Chapter 1

Jean-François clasped the delicate parchment in trembling hands, his eyes tracing the elegant curves of ink that had once been so familiar—her hand, her words. He read it again, though the lines had seared themselves into his mind.

"Jean, my heart aches to write this. You must understand I could no longer wait for dreams to bloom in a barren garden. I have found stability, something I fear you cannot give. You are gifted, but gifts do not fill cupboards nor stoke hearths. Forgive me, please. I will always love what we had."

Nine years unraveled in the space of a few sentences. Nine years of whispered dreams by candlelight, of shared bread and shared laughter when there was little else. Nine years of promises made beneath moonlit skies, of hands clasped tightly even when storms raged both within and without.

And now—gone.

Jean-François folded the letter with a reverence that belied the violence in his chest and placed it on the nightstand. He collapsed onto the narrow cot in his cramped cabin, the room lurching with the rhythm of the ocean beneath. The walls closed in, a suffocating cocoon of wood and despair. The cabin was barely large enough to contain him: the single bed with a threadbare blanket, a nightstand cluttered with books he’d intended to read on the voyage—Balzac, Hugo, Verne—all untouched. A tiny desk crouched in the corner, littered with half-written pages of prose that now seemed so pitifully hollow.

The sound of the ship’s machinery hummed beneath the chatter of nobles above deck. Their laughter carried through the floorboards, mingling with the faint strains of violin music drifting from the grand ballroom. He could almost see them, champagne glasses in hand, oblivious to the man below drowning in a different sea entirely.

He lay back, staring at the ceiling, his mind a relentless storm. He saw her face in flashes: the way she laughed when she spun too quickly in her favorite blue dress; the way she smelled of lavender in the spring; the way she had whispered, "I believe in you," when he had shown her his first story.

And then, unbidden, came the image of another man—faceless but whole, complete in ways Jean-François was not. This man had likely taken her to lavish dinners in Paris, not dingy cafés where Jean-François spent the last of their coins on black coffee to fuel his writing. This man had given her the stability she craved, the security Jean-François had always promised but never delivered.

The thought of her with him, of her smile turned toward another, pierced deeper than the Atlantic winds slicing through the ship’s rigging. His heart constricted, a physical ache that made his breath falter. He pressed a hand to his chest, as though he could hold the pieces together.

His eyes burned, but no tears came. He had cried on the dock when he had first boarded the ship, though no one noticed the forlorn writer among the sea of immigrants and dreamers. Now, there was only emptiness, as though her departure had carved out something essential within him.

The ship rocked, and he closed his eyes, letting the motion cradle him. For a fleeting moment, he imagined the cabin was their tiny Paris apartment, the one where they had spent their first year together. He remembered the draft that slipped in under the door in winter, how they had huddled together for warmth, laughing as they built makeshift barricades with blankets. He remembered the night she had surprised him with a cake for his birthday, its lopsided shape a testament to her lack of skill in the kitchen but also her boundless love.

He reached out as though he could touch those memories, but they dissolved like smoke between his fingers.

Outside, the nobles laughed. Inside, the ship’s groans and creaks seemed to echo his breaking heart.

Jean-François rolled onto his side, the letter still haunting the edge of his vision. He closed his eyes, willing sleep to take him, to deliver him from the torment of his thoughts. Slowly, the rocking of the ship dulled the sharp edges of his pain, and he drifted into a fitful slumber.

But even in dreams, she was there—her face, her voice, her laugh. And always, always, the shadow of the man she had chosen instead.

The ship sailed onward through the night, its course set for a land of new beginnings. But for Jean-François, the weight of the past remained, an anchor dragging him into the depths.