Chapter 24
Time passed, and the lighthouse welcomed it gently.
Amira and Elias found a rhythm that didn't rush — mornings filled with tea and shared pages, afternoons spent tending to visitors who came not for directions, but for stories. Children placed new stones beneath the memorial tree. Elders wept softly beside names that finally had a place to rest.
Amira expanded The Book of Echoes — now filled with voices from around the world: names once drowned, now spoken; wounds once buried, now held.
Elias built shelves in the sitting room for her journals. "You're making a library out of ghosts," he teased.
"No," she said, smiling. "I'm making a map."
Some nights they walked the cliffs in silence, hands linked. The sky above them stretched deep and ancient.
One night, under a sky clear and bright, Amira looked up and pointed. "That one," she whispered, "that's Mirabelle's star. Not the brightest. But the one that keeps returning to the same place."
Elias followed her gaze. "And that one," he said, "is yours. Because it burns quiet but steady. Like the sea chose you to remember us all."
They stood under the constellations they had named — not the official ones in maps and books, but the personal ones, the sacred ones.
They didn't speak of forever.
They didn't need to.
Because some love stories are not about eternity, but presence. About being there when the silence needs a voice. About staying when the tide pulls everything else away.
And together, they stayed.
Not to forget the past, but to build something luminous atop it.