✨ Prologue A Fleeting Glance
Some moments don't feel like moments at all.
They feel like beginnings.
Alex Harper sat on a bench at Harrington Station, sketchbook resting on his knee, pencil flicking in quick, practiced movements. He came here oftennot to catch a train, but to catch faces. Movement. Life. Something about the station's chaos made him calm.
He was working on the curls of a stranger's hair when he saw her.
She strode into the frame of his world like a flare guitar case slung across her back, black boots stomping to a rhythm only she could hear, dark hair spilling over a leather jacket. It was her eyes that arrested him: fierce, curious, reckless. She looked like trouble disguised as poetry.
She had no idea she'd just been immortalized in his mind.
Alex lifted his pencil, unable to stop his hand from tracing her onto the page. Her mouth moved singing under her breath when suddenly she looked in his direction.
Blue-gray eyes. Direct. Unafraid. The world fell silent for a beat.
A small smile curved her lips. Confident. Almost teasing. She held his gaze for half a heartbeat and then the train roared in.
Papers in his lap scattered. By the time Alex scrambled to catch them, she had disappeared behind metal doors, swallowed by the crowd and the noise and the moment.
He stood breathless, wondering if he imagined her.
He hadn't even gotten her name.
That night, in his tiny apartment above the bakery, Alex couldn't sleep. Instead, he sketched her again and again trying to get the spark in her smile right.
Across the city, on a dimly lit stage in a packed basement bar, Jamie Callahan belted her lyrics into a microphone as the crowd chanted Heartfire! She should've been focused on the music but somewhere in the back of her mind, she kept thinking about the quiet boy she'd seen that morning. The one who looked at her like he understood her.
One moment.
Two strangers.
And neither of them knew that their stories had just begun to collide one sketch, one song, at a time.