### **Chapter 6: The Years Between**
Grief doesn't arrive all at once. It drips in slowly, like a leak in the roof you don't notice until everything underneath is ruined. Elara tried to keep living, but her world had shifted in quiet, brutal ways.
She searched for him in every corner of the country. Letters. Phone calls. Hospitals. Her hands, once steady with a brush, shook with desperation. Each dead end felt like another goodbye. No death certificate. No body. Just silence.
In time, people stopped asking. Friends stopped hoping. They told her gently, "You need to let go." But how do you let go of someone who never said goodbye?
Her paintings changed. The colors grew muted. The subjects lonelier. Critics called it "evolution." They didn't know it was mourning.
The bench by the sea became her chapel. She visited it like prayer, every autumn, waiting for a miracle that never came.
Sometimes she dreamed he walked back up the path — older, thinner, smiling that crooked smile. She'd always wake up before he reached her.
And still, year after year, she waited.
Not because she believed he'd return…
…but because she didn't know how to stop hoping.