Page 64 of Second Chance with the Half-Elf
AERON
The smell of fresh paint clings to my skin like guilt that won’t rinse off. My shirt’s streaked with it—sage green and chalky white—every shade we scraped from council-approved palettes trying to make the boardwalk look like it’s something worth saving. Half the lantern hooks are bent, the new ones don’t match, and the wind coming off the water keeps snapping the banner lines like a warning.
It’s Lantern Night. And the whole damn town is holding its breath.
I’m tying string lights above the east-facing vendor stalls when Drokhaz climbs up beside me, all quiet bulk and a cup of coffee that smells criminally better than what I’ve had this morning.
“You know,” he says, “you could let someone else hang lights for once.”
I grunt, looping the wire tighter around a beam. “They don’t get high enough.”
“You mean ‘they don’t get moody about symmetry.’”
I shoot him a look.
He shrugs. “Same thing.”
Down on the boardwalk, Rowan’s organizing a group of kids trying to hang paper lanterns without setting themselves or each other on fire. Jamie’s darting between them with a bucket of sand in one hand and a plastic shark in the other, hollering about “monster safety protocols.”
The whole thing looks like chaos.
The good kind.
Still, I can’t shake the thrum in my chest, the sharp awareness that I’m waiting for something—someone—to knock the air out of me again.
Word spreads fast in Lumera.
And this morning, it came to me sideways through Goff’s smug grin: Evie’s not selling the house.
She’s staying.
I nearly dropped a box of copper tacks when I heard it. Had to walk it off, past the loading crates and into the sea wind until the burn in my lungs matched the one in my chest.
I’ve spent so long preparing myself for her to leave. Now I don’t know what the hell to do with the possibility that she won’t.
Hope isn’t something I let myself feel lightly.
It’s dangerous. It’s got teeth.
And right now it’s pacing just beneath my ribs like a thing ready to bite.
Drokhaz hands me the coffee and climbs back down to help rig the lantern poles near the pier. I stay on the ladder a second longer, just watching the tide edge in beneath the planks and listening to the gulls scream like the sky owes them a favor.
I’m halfway through tying off the final string when I hear her.
Her voice behind me.
“I figured you’d be up here hoarding symmetry and smoldering in silence.”
I freeze. Every muscle goes taut.
Then I look down.
She’s standing just beyond the vendor tents, hands stuffed in her coat pockets, hair wind-tangled and eyes sharp with something I haven’t let myself believe I’d see again.
Ease.
She walks toward the ladder slow, like she’s not sure how this will go but she’s doing it anyway.
