They called it the Glass Garden, though nothing inside it was truly made of glass. Not entirely. But there was something about the way the light moved through the colored panes in the ceiling, how it spilled over the leaves and the vines and the metalwork blossoms like stained dreams, that made the name feel true enough.
Elirys had come alone.
She needed a place where time could dissolve, where no one expected her to speak, to explain, to smile. A place where she could breathe.
Tucked between an old stone chapel and a quiet gallery, the greenhouse stood like a secret. Inside, the world fell away. The air was warm with breath and silence, fragrant with damp earth and ghosted petals. Sunlight filtered through rose and sapphire glass, casting jeweled shadows on the floor. No one spoke here. Even the footsteps came soft.
She wandered beneath arches of climbing ivy, beside rows of sleeping orchids and glass-blown butterflies suspended on wires so fine they looked as if they hovered on their own. The colors were pale, hushed, like everything had agreed to be quiet for her.
A notebook was tucked in her coat pocket. Hailey had teased her gently about always carrying one. But she hadn't come to write.
Not today.
Today, she just wanted to feel.
She sat near a twisted bench wrapped in vines, beside a sculpture of butterflies frozen mid-flight. A soft instrumental played somewhere in the distance, a violin, maybe. She wasn't sure if it was real or imagined. But it felt like music meant for her.
She closed her eyes. Let herself forget time. Forget the weight she carried even on her lightest days.
And across the greenhouse, through vines, through glass, through people who didn't notice, half-hidden behind a curtain of climbing glass lilies ~ he saw her.
The stranger from the bus stop.
He hadn't followed her. Not truly. He hadn't even known why his steps brought him here, only that something gentle had nudged him toward the glass-paned doors. And when he stepped inside and saw her sitting there, lit like something from a dream he'd tried to hold onto too long, he stopped.
He didn't move forward. Didn't speak.
Just watched.
Not the way strangers do - curious, fleeting, forgettable.
But like someone trying to remember a dream.
The sun touched her face and caught in her lashes, and for a breathless second, she looked like she might disappear.
He stepped forward.
Then paused.
She was smiling to herself ~ just faintly, but real.
She looked lighter today. Not happy, exactly, but like someone who'd found a pause in her sadness. Her head was tilted slightly, her eyes soft with thought, hands curled around the edges of her notebook.
He wanted to memorize the quiet curve of her shoulders. The way the colored light kissed the tips of her hair. She didn't look broken. She looked... resting.
And he knew then that if he spoke, the moment would vanish.
This moment wasn't for him. So he left.
He walked the long way out, and paused only once, at the front desk, where a small bowl of visitor notes lay blank and waiting. He wrote nothing more than five words, folded it around a tiny blue flower pressed between tissue paper, and slipped it beneath the edge of the bowl.
No name. No explanation.
Just this:
"You looked like peace today."
Later, as she was leaving, the girl behind the counter called out, gently handing her the folded paper. "This was left for you, I think."
Elirys frowned. "I didn't...."
But the note was already in her hand.
The flower was soft. The ink slightly smudged.
And as her eyes moved over the words, her breath caught.
Not from shock. But from something quieter. She didn't know how he'd found her again. She didn't even know if she was meant to find him back.
But in that moment, under the colored shadows and glass butterflies~
Elirys felt seen.
And for the first time in a long time…
It didn't hurt.