As She Was

The booth groaned beneath him as Jonah shifted, the haze of his sleep still clinging to him, as if he hadn’t just woken from rest but something deeper. Something colder. Then he saw her. Sat at the bar with her back to him. Her dress, pale blue, soft as river mist, draped from her shoulders like it remembered another time. A ribbon, loose and languid, traced the line of her dark hair, tied without care—like she hadn’t needed a mirror, like it belonged to no one else.

Jonah couldn’t blink.

He didn’t need to see her face, just the shape of her. How her spine curved gracefully toward the bottom, the way one heel tapped idly against the rung of the barstool. It hit him all at once. All of it. Every detail. Every day. Every night they had spent together. It wasn’t just a memory. It was a life. Laughter in the dark. Fingers laced in the grass. Firelight on her cheekbones. The sound of her voice saying his name like it meant everything. He rose slowly, every part of him trembling. It couldn’t be. His feet moved almost without his consent—because even if this was a dream, a trick, or a ghost, he had to see her face again.

She turned, unhurried, like she already knew he was there. Her eyes met his. That smile bloomed across her face—the one that never needed words. Her lips curled at the corners, the way they always did, like she’d remembered something beautiful. Her skin caught the gold of the morning light. She hadn’t aged a day. She was exactly as she was all those years ago. Preserved by the town, as if to punish him. But in that moment, he didn’t care. Couldn’t. The sight of her cracked something in him wide open. And from it came everything he had fought to forget. Every feeling. Every promise. And in her eyes, he found the last missing piece. Her name rose in him like breath after drowning.

“Ellie.” He whispered, a tear in his eye.

She smiled wider, as if she had been waiting all this time for him to remember.

“You came.” Her voice carried the softness of a lullaby, so slight it barely stirred the air. It was spoken like a question but laced with something quieter—hope.

Jonah eased down beside her, slow and reverend, like how a man might sit next to a ghost. His eyes searched her face, afraid even to blink, in case she would vanish if he did.

Ellie slid over a glass of whiskey like it was the most normal thing in the world. “I saved you a drink. It’s still whiskey, right? Or...” She glanced at him, teasing gently. “Have you gone soft on me?” She smiled then, that familiar, cautious smile; the one that curled a little slower on the right.

“How?... How are you here?” Jonah barely spoke, his throat tightening.

“Same as you, I imagine?” She tilted her head—that same puzzled twitch of the eyebrow she did when something didn’t sit right.

Jonah stared, waiting for the mask to crack, for something unnatural to reveal itself. But she only looked back, steady and warm.

“You look just the same.” His gaze drifted over her, slow, like he was taking in a work of art. The way her arm rested on the bar, easy and exposed, left her heart open, unguarded. The way her fingers curled slightly at her knee, like they did when she was deep in thought. Every soft line. Every curve. Every gesture. Exactly how it had always been. Not a hair out of place.

Ellie let out a soft laugh, tipping her head toward him. “Is that your idea of a compliment, Jonah?”

There it was—that twinkle in her eye. The spark that had always undone him. As if she wasn’t just the centre of the world. She was the whole damn universe, wrapped in lace and sky blue.

“You’re as beautiful as the day we met.” Jonah smiled, but there was sorrow in his eyes. “I just... thought I lost you.”

“Lost me?” she said, comically. “I’ve been right here the whole time.”

Jonah watched as Ellie’s lips met the rim of her glass, gentle and effortless—like how they used to meet his. How they used to draw him in like a tide he could never resist.

“You’re not upset?” he asked, after a pause.

She frowned. “Should I be?”

“You don’t remember.” His gaze dropped, the truth settling in. She was just a mirage. A piece of his mind his past had summoned like a ghost.

Ellie blinked. “Remember what?”

His head bowed. He couldn’t bear to meet her eyes. The silence stretched between them like a taut wire, ready to snap. “I don’t know where to begin,” he whispered. The tears came without shame now, carving warm tracks down his face. “Every day without you... it’s a kind of hell no man should survive.” His voice trembled with years of grief. “I see you in the clouds. In every window. I hear your voice in the wind—it calls me by name. If I still dreamed, they’d be of you. Of your touch. Your laugh. And if I prayed, I’d pray for you. To see you just once more.”

He reached for her knee, and when his hand closed over it, the warmth engulfed him. It came to him naturally, like the time between them didn’t exist at all.

“I told myself I left to protect you.” He dragged in a breath like it hurt to do so. “That if I ran, you’d be spared from what was coming for me. That maybe you’d find peace.” He shook his head slowly, like he couldn’t believe his own cowardice even now. “But the truth is... I was scared. I didn’t know how to carry you and the guilt at the same time. I didn’t know how to be the man you deserved.” His fingers curled tighter against her, like she’d slip away if he let go.

He looked up at last. His eyes—red and burning—met hers. “I curse the day I left you. And I curse the man I was for letting you go.” He paused, breathing in the quiet between them, letting the gravity of everything he’d carried pull him to the edge. “I would give anything to come back.” He spoke lower now. “And if this loop is what brought me to hold you again... then I’d walk through it a thousand times more.”

Ellie’s hand slid onto his like it had never left. There was no judgement there, no scorn. Jonah’s breath hitched under the weight of it. He wanted to look away, but she wouldn’t let him. Her gaze held his like an anchor—gentle, but firm. Pulling him back from wherever he’d drifted.

“Meet me in the woods where my heart glows, when the moonlight hums and the wind slows.” She spoke as if reciting something long-held, long-hidden.

Jonah's brow creased. “What?”

She only smiled. “Meet me there. I’ll be waiting.”

Ellie rose from the stool, and Jonah’s hand slipped from hers like a final note fading from a song. She didn’t speak. Didn’t look back. She simply turned, graceful and quiet, and began to walk, her steps soundless against the worn saloon floor, like she was gliding on ice instead of walking on wood.

“Wait.” Jonah breathed, already rising, already reaching for the warmth she’d left behind. It hugged his skin like damp cloth. He rushed after her, heart pounding, pushing through the saloon doors into the light of an old day. But outside, only silence.

The street was empty, bathed in pale gold. Dust stirred lazily in the breeze. The town was still, as if holding its breath. No sign of her. Just the endless stretch of lonesome pines swaying in the distance.

She was gone.

Jonah raced down the saloon steps, his eyes frantic, searching up and down for one more glimpse; one flutter of her dress, one blow of her hair.

But there was nothing.

His throat tightened. The tears came again, unbidden, slipping down his cheeks in heavy silence. Not the sharp sobs of grief, but something deeper. Older. A sorrow that had waited patiently for release. He covered his mouth with a trembling hand, but it couldn’t hold back the sound of what he felt. Love. Loss. Remorse.