Part 5: “The Space Between Holding On and Letting Be”
The scar wouldn’t leave my mind.
Not the one on Miles’s leg—that one had faded into his fur, just another mark in a story I could only read in pieces.
I mean the invisible kind.
The kind that presses behind your ribs when everything is quiet. When you’re in the checkout line buying dog biscuits you never used to buy. When you pass couples in café windows and feel nothing and everything at once. When someone asks, “Are you seeing anyone?” and you smile like it’s a neutral question, not a wound.
The kind that doesn’t bleed anymore, but still burns when the weather shifts.
It’s been six Sundays now.
Six weeks since Miles first limped into my life like a question I wasn’t ready to answer.
And now?
Now he knows how to nudge the back door open with his nose when I forget to latch it. He sleeps on the far edge of the bed, barely touching, like he respects the fact that I still need space. He waits for me by the bathroom door every morning, sighs when I forget to refill his water bowl, and barks—once, sharp—whenever the mail truck comes by.
The barking startled me at first. It was the only sound he made in those early weeks.
But now it feels like music.
Not loud. Not constant. Just… real.
Like him.
Like us.
People ask if he’s mine.
I say, “Sort of.”
Or, “We’re figuring it out.”
Or sometimes nothing, because honestly, I don’t know if either of us belongs to anything anymore.
But I do know this: I bring two coffees to the café now.
One for me.
One for the ghost of someone else’s memory.
And Miles—he lies under the table, head on his paws, eyes closed, not asleep but resting in a way I envy.
Like he’s finally allowed to stop searching.
David and I talk sometimes.
He calls once a week to “check in.” Always with a weather update. Always with a story about Nadine—her garden, her laugh, the way she used to hum while washing dishes.
Sometimes I cry after we hang up.
Not because I’m sad.
Because there’s something deeply beautiful about someone still choosing to speak of love in the present tense.
“She used to say grief isn’t a wound,” he told me last week. “It’s a room. You don’t heal from it. You just learn how to live in it with the lights on.”
I wrote that down.
I keep it taped to the fridge now.
Tuesday evening, I noticed Miles licking his leg.
The scar again.
It hadn’t bothered him for weeks. But now he was gnawing at it, gently but obsessively.
“Hey,” I whispered, kneeling beside him. “We’re not going backward, okay?”
He looked up, lip twitching like he wanted to speak but couldn’t.
I knew the feeling.
I examined the spot—it wasn’t infected, just tender.
Like maybe something old was flaring up again.
I reached for the vet referral David had once texted me and booked the first open appointment.
It felt strange. Like crossing some new line.
Like responsibility.
The vet’s office smelled like antiseptic and fear.
Miles trembled on the steel table—not panicked, just visibly unhappy. I held his collar, whispering nonsense words like I was trying to soothe myself more than him.
The vet, Dr. Yoon, was kind. Young. Gentle.
“This leg’s healed from an old fracture,” she said, tracing the outline of the scar. “Could’ve been a car accident. Could’ve been abuse. Could’ve been anything.”
“Do you think he remembers?”
She looked at me. “Dogs don’t forget. They just don’t explain.”
She paused. “He’s okay now. A little arthritis, but nothing you can’t manage.”
I nodded, but the question stayed with me.
What do you do with pain that never asks for attention—just limps quietly beside you?
That night, I sat on the floor with Miles, my back against the wall.
I read aloud from my old journal—the one I stopped writing in after James left. Pages filled with quotes I underlined twice, as if more ink made them truer.
Miles stayed curled against me.
I flipped to the page I’d scribbled after our breakup. I hadn’t touched it in two years. It just said:
“Maybe love isn’t the person who shows up. Maybe it’s who stays when nothing makes sense anymore.”
I looked down at him.
He wasn’t looking at me.
But he didn’t need to.
On Sunday, we skipped the café.
Not out of sadness.
Just because.
We walked the greenway trail instead. Past the water, over the bridge. Miles sniffed every corner like it was a poem he was slowly decoding.
We stopped at a clearing and sat in the grass. I laid back. He curled beside me, head resting on my thigh.
And for the first time, I thought: Maybe healing doesn’t come in answers. Maybe it comes in pauses.
In the quiet spaces where no one asks you to be whole.
Back home, I opened the top drawer of my dresser.
The ring box was still there.
I hadn’t looked at it in months.
I opened it now.
Not out of hope.
Out of honesty.
The ring still sparkled, delicate and small. A rose gold band. A single imperfect diamond. James said it reminded him of me—how I liked things slightly off-center.
I held it in my palm for a long time.
Then I slid it into the same drawer where I keep Miles’s red tag.
Not as a symbol of endings.
But of what we carry forward.
Both things that once meant belonging.
Both things I no longer need to wear to remember.
