The road home stretched before me like a scar. I drove through the night, headlights carving through mist and trees, the rain whispering secrets against the windshield. Every few miles, I caught a glimpse of red in the corner of my vision—sometimes a flicker of cloth by the roadside, sometimes the faint reflection of her face in the glass.
She wasn't gone.
Not really.
But for now, she was quiet.
And in that silence, memories began to rise like ghosts of their own.
It was the library where I first saw her.
I remember because I was there for all the wrong reasons—hiding, not reading. It was raining that afternoon, one of those soft, endless rains that make the whole world feel tired. I was pretending to look for something in the philosophy section, though I couldn't have told you what.
Then I heard it—her laugh. Not loud, not forced. Just real.
When I looked up, she was standing two aisles over, struggling to balance a stack of books in her arms. One slipped, hit the floor with a dull thud. She laughed again, the sound spilling through the quiet space like sunlight through blinds.
"Guess I'm not as coordinated as I thought," she said when she caught me watching.
"You're not the first casualty of gravity," I said before I could stop myself.
She smiled—wide, open, fearless. "Then you should help me. Since you seem like a survivor."
I did. I bent down, picked up the book, handed it back to her. The cover was red.
"The Scarlet Letter," I read aloud. "Bit on the nose, don't you think?"
She tilted her head. "You don't like the book?"
"Not the book, the color."
"Shame," she said, her eyes holding mine for a moment longer than they should have. "It's the color that notices you back."
We ended up sitting together that day. Talking. She was studying art history, though she hated how academic it made beauty sound. I was between jobs—between everything, really.
"You talk like someone who wants to disappear," she said after a while.
"And you talk like someone who doesn't believe in disappearing."
She smiled. "That's because I don't. People don't vanish. They just forget who they are for a while."
When the rain stopped, I offered to walk her home. She didn't hesitate. Her apartment was a few blocks away, small, full of color and clutter—paintbrushes in jars, records leaning against the wall, a half-finished canvas on the easel.
"I don't usually let strangers in," she said as she poured two glasses of wine. "But you don't seem like a stranger."
And maybe I wasn't.
That night, I stayed until dawn. We didn't touch, didn't even sit too close—but when I left, I carried her laugh with me, and it didn't fade for days.
The next time I saw her was by accident—or maybe not. She was sketching near the river, her hair pulled up, her hands smudged with charcoal.
"You again," she said without looking up.
"I could say the same."
"Then say it."
"I was hoping to."
She looked up then, smiling, and for the first time I noticed the freckle near her lip, the one you only saw when she laughed.
We spent the afternoon there. She told me about her parents, about the little seaside town she'd grown up in, about how she used to paint the same sky every day until it looked the way it felt, not the way it looked.
"What about you?" she asked eventually.
"Nothing that interesting," I said. "Just a string of almosts."
"Almost what?"
"Almost happy. Almost enough."
She leaned back on her hands, squinting at the sky. "Then maybe you just haven't met your 'enough' yet."
We became we in small, ordinary ways.
A movie that ran too long. A walk that turned into dinner. A dinner that turned into staying over.
I started keeping things at her place without meaning to—a toothbrush, a shirt, a book she never returned. She painted in the mornings, barefoot, hair a mess, humming to herself. She'd talk to the plants on the windowsill like they were old friends.
She loved the color red—the deeper, the better. Red lipstick. Red shoes. A red ceramic mug she always drank from, no matter what.
When she kissed me the first time, her mouth tasted like that color—warm, reckless, alive.
"You still hate red?" she asked after, her forehead pressed to mine.
"I'm trying to reconsider."
She laughed, soft and close. "Good. It looks good on you."
Some nights, she painted me. I'd sit on the couch while she worked, pretending to read. She'd study me with that impossible gaze, eyes moving between my face and the canvas.
"What do you see?" I asked once.
She thought for a long time before answering. "Someone who's still looking for home."
"And you think you can paint it into me?"
"Maybe," she said. "Or maybe I just want to see what happens when someone like you lets themselves be seen."
The rain was heavier now, drumming against the windshield as I drove. My chest ached with the memory of her voice, her touch, her laugh that still echoed in my skull like a song I couldn't forget.
That was before the fire. Before the guilt. Before red became something else.
But even now—years later, haunted and half-mad on the road—I could still remember the exact shade of her lipstick, the warmth of her hand, the way she used to say my name like it meant something.
"Nathan," she'd whisper, like a secret only she was allowed to keep.
And for a little while, I'd believed her.