Rowan Dane didn’t cry when she found David kissing his assistant in the gallery office. Not when he said she was “too cold,” that she loved paintings more than people. Not even when he packed his silk ties and cologne and left without a goodbye.
But she cried now. Alone. In the front seat of her dusty silver Volvo, parked in front of the old family house on Wither’s Hill. Her shoulders shook as tears streamed down her face, smearing what little makeup she’d bothered to put on that morning.
The house looked smaller than she remembered. The white paint had peeled away in patches, revealing the gray wood underneath like old scars. The windows were dark and clouded with salt, staring back at her like disappointed eyes. The porch sagged like it had grown tired of waiting for someone to come home. Grass had swallowed most of the front walk, and a crooked iron mailbox leaned sideways like it had given up too.
“This is so stupid,” Rowan whispered, wiping her nose with a crumpled napkin from the fast-food place where she’d stopped three hours ago. “I don’t belong here.”
She stared at the sea beyond the house. Gray waves crashed against the rocky cliffs in the distance, wild and endless. A heavy fog rolled across the hills like a slow, living thing, wrapping around the lighthouse on the far point. Breakwater Bay hadn’t changed much in the ten years she’d been gone. The same little fishing boats bobbed in the harbor below. The same seagulls circled overhead, their cries carrying on the wind.
But she had.
She used to dream of escaping this place—of becoming someone important, someone respected. And for a while, she had.
She was the assistant curator of one of New York’s biggest galleries. She wore designer heels, went to rooftop parties, and shared a loft with a man who knew all the right people.
That was then.
Now she was thirty-two, heartbroken, jobless (thanks to David being not just her boyfriend but her boss), and back in her childhood hometown with everything she owned shoved into the backseat of her car and trunk. From rising star to fallen one in less than a month.
Rowan sighed, grabbed the keys from the ignition, and stepped out of the car. The air was colder than she expected, sharp with salt and the faint smell of seaweed and pine. It smelled like home and like a ghost at the same time. The wind immediately caught her dark hair, whipping it across her face and into her mouth. She’d forgotten how the wind never really stopped here, how it was always touching you, pushing you, reminding you it was there.
She walked to the porch, her city boots crunching on the overgrown gravel path. The steps creaked beneath her weight, the sound bringing back a flood of memories—running up these same steps as a child, sitting here with her first boyfriend at sixteen, leaving with her suitcases at twenty-two, swearing never to return.
Her hand shook as she unlocked the door with the key her mother’s lawyer had mailed her three years ago. When it swung open, the house greeted her with silence and dust motes dancing in the thin streams of fading daylight.
Inside, it smelled like wood, old books, and the faint memory of her mother’s rose soap. Furniture was still covered in sheets, turning tables and chairs into pale ghosts. A photo of her as a little girl—grinning, barefoot, holding a seashell—hung crooked in the hallway. Her mother had taken that picture. Her father had built the frame.
Her throat tightened.
She used to tell her parents the wind whispered stories at night. They said it was just the house settling. But she knew better. Even as a child, she’d felt something different about this place, this house perched between land and sea.
She didn’t want to admit she had nowhere else to go. That her savings had dwindled after weeks of hotel rooms. That her parents had died in a car accident three years ago and left her this house because they believed she’d come back someday.
She hadn’t. Not until now. Not until everything fell apart.
Rowan dropped her bags with a thud that echoed through the empty house and collapsed onto the couch, still covered in a faded white sheet. A small cloud of dust rose around her, making her cough. She sank into the cushion. And for the first time in weeks, she let herself feel it—all of it.
The humiliation of being replaced so easily.
The loneliness that had started long before David left.
The aching, awful truth that maybe David was right.
Maybe she was too cold. Too strange. Too hard to love.
She’d missed their anniversary dinner—too consumed with prepping a Warhol exhibit that could’ve put her name on the national stage. David had waited at the restaurant for two hours, a ring box hidden in his pocket. He never forgot that. Never let her forget it either.
A soft sound broke the silence.
Rowan sat up quickly, her heart racing. The room was empty. The windows were shut. But outside, in the distance, the wind had shifted.
It almost sounded like—
No. That was crazy.
She shook her head, running fingers through her tangled dark hair. It had only been the wind through the trees or water dripping somewhere in the old pipes. She was tired. Jet-lagged. Her emotions were raw. This house held too many memories, and her mind was playing tricks.
Still… the sound stayed with her. Long after she dragged her suitcase upstairs to her old bedroom. Long after she half-heartedly wiped dust from the nightstand. Long after she curled up beneath an old quilt, still in her clothes, too exhausted to even brush her teeth.
A whisper.
Low and soft.
Right at the edge of hearing.
It sounded like it said her name.
Rowan…
Her eyes flew open in the darkness. The digital clock on the bedside table glowed 2:17 AM. The house creaked around her, settling into the night. Outside, the waves crashed against the shore in their endless rhythm.
And somewhere—maybe in the wind, maybe in her mind, maybe in the house itself—that voice whispered again.
As if Breakwater Bay had been waiting for her all along.
As if it had secrets to tell her.
As if coming back wasn’t an ending, but a beginning.
“Rowan… welcome home,” it seemed to say. But was it the house? The wind? Or something else entirely?
She didn’t sleep again that night.
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