Chapter 64

Chapter 64

Mira’s POV

Ace showed up on Saturday with zero warning and the audacity to look unbothered about it.

I opened the door expecting Zara’s neighbor with a noise complaint and found him standing there instead, hands in his pockets, wearing a plain white shirt and dark jeans like he hadn’t put any thought into it, which somehow made it worse because he looked effortlessly put together in a way that felt personally offensive given that I was wearing Zara’s old university hoodie and hadn’t brushed my hair since Thursday.

“Get dressed,” he said simply.

“Good morning to you too.”

“It’s afternoon.”

I looked past him at the sky. He was right, which was annoying.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I told him.

“You’ve been inside for six days,” he replied, completely unbothered by my resistance, like he’d anticipated it and built it into his timeline. “You’re going outside today. Wear something comfortable.”

“Ace.”

“Mira.” He held my gaze steadily, patient and immovable, the human equivalent of a wall that had decided it liked you. “One afternoon. That’s all I’m asking.”

I looked at him for a long moment. Then I looked back at Zara’s living room, the couch with the spring that dug into my lower back, the cooking programme that had been running on a loop for three days, my phone face down on the cushion where it had been living since I stopped waiting for a call that wasn’t coming.

“Fine,” I muttered. “Give me ten minutes.”

He smiled the small quiet smile he had, the one that didn’t ask for anything.

“Take fifteen,” he replied. “You look like you need it.”

I shut the door in his face and went to get dressed. 


He took me to the waterfront. Not a restaurant or a bar or anywhere that required a reservation or small talk with people I didn’t know. Just the waterfront, the long stretch of it on the east side of the city where ordinary people walked dogs, ate ice cream and existed without requiring anything from each other.

I hadn’t been here in years.

We walked without a particular destination, which was the right call because the moment he’d suggested it I’d felt something in my chest loosen slightly, like the specific tension that came from being inside too long with your own thoughts had found somewhere to go.

“You didn’t have to do this,” I said after a while.

“I know,” he replied, the same way he always did.

“I’m not great company right now.”

“You’re fine company.” He glanced over briefly. “You’re quiet. That’s not the same thing as bad.”

I looked at him sideways.

“Most people find my quiet unsettling,” I said.

“Most people are uncomfortable with silence because it makes them think,” he replied evenly. “I don’t mind thinking.”

We walked past a man selling roasted nuts from a cart, the smell of them warm and sweet in the cool air. Ace stopped without asking and bought two paper cones, handing me one like it was already decided.

I accepted it because arguing felt like too much effort and also because they smelled incredible.

“Thank you,” I said.

He bumped his shoulder lightly against mine.
“Don’t mention it.”

We found a bench near the water and sat, the city spread out across the other bank, all glass and steel catching the afternoon light.

I ate my nuts and watched a small boy chase pigeons with more ambition than strategy while his mother filmed it with her phone, and for a few minutes I just existed inside the ordinariness of it all without thinking about anything else.

It was the first time in two weeks I’d managed that.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“Always.”

“Why do you keep showing up?”

He turned to look at me, unhurried, like the question didn’t catch him off guard at all.

“Because you need someone to,” he replied simply.

“That’s not a reason,” I pressed. “That’s an observation.”

The corner of his mouth lifted slightly. “You want the real answer?”

“I asked, didn’t I?”

He looked back at the water for a moment before turning to face me properly, one arm resting along the back of the bench, close enough that I was aware of the warmth of him in the cool afternoon air.

“Because you’re the most stubbornly alive person I’ve ever met,” he said quietly, “and I think you forget that sometimes. And when you forget it, you need someone to remember it for you.”

I stared at him.

“That’s either very sweet or very strange,” I said.

“Probably both,” he agreed without apology.

Something moved through me that I didn’t immediately have a name for. Not the electric, destabilizing thing that a certain other person’s proximity produced in me, nothing like that. Something gentler and steadier, like finding solid ground after a long time of uncertain footing.

I looked away before it became something I had to address.

“The pigeons are losing,” I said, nodding toward the small boy who had now tripped over his own shoes and was sitting on the pavement looking personally betrayed by gravity.

Ace laughed, genuinely, and I felt it somewhere in my chest in a way I filed away quickly under things I wasn’t examining today.

We stayed until the light changed.

That golden late afternoon shift where everything softened at the edges and the water went from blue to something warmer, and I sat on that bench beside Ace, talking about nothing important for two hours and somewhere in the middle of it stopped noticing that I was supposed to be miserable.

On the drive back he put music on low and didn’t fill the comfortable silence with anything unnecessary, while I sat in the passenger seat watching the city move past and thought about what he’d said.

I pressed my fingers lightly against my chest where the ache lived.

Working on it, I thought.

When he pulled up outside Zara’s building he put the car in park and turned slightly toward me.

“Better?” he asked.

I thought about it honestly.

“A little,” I admitted.

He nodded like that was enough.

I reached for the door handle and then stopped, turning back.

“Ace,” I said.

He looked at me.

“Thank you,” I told him. “Actually. Not just for today.”

Something in his expression shifted, carefully at the same time, like he was holding something he didn’t want to spill.

“Anytime, Mira,” he replied softly.

I got out of the car and walked to the building entrance, making it all the way to Zara’s front door before I let myself think about the way he’d looked at me just then.

The way nobody had looked at me in a very long time.

I pressed my forehead against the cool wood of the door for a moment.

Don’t, I told myself firmly.

But the thought was already there, small and inconvenient and impossible to fully ignore.

Whatever my heart was doing for Ace, I couldn’t put a name to it yet.