Therapy began slowly, each session peeling back another layer of the denial he’d built to survive the immediate heartbreak. He forced himself to sit with the memories he had buried, confronting the quiet pains he’d previously mistaken for temporary distance. He began to see the months leading up to her departure not as a perfect landscape he’d imagined, but as one already marked by a gradual, painful erosion.
He finally gathered Clara’s leftover belongings from around the apartment—the spare toothbrush in the cup, the faded band T-shirts in the back of the drawer, the half-used bottle of shampoo in the shower. Holding them, he realized with a fresh ache that they were simply things she hadn’t cared enough to take. They held no hidden meaning, no cryptic clue to her heart. They were just debris, the insignificant flotsam left behind by a receding tide.
He wrote her a letter he never intended to send, letting gratitude and sorrow spill onto the page. It wasn’t closure, not entirely, but it felt like a first step toward accepting what had always been true.
The truth felt clear one quiet morning when Adam stepped outside for fresh air. The city seemed different, softer somehow. He inhaled deeply, letting the past finally loosen its grip. Healing would take time, but for the first time in weeks, he sensed the faint, fragile shape of a beginning.