The morning after the lighthouse, the apartment felt like an object rearranged. The sofa was where it always had been, the drafting table still held its models, but everything bore a faint patina of unreality as if someone had gone through the place and shifted a few familiar paintings a degree out of true. Mara woke with the taste of salt and adrenaline still in her mouth, the montage from the fall replaying in quick stabs behind her eyes. She lay very still, measuring the distance between the bed and the window and thinking about seams.
The watch she had left on the counter sat like a small, patient animal, and when she picked it up the brass was warm from the kitchen where Leo had sat with his own tea into the small hours. He had left a note on the table—sensible, practical—asking her to call if she needed anything and adding, between practicality and care, I made sure your car's windshield wipers still worked. Come by the shop tomorrow if you want to see someone who knows how to fix things that sometimes break in hearts and in wood.
Mara smiled at that and then frowned at herself for smiling. She dressed with the careful movements of someone who measured the world in tasks to avoid being swallowed by it. The watch rested against her palm. She wanted to know what it could do. The seam had opened; the lighthouse had shown rooms she had not walked into. Now that she'd seen the door, the question was whether she could open it on purpose, whether the watch had more than one way of answering.
She made a small experiment. She laid out three objects on the kitchen table: Nolan's old lighter (black and dented), the engagement ribbon Leo had once given her when they'd visited a craft fair (a ridiculous memory, but precise), and a stamped postcard of Amsterdam that had come in an envelope three years ago from an architecture conference she'd considered attending. She put her hand on each in turn, holding with the specific, patient pressure she reserved for delicate models. She'd practiced this before with building materials—feeling for the grain, testing for warps. This was different. These objects felt like keys tonight.
The lighter yielded a flash of light: Nolan's voice calling her from the porch, the smell of tar from his old truck, a summer when nothing felt final. The ribbon produced an image of a younger Mara and Leo who had laughed until they'd cried because of a ridiculous market vendor's commentary about ribbon color. There was a thin, silly tenderness in that glimpse that felt like a childish bruise—hurtful but oddly comforting. The postcard was a snap of a different life: a narrow canal, wet bricks, a version of Mara in a long coat with hair cropped short, laughing at something a colleague had said in broken English.
Each glimpse came like a slide: bright, intense, then gone. It left an echo at the edges of her perception, a residue of possibility. She closed her eyes and held her hands on the table and let out a breath she had been holding somewhere behind her sternum.
June had said the lighthouse "amply magnifies what's already loose in you." After the fall, it seemed the watch served as a dial. In the light of the small kitchen she tried to formalize rules—if you're an architect, you make rules when everything else feels unsure.
Rule one: The visions — threads — were triggered by objects and people tied to significant emotional stakes. They did not appear at all for mundane things or shallow desires; they anchored to what mattered deep enough to change the tilt of your life.
Rule two: The threads were vivid but not interactive. Mara could see, smell, and sometimes feel as if she were present in another life, but she could not alter that scene from the outside. She realized this when she tried to shout a warning into a vision of Nolan; the sound caught in her chest like a fish on a line and dissolved before it got there.
Rule three: The glimpses were finite—short in duration and variable. Sometimes she had one flash that lasted a breath; once, during the fall, she'd had a near-lifetime's worth. The lighthouse seam had been larger that night and had allowed a longer corridor. That was dangerous because longer exposures blurred the edges between lived life and possibility.
Rule four: The seams were not selfish things; they had consequences. June's warning—seams remember—came into focus when Mara noticed something odd that afternoon. A neighbor she'd known casually, Mrs. Pritchard, stopped Mara on the sidewalk and greeted her by name, then asked, very softly, whether Mara had ever considered running a small gallery in town. Mara blinked. This was not an idea she had ever entertained. The notion felt like residue from an image she had seen where she ran a small community space. She hadn't told anyone about that vision. How had it become a suggestion in Mrs. Pritchard's mind? The thought made her put the watch back in the drawer as if it were an instrument that left fingerprints.
