to lose."
No more. No less.
It weeded out the ones who didn't know what silence was worth.
Weston had no real plan to connect with anyone. He'd scrolled past dozens of profiles tonight without blinking. But then—
He stopped.
A photo—deliberately vague. A silhouette against the sunset. Just a shape, really, of a woman with a sloped shoulder, the edge of her cheek catching the light, her long hair pulled back in a ribbon.
It could've been anyone.
That was what made him pause.
He tapped.
Username: SunsetHeart01
Location: Livingston, MT
Bio:
Reader of sad books. Believer in second chances. Only here because I've run out of reasons not to be.
That last line hit harder than it should have.
Weston stared at it for a long moment.
There was no exclamation point. No hashtags. No flirtation. Just soft sadness and reluctant hope.
The kind of line that didn't come from someone trying to be clever. The kind that came from someone telling the truth because pretending had finally worn out.
Weston sat back.
The glow from the phone lit the sharp angles of his face, made his gray eyes seem paler. The room around him was as still as the land outside his childhood bedroom window used to be. The quiet there hadn't been lonely—it had been earned. Here, in this apartment full of things he didn't need, it felt different.
He looked at her profile again.
Something pulled.
He tapped the message icon. Paused. Started typing.
"Reader of sad books, huh? Let me guess—The Bell Jar?"
He deleted it.
Too cynical.
Tried again.
"Second chances are overrated. But I get it."
Deleted.
Too bitter.
His jaw flexed. He set the phone down on the side table, rubbed the heel of his hand against his temple, and exhaled sharply through his nose.
What was he doing?
He didn't do this. He didn't chase. He didn't ask.
But something about the words—Only here because I've run out of reasons not to be—felt too familiar. Too honest. He wondered what kind of voice had written it. What kind of woman pressed send knowing someone might see it and never reply.
He picked up the phone again.
Tried one more time.
"You had me at 'reader of sad books.' Let me guess—Bridges of Madison County?"
He stared at the screen.
A faint smirk ghosted across his mouth. He hadn't thought of that book in years. His mother had read it three times. Always with a tissue in one hand and a pencil in the other, underlining passages like scripture. When she died, Weston had found it tucked between her cookbooks—dog-eared, loved, and covered in tiny margin notes.
He'd read it after her funeral. All in one night.
And again the next winter.
The book had made him angry—too romantic, too tragic, too raw.
But he hadn't stopped reading.
He didn't admit that to anyone.
Didn't need to.
But now, for reasons he couldn't explain, he hit Send.
The message left his screen like a bird escaping through a window left open too long. It fluttered out into the void of digital silence, unclaimed.
Weston stared at the screen for another moment.
Then, slowly, he placed the phone down, rose from the chair, and moved toward the window. He stood there in the dark, staring at the quiet sprawl of Livingston under the stars.
Somewhere down there, she existed.
SunsetHeart01.
He didn't know her name.
Didn't expect to.
But tonight, for the first time in a long while, Weston Blake had reached for something without being certain what he'd get back.
And that uncertainty?
Felt dangerously close to hope.
The spring sun was deceptive.
It bathed the office complex in a warm glow, but the wind off the ridge still carried a bite. Ella Morgan sat alone on the bench outside Frontier AgriCorp, her sandwich untouched in the wax paper beside her, her coat zipped to the chin.
Across the lot, two interns from accounting passed by, laughing about something she didn't catch. One of them glanced her way, then looked straight ahead. She didn't mind. She didn't expect to be noticed.
She had her phone in her hand, thumb hovering over the app she'd been pretending not to think about since last night.
The dating app.
The one she'd told herself she wasn't taking seriously.
The one where someone had messaged her.
She opened it.
A single unread notification blinked at the top of the screen. Her thumb tapped it.
DustyRider85:
"You had me at 'reader of sad books.' Let me guess—Bridges of Madison County?"
Ella blinked.
Her stomach twisted—not in dread, but something warmer. Nervous. It was a strange thing, being seen that easily. The Bridges of Madison County wasn't just her favorite—it was the only book she'd ever underlined so furiously the ink had bled through the pages.