Later, Miles stood at the door, tail gently wagging.
“Want to go?” I asked.
He barked once.
And we stepped outside.
Not searching.
Not waiting.
Just walking toward whatever light would find us next.
Part 6: “The Visitor and the Voice”
There’s a kind of peace that makes you nervous.
Like you’re waiting for the rug to be pulled out.
Like you’ve finally sat down to rest and realized how long your legs have been shaking.
That’s how it felt the morning he showed up.
James.
It was a Tuesday.
I was standing in line at Sun & Steam Café, holding my wallet in one hand and a leash in the other. Miles was beside me, calm as ever, his tail sweeping the floor in that slow, steady rhythm I’d come to rely on.
Then I heard it—his voice.
Behind me.
Soft. Familiar. Sharper than a memory has any right to be.
“Lila?”
I turned slowly.
There he was.
James Tyler Bennett, in the flesh. Khaki jacket. Slight stubble. Hair too neat, like he’d styled it to look messy. He looked good. That was the worst part.
He hadn’t aged the way heartbreak should make you age.
I didn’t say anything at first.
Just stared at him like I was trying to remember what it felt like to trust him.
He smiled—awkward, boyish.
“I thought that was you.”
Miles stood, ears alert, body stiff. Protective.
I cleared my throat. “Hi.”
James nodded toward Miles. “He yours?”
I glanced down at him. “Sort of.”
It wasn’t a lie.
He looked at me again—really looked—and I hated how fast my heart was pounding. Not because I wanted him back. But because I didn’t know what part of me still needed something from him.
“Can we… talk?” he asked. “Just for a minute?”
I looked at the line ahead of me. At the door. At Miles.
Then I nodded.
Because some ghosts deserve a funeral.
We sat on the bench. The bench.
The one where he proposed. The one where I sat for a year trying to un-feel him.
Now, with Miles at my feet, it felt less like a wound and more like a landmark. Something I could walk past, not fall into.
James held a paper cup between his hands. Black coffee. Always black.
“I didn’t expect to run into you,” he said.
“No one does,” I replied.
He winced.
“I heard you moved back,” he offered. “From a friend.”
“Yeah. Last year.”
“I live about ten blocks that way now,” he said, pointing vaguely west. “Got a teaching job at the college.”
I nodded, unsure what to say to that. Congratulations? Good luck? Why do I care?
He glanced down at Miles.
“What’s his name?”
“Miles.”
Something flickered in his eyes. “That’s a good name.”
I didn’t answer.
Silence stretched.
Then he said it.
“I wanted to say I’m sorry.”
Not the kind of sorry that fixes anything.
The kind people offer too late, after the damage has gone quiet.
“I thought about writing,” he added. “But I didn’t know if that would make it worse.”
“It would’ve,” I said simply.
He nodded.
“I didn’t leave because I didn’t love you.”
I looked at him. “Then why did you?”
He stared at his hands. “Because I thought I wasn’t enough. Because I got scared. Because you looked at me like I held your whole future and I—I couldn’t even hold my own.”
I sat with that. The words I used to beg for.
Now they didn’t land the same.
Because I wasn’t that girl anymore.
I didn’t need to know why he left.
I needed to know why I stayed.
Miles leaned into my leg, grounding me.
I touched his head gently. “This is Miles,” I said again, more to myself than to James. “He belonged to someone who lost everything. And somehow, he found me.”
James nodded. “Seems like he found the right person.”
His voice cracked, just barely.
And for a second, I saw it.
Not regret.
Not love.
Grief.
Not for me, maybe. But for who we were. What we almost had.
I nodded. “I think he did too.”
James stood slowly. “I won’t keep you.”
I stood too.
We didn’t hug.
Didn’t linger.
Just looked at each other the way people do when they’ve finally put something down.
He said, “You look strong.”
I smiled. “I am.”
Then he walked away.
And I let him go.
Not with pain.
With peace.
That night, I told David about it on the phone.
He laughed gently. “Funny how the past shows up just when you stop waiting for it.”
I told him about the bench. The coffee. The apology.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I think so.”
“Then that’s all that matters.”
I looked down at Miles, asleep on the rug with his legs twitching in some dream I’d never get to see.
“I think I finally believe that,” I said.
David sighed. “Grief changes. That’s its only job. Doesn’t matter if it takes months or decades. As long as it changes.”
I looked out the window at the night.
It was quiet. Still.
But inside me?
Something was shifting.
The next morning, I opened a new journal.
The old one still lived in my drawer. Full of heartbreak and questions and half-written beginnings.
But this one—this one was blank.
I wrote one sentence at the top of the page:
“Healing isn’t about who comes back. It’s about who you become when no one does.”
Then I set the pen down.
And reached for the leash.
Miles was already at the door.
Waiting.