D. K's pov
Darian Kellen Vale did not believe in miracles, not anymore. Not since he turned nineteen and stopped waiting for his father to show up to his poetry reading. Not since he watched his mother smile through clenched teeth every Sunday as their neighbors asked about her husband. Not since the university offered him a future that looked suspiciously like a repetition of the past.
At twenty-six, Dorian's life was neat in the way a library after midnight was neat,ordered, quiet, and a little haunted. He was a teaching assistant in the literature department at the University, a role that earned him just enough respect to be overworked and underappreciated. Most students called him "Mr. Vale" or "TA Dorian." No one called him just Dorian. He wasn't the kind of man people invited to parties or remembered in yearbooks. He was the kind of man who remembered everyone else and wrote about them in the margins of his notebooks.
He lived alone in a third-floor apartment that overlooked a laundromat and a forgotten bookstore. His kitchen sink dripped. The window whistled at night. But it was his. The floors creaked like old joints, and there were books in every corner,some read, some only half-tried. There were mugs that held tea bags long since dried out. The record player in the corner was his only indulgence, an old habit from his mother. Nina Simone. Bill Withers. A little Chopin on the hardest days.
His father was a ghost with a name that still opened doors: Ezekiel Vale. A literary genius, once. A poet who'd published three books by the time he was thirty and disappeared into scandal by thirty-two. Darian hadn't seen him in fourteen years, but he saw echoes of him everywhere,in professors' compliments, in the way his own voice sometimes cracked when reading Yeats aloud, in the mirror when he hadn't slept and the darkness under his eyes looked inherited.
His mother, Rachel Vale, was a quiet woman who had learned to smile in public and cry behind doors. She'd raised Dorian on lesson plans, used textbooks, and firm boundaries. There were rules in the house: always say thank you, never speak ill of others, and don't ask about your father unless you want the silence to last a week.
The last time he'd asked about him, he was fifteen.
"He was brilliant," his mother said, setting a cup of tea on the table. "And some people can't survive their brilliance."
Darian had nodded, because what else could you do with a truth that left you with more questions than answers?
He'd loved once. Or what he thought was love.
Kaia Renner. She had been everything he wasn't,loud, impulsive, always sketching strangers in her notebooks like she could see beneath their skin. They met during undergrad in a class called Romanticism and Rebellion, fittingly. She asked if he believed in revolution. He said no. She said that was a shame and kissed him anyway.
Their love was frantic, beautiful, doomed.
She liked to make messes and asked him to join her. But Darian had spent his whole life trying to be clean. Emotionally. Socially. Academically. Kaia wanted vulnerability. He gave her walls dressed up as calm.
"I feel like I'm dating a locked door," she'd said once, throwing a scarf over her shoulder as she packed to leave. "You write about truth, but you're afraid of being seen."
She left him in December with a note scrawled on a napkin and a final sculpture she made of him,clay cracked across the chest like something had broken inside.
He didn't throw it away. He didn't fix it either.
He put it in the back of his closet, buried beneath coats he never wore.
His days became repetition: wake, coffee, class, papers, sleep. Rinse, ache, repeat.
He graded dozens of essays a week. Students wrote about Sylvia Plath like she was a punchline or a martyr. He knew better. He read their takes on James Baldwin, saw the heart of them trying to understand identity, even when they used the wrong words. Sometimes he left them comments longer than their actual paragraphs, because teaching was the only time he felt like he mattered.
He attended faculty meetings where his opinions were listened to and forgotten in the same breath. He wore sweaters to hide the way his body thinned under stress. His nights were often spent walking aimlessly through the park, past the old library, into the city where no one knew his name. Sometimes he ended up at a café near the campus, one with a wall of handwritten poems and a chalkboard menu that changed weekly.
He never stayed long.
It felt too close to hope.
There was a novel in his drawer. Untitled. 132 pages.
He hadn't touched it in eight months.
It was about a boy who heard people's emotions as music. Every betrayal sounded like cello. Every lie like untuned violin. Every love like silence.
He stopped writing after his advisor said, "It's good. But maybe try something more marketable?"
He'd nodded. Pretended to agree. But when he went home that night, he didn't open the file again. Not because it wasn't good,but because he didn't know how to fight for something that only made sense to him.
There were other things.
Darian struggled with anxiety. Always had.
It lived in his chest like a second heartbeat. Quiet most days. Thunderous on others. Sometimes he'd wake up unable to breathe, convinced he had forgotten something, failed someone. He didn't tell anyone. Not even his doctor. He didn't want medication. He didn't want labels. He just wanted control.
So he made routines.
Same breakfast. Same walk. Same playlist.
He kept journals where he recorded the hours he didn't cry, the days he didn't spiral, the moments he didn't disappear into himself.
Some days he won.
Most days, he just survived.
One morning, he was sitting in his usual café near campus. Third chair by the window. Two sugars in his coffee. Wool coat still damp from rain.
He was reading Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son again not for class, just for grounding. There was a comfort in words that didn't flinch.
Across the café, a girl sat down. Notebook in hand. She looked tired, like she hadn't slept. She scribbled, then crossed out. Scribbled again.
He didn't stare. Not really. Just observed.
Her name, he'd learn later, was Arielle.
But in that moment, she was a mirror.
And something in him paused.
He wouldn't speak to her that day.
Or the next.
Or the next next.
But something in the way she clutched her pen,like it was both weapon and shield,unlocked something in him.
That night, for the first time in months, he opened the novel file.
He reread the last paragraph he'd written. His eyes stung. His fingers hovered over the keys.
Then he started typing.