Adam’s fingers trembled as he opened the old sketchbook.

  The pages inside were filled with jagged charcoal lines, drawings of faceless figures caught in some eternal dance of grief and loss.

  “This is all I had in there,” he murmured, flipping through the pages with a haunted look in his eyes.

  He stopped on a page, showing a figure with a wound on its chest — missing, incomplete.

  “There’s one here of you,” he said quietly, turning the page to reveal a drawing of Yara’s face.

  But there was something missing.

  Her eyes were gone. Just empty, hollow spaces where her gaze had once been.

  “I thought I imagined you,” he said softly, his voice cracking. “I thought I made you up just to survive.”

  Yara pressed her hand against the paper, the rough texture of the charcoal familiar in a way she hadn’t expected.

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  “No,” she whispered. “I was real. I just… couldn’t stay. I couldn’t face the truth.”

  She turned to another page — the lighthouse. The same one she had visited just hours ago.

  But in his drawing, the lighthouse was burning, flames licking at the walls, consuming everything.

  “How did you…” she began, but Adam cut her off.

  “I dreamed it. Over and over. It was like a warning, something I couldn’t escape.”

  She shivered, a chill running through her body.

  “Maybe we were always tied to this ruin,” she thought, looking at the haunting image of the lighthouse burning.

  “But maybe ruins could become places to rebuild,” she whispered softly, the words of her own heart.

  In that moment, something in her shifted. They could rebuild. They could start over, piece by piece.

  And maybe, just maybe, the ruins of their past could become the foundation of something new.