Chapter 2

My System gave me the notification, a quiet hum in my mind: Return sequence initiated. Departure in five days.

Five days. That was all I had left in the 1970s.

I spent the next day packing. Not my clothes, but my memories. I took out a simple cardboard box and started filling it.

Five years of handwritten notes, my desperate attempts to decode his musical genius. The wedding dress I was sewing by hand, the needle still stuck in the unfinished hem. His old, worn-out guitar picks I' d collected like holy relics. A photo of us, him looking serious and me looking at him with an adoration that was painful to see now.

Each item was a piece of my foolish heart.

My roommate, a kind-hearted hippie girl named Luna, watched me with worried eyes.

"What are you doing, Stella?"

"I'm leaving," I said, my voice flat. "When I'm gone, can you give this to Jennifer Clarkson?"

Luna frowned. "Jennifer? The executive's wife? Why her?"

"Because," I said, closing the lid on the box, "she's the rightful keeper of his legacy. These things belong to her world, not mine."

I was giving up. I was surrendering his memory to the woman he truly loved. It felt like tearing a part of myself out, but it also felt right. It was the only way to cut the cord.

That night, I couldn't sleep. I walked to his secluded cabin, wanting one last look. I stayed hidden in the trees, a ghost at the edge of his life.

A car pulled up. Jennifer got out, looking frantic and guilty. She ran to his door.

He let her in immediately.

I crept closer, close enough to hear their voices through the thin cabin walls.

"Nate, I'm so sorry," Jennifer sobbed. "It's all my fault. If I hadn't married him... you never would have hidden yourself away like this."

"It's not your fault, Jenny," Nathaniel's voice was softer than I had ever heard it. A tenderness reserved only for her. "It was my choice."

He became a recluse after she married someone else. The fact, laid bare, was a final, brutal confirmation. I was just a visitor in the ruins of their love story.

I watched as he held her, his hand stroking her hair. He looked at her with a warmth, a deep, aching love that he never, ever showed me. I was a friend. A helper. A responsibility.

She was his soul.