Chapter Four: The Space Between Forgotten and Familiar

📖 Chapter Four: The Space Between Forgotten and Familiar

The ink on the journal had bled slightly from years of thumbed pages. Her fingers hovered over the soft spine, breathing in its worn leather. Each word Lucien had written held weight — not just the ache of longing, but the tenderness of memory.

Éloïse traced a line he had underlined twice.

“You are not a sigh. You are a soft page turning.”

Her breath caught.

The phrase curled inside her like smoke from a half-forgotten fire.

She didn’t remember this moment.

But her heart did.

Her hands trembled as she turned the page… and a loose sheet, aged and folded thrice, slipped out — a dated entry written in childish print, surrounded by faded ink smudges and pressed lavender petals.

🌸 Interlude: Rue de Lavande, 2009

The summer rain had chased most children indoors, but Éloïse had insisted the world looked prettier soaked.

Lucien had followed her, of course — boots squelching through garden mud, hair plastered to his forehead, cheeks flushed with quiet joy.

She’d twirled beneath the gray sky, arms wide, laughing.

"Si tu étais un son, Lucien, lequel serais-tu ?"

If you were a sound, Lucien, what would you be?

He had blinked. “I don’t know… maybe a sigh?”

She’d giggled and placed a messy flower crown on his head.

“You’re not a sigh,” she’d whispered. “You’re a soft page turning. Like a secret someone is afraid to read too fast.”

He had smiled then — small, sheepish — and tucked that sentence away forever.

Present

The Éloïse sitting on the edge of the window seat blinked back the sting in her eyes.

The girl in that memory felt so familiar. As though she still lived somewhere beneath her skin.

And Lucien — he wasn’t just kind. He wasn’t just patient.

He had loved her before the storm, through the silence…

And maybe, just maybe, she was learning to love him again — or realizing she never truly stopped.

"Mon cœur ne t’a jamais oublié…"

My heart never forgot you.

Her fingers trembled as she smoothed the page, lavender petals crackling like ghosts. The journal lay open in her lap, soaked in the kind of silence that only memory could summon.

She didn’t hear the door creak open.

Didn’t register the soft shuffle of boots against the old wooden floor.

But then—

“You found it, didn’t you?”

His voice was quieter than the rain tapping against the glass. Almost afraid to break whatever fragile spell she had wandered into.

Éloïse looked up.

Lucien stood just inside the room, damp from the fog, his curls glistening with dew. He didn’t step closer. Just waited — as if the air between them were something sacred.

Her voice barely rose above a whisper.

“You kept it. All these years…”

Lucien gave the faintest of smiles, one that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“Not all of it. Just the parts that still remembered you.”

Her breath caught.

“Why?” she asked, the word brittle.

He glanced down, then up again — eyes raw, full of everything unsaid.

“Because some pages refuse to be rewritten, no matter how many times you forget the story.”

She didn’t know if she wanted to cry or reach for him.

Maybe both.

Instead, she whispered the one line from the journal that had undone her.

“You’re not a sigh… You’re a soft page turning.”