That exact line—the one Weston had chosen—was circled in blue twice in her own copy, her mother's initials in the margin beside it. She hadn't told anyone that. Not even Sam.
Still, her first instinct was to ignore it.
Too direct.
Too… personal.
Her thumb hovered over the screen. The cursor blinked in the message field, waiting for her to decide what kind of person she wanted to be today.
Cautious?
Dismissive?
Honest?
She inhaled deeply, glanced at the half-eaten sandwich in her lap, and then typed:
"Careful. Quoting that book gets dangerous. You might be mistaken for someone with a heart."
She hit send before she could overthink it.
The message disappeared into the ether of the internet.
Ella stared at the screen for another moment, then stuffed the sandwich back in the bag and returned to work. But the warmth lingered—like a slow burn beneath her collar, beneath her skin.
That evening, Weston Blake sat at his kitchen counter, his laptop open, untouched. His dinner—steak and asparagus—was cooling beside him, forgotten.
He stared at his phone, screen unlocked.
SunsetHeart01:
"Careful. Quoting that book gets dangerous. You might be mistaken for someone with a heart."
Weston smirked despite himself.
She got it.
More than that—she read it the way he had. Not as romantic fluff, but as a warning dressed like poetry. He tapped out a response.
"I'll risk it. What line's underlined in your copy?"
He waited. She didn't reply right away.
For once, he didn't mind.
Ella didn't see his message until hours later.
She was home, barefoot, wrapped in an oversized sweater that smelled faintly of lavender detergent. Button was curled against her thigh on the couch, and The Bridges of Madison County was open again on her lap—though she hadn't touched the pages in months.
His reply glowed at the top of her screen.
She bit her lip, then typed:
"The one about how we live two lives—the one we learn with, and the one we live with after. I always thought that was unfair. We only get one shot and most of us are still practicing."
It was too much.
She almost deleted it.
But then—she didn't.
She pressed send.
The messages continued in quiet bursts.
They didn't flood each other with constant replies. Instead, it was a thread—thin but steady—spooling out across hours, sometimes a full day between replies.
He asked about her favorite books.
She asked about the saddle in his profile photo.
"It's mine," Weston wrote. "Still hangs on the fence back at the ranch. The leather's cracked now. I keep it that way."
"Why?"
"Because not everything needs to look new to be good."
Ella didn't know how to respond to that.
She stared at his words for a long time, fingers hovering above the keys before simply replying:
"That's a better answer than I expected."
Later that night, Weston asked her:
"What's a question you hate being asked?"
Ella replied:
"What do you do?"
He sent back a smiley face—just the emoji, nothing else.
Ella laughed, then caught herself.
She hadn't laughed like that in a while. Not the polite kind. Not the kind you gave people who expected a smile in return.
She pulled her knees up to her chest, the light of her laptop soft in the dark room, and reread their entire chat thread twice.
Each word felt like a small truth.
Not a confession. But something close.
Weston, in his corner apartment, lay back in bed staring at the ceiling. His phone was still in his hand, the screen dark now, the battery almost dead.
He hadn't replied to her last message yet.
He wasn't sure how.
They hadn't talked about jobs or age or expectations. No "What are you looking for?" or "Where do you see this going?"
Just words.
Real ones.
He'd smiled—actually smiled—more in the last twenty-four hours than he had all week.
And that terrified him.
He set the phone on the nightstand and exhaled, long and slow.
The silence wasn't so heavy tonight.
Back in her apartment, Ella drafted another message.
"Do you ever wonder if the person you're talking to is someone you've already met?"
She stared at it.
Deleted it.
Typed again:
"Never mind. Long day. Goodnight, cowboy."
She didn't send that either.
Instead, she closed the laptop slowly, fingers lingering on the keyboard, the glow fading into the shadows around her.
Button yawned.
The wind curled against the windowpane.
And somewhere not far away, another set of fingers hovered over a screen, paused in the dark, wondering what this was turning into.