Clara didn't usually stray from routine.
Mornings meant tulips and invoices. Afternoons were for custom bouquets and the occasional wedding consult. Evenings? Evenings were hers—quiet, calm, lived between cups of chamomile tea and playlists full of old jazz. That's how it had been, ever since the accident.
But now, she found herself checking the clock just past 11 p.m., heart ticking with something she hadn't felt in a while: anticipation.
She wrapped a scarf around her neck and told herself it was just a walk. Just air. Just the city calling her outside. Not a man. Not his words. Not the way he looked at her like she was a puzzle worth finishing.
The bench was empty when she got there.
She almost turned back. Almost.
But then he appeared from the side entrance to the park, hair tousled by wind, sketchpad tucked under his arm like a secret. He looked surprised to see her. A good surprise.
"You came back," Julian said.
"I live around here," she offered with a shrug, as if her heartbeat hadn't already betrayed her.
"Right." He nodded, a little smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "You brought the wind with you."
Clara raised an eyebrow. "That another architect thing?"
"No," he said. "That's a you thing too."
She sat down beside him again—same bench, same broken light, same quiet that felt more like company than silence.
"What do you sketch?" she asked.
He opened the book and flipped to a page.
It wasn't a building. It was her.
Rough lines. Incomplete shading. But unmistakably her—head tilted, scarf loose around her neck, a petal caught in her hair.
Clara stared.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I should've asked. You just… sat so still that night. Like the world was spinning and you weren't."
She didn't know what to say to that.
So she asked, "Do you draw a lot of strangers?"
"No," Julian said. "Just the ones I wish weren't strangers."
That silence came again. Only now, it was full of things unsaid. Things like I don't know how to let people in and maybe I want to try anyway.
After a while, she asked the question that had lingered in the back of her mind since the night before.
"Why only when it rains?"
He looked up, as if the sky might explain it for him.
"My fiancée died on a rainy night. Three years ago."
Clara inhaled slowly. The words hung heavy, but they didn't scare her away. Grief had a language she understood.
"I was in a car crash," she said quietly. "Wrecked my wrist. I haven't played piano since."
They sat there, not as two people trying to fix each other—but as two people who knew what it meant to break.
And maybe, just maybe, what it meant to heal.