Epilogue: The Way the Light Finds Us
Five years passed like a song remembered in pieces—soft at the edges, but full at the heart.
The old courtyard café still stood. The white walls were now wrapped in wisteria instead of ivy, and the wind chimes had been replaced by tiny paper cranes, all painted by children who came to learn under Oriana's patient hand.
Anya stepped out from the kitchen, apron smudged with flour, her cheeks rosy from the oven's heat. The scent of jasmine rice cookies and oolong tea filled the air like a memory too good to let go.
"Careful," she called softly, watching a toddler stumble toward the potted lilies. "That one bites."
The child giggled. Anya winked. From a shaded table, a woman looked up from her book. She had a smile that aged like poetry, and eyes that still studied the world like it was a canvas she hadn't yet finished.
"Scaring children again?" Oriana asked.
"Educating them," Anya replied, sitting beside her. "That's different."
Oriana reached across the table, brushing a bit of flour off Anya's cheek. "You still talk like you're falling in love with the world."
"I am," Anya whispered, her hand slipping into Oriana's. "But mostly just with you."
They sat in silence for a while, listening to the wind rustle through the tree Anya had planted in the corner of the courtyard the first year they reopened—an almond tree, quiet in spring, loud in scent.
It was a simple life. But it was theirs.
Oriana's art was now in small galleries across the coast. Not because she wanted fame, but because people had found something honest in her lines—something that reminded them they had been young once too, and afraid, and in love.
Anya's bakery never made her rich, but it made her remembered. Customers often left poems instead of tips, folded neatly beside plates of crumbs. One had written, Your hands taste like stories I never thought I'd survive.
Sometimes, they went months without saying I love you. Not because they didn't feel it—but because they didn't have to say it out loud. It was in the way Oriana warmed Anya's tea when she forgot. It was in the way Anya always paused the music when Oriana drew.
It was in the quiet.
It was in the ordinary.
And sometimes, when the world slowed, Anya would sit in the garden and remember the girl with the sketchbook who had once drawn her heart on a paper napkin and called it a beginning.
Oriana would lean beside her, cheek to shoulder, and whisper, "You're still the softest season I've ever known."
And Anya would answer, "Then let me be yours forever."
Their story never needed a perfect ending.
Because it had always been written in the way they stayed.