Chapter 4: The Year of Silence
It didn’t happen all at once.
There was no dramatic goodbye, no shouted argument under the bridge, no tearful promises whispered in the dark.
It happened the way leaves fall in autumn—one by one, so quietly you hardly notice until the branches are bare.
July was the last truly perfect month.
Mae and Leo filled it with small adventures: racing shopping carts down abandoned alleys, mapping secret corners of Willow Creek no one else cared about, building elaborate stories about the lives of strangers they passed.
In the Paper Kingdom, they added new wishes to the jar almost daily. Make it to next summer. Stay fearless. Never forget this.
But reality was seeping in at the edges, a cold draft they couldn’t quite block out.
Leo’s bruises grew darker and more frequent. Mae caught him wincing when he lifted heavy boards for the treehouse. Once, she saw him staring at the river for so long she thought he might dive in just to escape something.
When she asked, he just smiled too fast. “I’m fine, Mae. Seriously.”
And Mae—afraid of pushing him away, afraid of what the answer might be—let it go.
In August, Mae’s mom started talking about moving again.
“I might have a better job offer,” she said one evening, her voice too bright, folding laundry in the cramped living room. “A couple towns over. Bigger school district, better pay.”
Mae’s heart clenched, but she nodded.
She knew better than to argue.
You couldn’t make people stay.
Not parents. Not promises. Maybe not even best friends.
The last day Mae and Leo spent together that summer was unremarkable.
They lay on the old bridge, side by side, tossing pebbles into the river and naming the shapes they made in the ripples.
“A jellyfish,” Leo guessed.
“Wrong. Definitely a crown,” Mae countered.
“Whatever. My eyes are better.”
“You’re delusional.”
He laughed—really laughed—and for a second, the weight between them lifted.
But when he stood to leave, something in his face shifted.
“Mae…” he started.
She waited.
But he just shook his head. “Never mind. See you tomorrow.”
She didn’t see him tomorrow.
Or the day after.
Or the day after that.
At first, she figured he was busy. Maybe grounded. Maybe building something elaborate and stupid to surprise her.
After a week, worry gnawed at her stomach like a persistent ache.
She biked past his house. The blue one across from the bakery. It looked the same, but no music played from the windows. No bike leaned against the porch.
She knocked once. Twice.
No answer.
Mrs. Jacobs from the flower shop passed by and said, “They left in a hurry, I heard. Family stuff. His grandma’s real sick, I think.”
Left.
The word echoed in her skull like a dropped stone.
Left. Left. Left.
She waited anyway.
She sat by the bridge for hours some evenings, sketchbook open, pretending maybe he would show up late, breathless and apologizing.
But summer ended.
School started.
The leaves changed.
And Leo did not come back.
Mae withdrew.
At school, she floated through classes like a ghost. Teachers commented on her “lack of participation.” Old classmates—barely acquaintances, really—gave her wide, uncertain smiles she couldn’t return.
The Paper Kingdom collapsed without him. She visited it once after he left, but the roof had caved in from an early storm. The wish jar was shattered, paper scraps molding in the dirt.
She didn’t rebuild it.
Some things weren’t meant to be patched back together.
Winter came hard that year, all brittle air and gray mornings.
Mae picked up a part-time job at the library shelving books after school. She liked the quiet. She liked how stories stayed where you left them, unlike people.
Every once in a while, she’d reach into her backpack and find a paper heart she’d forgotten about, tucked into a book or a pocket.
She never threw them away.
Instead, she kept a shoebox tucked under her bed—the original one Leo had given her—and added every stray heart she found.
A small rebellion against forgetting.
The year ground on, slow and heavy.
Mae turned sixteen in March.
No rain this time. Just a thin, cold sunlight that barely touched the town.
Her mom bought a cake from the bakery. A few girls from school sang awkwardly. Mae smiled when she was supposed to. She even blew out the candles.
But she didn’t make a wish.
She didn’t trust wishes anymore.
And then—one Saturday in April—Leo’s name lit up her phone.
For a second, Mae thought she was dreaming.
LEO CALLING
She stared at it, heart hammering against her ribs.
She almost didn’t answer.
Almost.
But she did.
“Hello?” Her voice cracked.
“Hey, Mae.”
His voice was lower. Rougher. Older somehow.
She clutched the phone so tightly it hurt. “Where are you?”
“A couple towns over,” he said. “With my aunt. Things got…complicated.”
Silence bloomed between them.
“I’m sorry,” he said, voice cracking too.
“You disappeared,” Mae whispered.
“I know.”
She wanted to scream. She wanted to sob. She wanted to punch him and hug him and tell him everything he had missed—the broken Paper Kingdom, the lonely bridge, the way Willow Creek felt smaller without him.
But all she said was, “I missed you.”
“I missed you, too,” he said. “Every day.”
They talked for two hours.
Not about everything. Not yet.
But enough.
Leo told her about his grandma getting sick, about his parents disappearing deeper into their own brokenness, about how sometimes he wanted to run until he couldn’t remember where he came from.
Mae told him about her mom’s new job, about the books she shelved, about how quiet the bridge was without him.
They promised to write.
And for a little while, they did.
Letters, not texts. Real, messy, ink-stained letters, folded into sloppy envelopes covered in doodles.
They wrote about nothing and everything.
About the river and the stars and the dumb jokes only they would laugh at.
But life has a way of pulling even the strongest threads loose.
The letters slowed.
Then stopped.
And Mae learned something else that year:
Sometimes, the people who know your heart best are the ones the world steals away first.
Still, she kept the shoebox.
She kept every letter.
Every paper heart.
Every piece of the bridge they built together.
Because some things, once written, can’t be erased.
Even by time.
Even by silence.
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