June said, when Mara went to the shop, that echoes happened. "You pry at a wall and dust settles in other rooms," she told her. "When you look where a seam is, you leave a part of yourself there like a coin in a wishing well. People can pull at it without knowing. That's the trouble. You can't take the world's attention without it looking back."
Mara listened and wanted to argue that she would be careful, that she meant only to learn, to understand. Words felt thin compared to the urge that sat like an animal in her chest, pacing. It wanted Nolan. It wanted the life where a careless decision had not ended him. June's hands, caked now with grease from some other repair, rested on the counter between them.
"Do you regret opening it?" June asked, head tipped in a way that asked for the truest answer.
"Yes," Mara said immediately. "And no. I don't know."
June nodded, the way of someone who had watched a thousand decisions spill into consequences. "Start small," she advised. "See, learn, put it away. Don't let redundancy become a weapon. People who get lost in the seam keep poking at threads until the fabric frays on both sides."
The repair shop was, in the late afternoon, a small world of practical noises—metal clinking, soft radio music, June's measured breathing as she worked. But there were, tucked away between the shelves and jars of screws, people who were not there for washers and bolts. June kept a corner—an alcove with a battered sofa and a bulletin board where men and women with quieter problems left notes. Mara had assumed it was only a place to drop off things for repair. She found, in the back, the seam community June had mentioned.
They gathered deliberately, as if holding a meeting for a sort of modern trade guild. There was a man named Simon—forty, balding, with hands the color of old ink—who'd been to the seam twice and stopped because his wife had found her memory changing in little ways. A college student, Anika, who still smelled faintly of chapter books and too many campus coffees, told Mara about a glimpse of a future where she'd left town and the sense of being forgiven she'd found there. And an older woman, Esther, who'd seen a life where she'd made a different choice about her son and bore both the regret and the odd relief of having had the vision.
They were a motley that fit into the alcove like a collection of found furniture. They spoke in whispers and sometimes in laughter that felt like a secret shared over soda. The rules June printed on a sheet and tacked to the wall were straightforward: Do not coerce. Do not pursue the impossible. If you share a vision, respect the privacy of it. Be aware of echoes.
It felt, to Mara, slightly ludicrous and terribly sacred at once. She learned quickly that the community mostly wanted what anyone wanted in grief: company, a map, permission to say aloud the things they were afraid to confess. Simon's voice, when he admitted he'd felt like a ghost in his own life after his second visit, was a low thing that went uncomfortable in the chest. Anika, who had been more brisk and academic about the seam at first, admitted she'd cried during a vision where her mother had forgiven her for leaving home. The small confessions made the room feel like a confessional and like a book club at the same time.
Leo came that evening without being asked. He had that slightly out-of-practice nervousness about him that belonged far more to young lovelorn men than to someone who had once owned a workshop. He carried a bag with two mugs and a thermos. His hair was damp from the rain that had started up again. When he saw Mara in the alcove he looked at her with a kind of boyish relief that belied their adult history.
"You looked like you needed company," he said, setting down the thermos like it was a small peace offering.
Mara answered with a smile that felt like it had been ironed for cloth. "I did. Thank you."
They sat next to each other on the sagging sofa, shoulders almost touching. It was an arrangement that felt like sitting in someone else's living room again and remembering how to be present without analyzing everything to the socket. The seam community talked among themselves—half advice, half gossip. June ran her hand along the watch and told a new story about an old radio she'd once coaxed into broadcasting a long-scrubbed station. People laughed. The room held a softness.
At some point Leo's hand found Mara's on the sofa. His fingers were cool, callused from woodwork, and they curled gently around hers like a practiced knot. The contact was tiny and made Mara's breath hitch with a sensation she could only label as recognizably adolescent—sudden, bright, slightly ridiculous. There was a nervousness to Leo that felt sweet: the small adjustments of a man trying on courage again.
"I'm sorry," he said suddenly. "For—everything. For when I left. For not being better when Nolan—" He did not finish, and the omission made space for the thing they both knew and feared.
"It wasn't all on you," she said. The words felt like laying a beam. Honest, structural, not ornamental. "We both— we were small then. Or tired. Maybe both."
