She was reading, not with urgency, nor with purpose, but in that suspended state where time begins to thin and the body forgets its weight. The book was open in her lap, its spine softened by many seasons, its corners worn into softness.
She turned the pages slowly, though she had memorized much of the tale, and lingered over certain lines as though she might find something new hidden between the words if she read them just once more.
Around her, the air was bright with the warmth that follows rain. The leaves still clung to their summer tones, though the light had changed, pulling longer, quieter shadows across the lawn.
Young deer stood not far off, fawn colored, curious and barely moving, but she did not see them. Her eyes were on the page. Her thoughts were elsewhere.
There had been other days like this. She could not have said how many. She only knew she preferred them, these undemanding hours where nothing was expected of her, save stillness.
She had long ago decided there was a quiet sort of safety in fiction. In the rhythm of stories that began and ended as they were meant to. In the simplicity of characters who spoke their minds without shame and acted without consequence.
She liked the order of it.
The predictability.
The kindness of a story that hurt sometimes, but always healed before the last page.
She might have stayed there longer had it not been for the sound, small, sharp, and out of place. Not alarming, but unfamiliar. Like a note struck in the wrong key. She looked up then, expecting to find something disturbed in the grass.
But it was not the deer who had moved.
It was the world.
The trees, though still, seemed newly unfamiliar. The light had deepened. The house beyond the clearing, once reflected clear and pale in the water, had vanished from its surface altogether. In its place was a shadow she did not recognize, soft edged, indistinct, and waiting.
She rose without thinking.
The book fell shut in her hands.
She did not understand what had changed. Only that something had.
She stepped into the story she had read more times
than there are stars stitched into the sky —
a story they thought she’d be too ashamed to speak aloud,
one they never expected her to survive,
let alone love.
