Saturday morning arrived clear and bright, the world still damp from the storm.
Emma's little car wound along the coastal road, the ocean stretching wide and silver beside them. Hannah sat in the passenger seat, hair pulled back, window cracked just enough for the salt wind to curl through.
Neither said much at first. The silence between them had shifted from careful to comfortable.
When they stopped at a small overlook, the water below broke against dark rocks, foaming white. Emma leaned on the railing, squinting toward the horizon. "When I was a kid, I used to think you could see the future if you stared long enough where the sky met the water."
Hannah smiled. "And did you?"
"Sometimes. Or maybe I just made up something I needed to hear."
They walked for a while, following a narrow path through the grass toward the edge of the bluff. A lighthouse stood ahead, quiet and paint-faded, its lens flashing faintly in the sun.
"After college," Emma said, "I almost didn't come back here. I thought I needed to be somewhere bigger. Busier."
She kicked at a pebble, watching it skip off the path. "But the longer I was gone, the more I missed… this. The kind of quiet that reminds you who you are."
Hannah nodded. "I know that kind of quiet."
They stopped near the fence line, the sea wind catching Hannah's hair.
Emma turned toward her. "You ever think you built your life too small? Just so nothing could knock it over?"
Hannah hesitated, then said softly, "Yes. But lately, I think maybe I just needed the right person to walk into it."
Emma's breath caught — not because the words were dramatic, but because they were true.
The wind rushed around them, full of salt and promise.
They didn't need to say more.
They stayed until the sky began to change, gulls tracing slow arcs above the water, both feeling that quiet certainty again — the one that said this matters.