He nodded. His thumb brushed the inside of her hand in a circle that made something buzz a little under her ribs. A teen movie would have cut the world into a slow-motion hover here and played a soft guitar. Mara smiled at the absurd image and then, unexpectedly, felt a lassitude at the thought that their lives had been smaller things organized badly by that time.
They talked, awkward and true. Leo asked about the edges of her visions—was Nolan anything like the living man? Mara tried to describe the ache of seeing him alive, the small domestic argument over paint color, the laugh that pinned itself like a real thing inside her chest. Leo listened without interrupting, his face an open plan she could read.
"Do you think you can bring him back?" he asked finally, the sentence a thin wire stretched between them. His voice quavered as if his own teenage self had turned up to ask the obvious impossible thing.
Mara looked at him and saw, as if under a glass, the shape of who they had been: two people who'd learned to hold their breaths when the world shifted and who'd preferred the certainty of plans to the chaos of emotion. The answer was a bitter, clear no and a yes that meant something else.
"I don't think I can change what happened," she said. "But I can see what might have been. And that matters. Not the same as a life, not the same as a person, but it's a way to understand my options. It's a way to—" She fumbled for the word. "To study the architecture of regret."
Leo laughed then, softly. "You made grief sound like drafting."
She elbowed him lightly. "You make everything sound like woodworking, Leo."
They both smiled. The sofa creaked; the alcove hummed with other people's conversations. For a small, sparkling second, Mara allowed herself to be nineteen again, sitting on a spray-painted bench with a stupid band on the radio and the future ahead like a promise. Her cheeks warmed, a childhood heat that had nothing to do with the seam and everything to do with an old safety.
Leo's hand tightened, then relaxed. He leaned in and brushed his forehead against hers in a gesture more tender than any kiss, and Mara found the movement restored a dizzying, warm orientation. It had the clumsy bravery of first loves rather than the polished certainty of adult reconciliations. Her heart made a small, reckless hop.
"Promise me one thing," he said, voice soft.
"What?"
"Don't go poking seams without telling me." His grin was half-joking, half-plea.
Mara laughed out loud, the sound bright and young. "That's not a very architecture-like clause."
"You always did like clauses," he teased. "Fine. Tell me."
They made a small pact there on the sofa, no paperwork, only two people re-learning how to be in the same plan. It felt teen-romantic and ridiculous and entirely necessary. It was a tenderness the world had been stingy about lately, and Mara accepted it like a warm scarf.
Afterward, when the group drifted and the rain tapered off, Mara and Leo walked part of the way home together under a shared umbrella, shoulders brushing as they leaned into the city lights. The town smelled of wet stone and cinnamon from the bakery. They spoke of nothing much—an old movie, a ridiculous landlord—and touched on what they might do if the seam never opened again: get a dog, paint the spare room a color that was not beige, take a trip that required passports.
The romance in those moments was small and safe, like a hand on the small of the back and a bright, idiot-safe hope. There were no grand proclamations, no promises to remake the past into a different story. It was a remaking of the present into something that did not feel like a ledger. It felt young because it was simple: kind gestures, shared jokes, and the admit-and-forgive rhythm that belongs often to adolescence and sometimes, with luck, to mature tenderness.
When they reached Mara's doorstep she pressed the watch against her palm and felt its pulse—both more regular and more foreign than it had been. The seam had taught her rules; the rules sat heavy and useful with June's shop and the alcove and the small community she'd found there. She said goodnight to Leo, who leaned in for another forehead touch—this time not a rehearsal but a real one—and then turned inside, the watch warm against her chest.
Alone in the apartment, with the models like small, patient cities on the drafting table, Mara wrote Rule five in a little notebook she always kept for work and, now, for other things: Keep an anchor. She drew a small, childish heart next to it and then crossed the heart with a neat, architect's line to mark it made and measured. The seam was open; it would open again. She had friends and a small, awkward romance that felt like a tether. June had given her guidance. The community had offered caution.
She folded the little notebook closed and set the watch on top, a promise and a warning in brass. The night outside was the slow turning of tide; inside, she felt, for the first time since the funeral, not whole but braced.