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It was a rainy afternoon, the kind that draped the city in silence and made even the bookstore smell like memory.
Raine had opened the shop late that day. She didn't say why, and Seraphina didn't ask. Instead, she brought two warm pastries in a paper bag and sat near the poetry section, legs tucked underneath her like she belonged there.
They hadn't spoken much since the Moonlight Market. Not about anything that mattered, anyway.
But the quiet between them was starting to feel less like distance and more like understanding.
Seraphina ran her fingers along the spine of a book she hadn't opened. "Can I ask you something?"
Raine looked up from her notes. "You already did."
A small laugh. "Okay, can I ask you another something?"
Raine closed her notebook and nodded once.
"Have you ever had a home that didn't have walls?"
Raine blinked. "You mean like... emotionally, or are we talking metaphorical tents here?"
Seraphina smiled but didn't answer right away. Her gaze drifted to the raindrops racing down the glass. "I meant both, I think."
Raine didn't speak. She waited.
Seraphina's voice was soft when it came again. "I grew up in foster care. Moved around a lot. Different cities. Different names on the doors. No pictures on the walls. Just blank rooms and rules."
Raine shifted slightly but didn't interrupt.
"I never stayed long enough to decorate," Seraphina continued. "Never wanted to. And eventually I stopped unpacking my suitcase at all. Just lived out of it. It was easier that way."
She picked at a loose thread on her sleeve. "When I aged out, I thought things would feel different. But it turns out freedom isn't the same as having a place to belong."
The rain tapped harder against the window.
"I don't have family," Seraphina added, almost like a shrug. "Not in the traditional sense. No one who'd call if I disappeared. No holidays. No emergency contact. Just me."
She didn't sound bitter. Just... matter-of-fact. Like someone who had made peace with a kind of silence that others never even noticed.
Raine studied her.
"You're not chasing belonging," Raine said slowly. "You're building it."
Seraphina looked up, caught off guard.
Raine continued, "You find places and people, and you plant something. You wait to see if it grows."
Seraphina tilted her head. "And you? What are you doing?"
Raine hesitated. "I'm still watering a ghost."
They sat like that, suspended in the soft gray of the afternoon. No resolution. No declarations.
Just stories.
Pieces, finally laid out in the open.
And maybe that was how it started—not with fireworks or falling, but with someone staying long enough to ask, Where does it hurt?
And listening when the answer came.
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