Chapter 4:
Before the Tide Forgets
February 14, 2017
At five in the morning, the rain stopped. Not faded. Not eased. It stopped. As if someone had closed a valve buried deep under the seabed, a lever only the drowned could reach.
Casa Rossa held its breath.
No creaks. No whispers. No murmurs through moldy pipes. The walls, always pulsing like a dying organism, were now corpse-still.
There was only me.
And the sea.
I stepped outside barefoot, shirt damp and clinging like a second skin I was ready to shed. No bag. No ID. No name. Just the brooch hanging cold against my chest, no longer a memory, now a sentence.
The beach didn’t welcome me. It waited.
She was already there.
Not hidden in mirrors. Not coiled inside my throat. Not blurred between waves.
Her. Barefoot, dress unmarked by the tide, gaze sharp like broken glass.
She didn’t speak with wind this time.
Her voice was hers.
“Did you bring anything?”
I didn’t answer. I only reached for the brooch. Yanked. The chain sliced my neck, the pendant sliced my palm. Red bloomed across my hand like a flower that shouldn't grow in winter.
“This?” I asked.
She didn’t even look at it.
“That’s just the key.”
She stepped forward. The tide crawled up to meet her feet but didn’t touch them. Her shadow didn’t fall on the sand. She was already halfway gone.
I looked down. The water now reached my ribs.
When had I waded in?
Or had the ocean risen to welcome me home?
“Give it to me,” she said.
“What?”
“Your name. The one you buried. Not Christopher. The one that still burns.”
And I knew.
Not the paper name. Not the one stitched on school uniforms.
The first one. The real one.
The name I whispered in a fever the night we first touched hands at the Melbourne pier. The one she once breathed into my mouth, gasping it like a prayer, when the waves tried to take us both. The one I clawed out of my chest the day I left her to die.
I said it.
Out loud.
I won’t write it here. Not because I’ve forgotten, but because it doesn’t fit in letters. It fits in salt, in tides, in bruises.
The sea shuddered.
The sky didn’t tear. No lightning. No vortex.
Just a silence deeper than silence.
She smiled.
And then, she gave it back.
The brooch. Same cheap silver, same fake stone. But rusted now, hollow. As if it had served its sentence. As if it had remembered everything for me, and finally, mercifully, forgot.
“My name is no longer Leonore,” she said.
Those were the last words she ever spoke.
No explosion of foam. No cries.
The ocean just took her. Gently. Like it loved her. Like it forgave her.
I stood there as the water receded, dragging my reflection out to sea. I didn’t follow.
I couldn’t.
Not anymore.
I woke up face down in the sand, mouth full of salt and silence. The sky was pale, empty, as if the night had never happened, or had been erased. When I staggered back to the hotel, barefoot and bleeding, the door was already open. The old woman stood behind the desk, eyes blank as always. She didn’t ask where I’d been. She just held out a key and said, “You’re late.”
February 15, 2017
The tourists are returning.
I hear them roll their luggage down the cracked stairs. They laugh. They ask questions. They get lost.
The receptionist smiled at me this morning. Called me the new guy.
“You’re settling in nicely,” she said.
She handed me a key. Room 3.
It was warm in my hand. As if it had waited for me.
The brooch still hangs from my neck. I polish it sometimes. Out of habit. Like it means something.
The mirror still reflects only what it wants.
But at night, when the guests sleep, I sit behind the desk.
I write letters I never send.
I listen for waves that never come.
I remember a name I’ll never say again.
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