beach (7)

Like the sand was listening. The ocean murmured in the distance, waves folding over themselves in slow applause. “I went to therapy,” Jamie offered after a long silence. “Me too,” Lena said, brushing sand off her jeans.

Jamie smiled again, but it was sadder this time, quieter. “We really messed things up, huh?” “We were twenty-two and broken,” she replied. “It was never going to be clean.”

They both laughed, not bitterly, but like people who’d survived something. A seagull cried overhead. The wind shifted. They sat there, side by side, saying nothing more, but meaning everything they didn’t say.