Somewhere it never rains, someone is still waiting for the last storm to end.

  The air was too still for a park this close to downtown.

  I’d stepped off the trail near the old arboretum, chasing a line of thought I couldn’t finish, and walked beneath a low arch of iron and jasmine that hadn’t been there before. One second I was in city-gray March, the next—something else entirely.

  The sky here held the color of old watercolor: not quite blue, not quite violet, just soft and endless. The grass beneath my shoes made no sound. Wind stirred nothing.

  A pavilion stood ahead. Wooden, wide-roofed, with curtains that swayed despite the windless air. I moved toward it, boots leaving no trace.

  There was a single figure inside.

  He sat at the edge of a table set for no one else, one leg folded under him, the other hanging loosely over the step. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, arms thin but strong. His hair was light brown, almost golden, and tied back loosely with what looked like a ribbon from someone else’s life.

  He was drawing something. A map, maybe, or a memory.

  When he looked up, his eyes caught on mine as if they’d always known where to land.

  “I wondered when you’d arrive,” he said.

  The words felt meant for someone else—but they didn’t push me away.

  A teacup rested beside his sketchbook. The steam from it curled upward without vanishing. The scent was bergamot, and something fainter—ozone, perhaps, or a breeze that never came.

  I caught sight of a name—mine—written in soft pencil in the margin of the open page. “For Margaret.”

  “Where am I?” I asked.

  His smile was small, sad at the edges. “A place that remembers things people try to forget.”

  I stepped inside, the pavilion cool despite the sun. He gestured to a cushion across from him, and I sat, though my legs felt distant. This had the texture of dream logic, but I was awake in the way that dreams never allow: aware of the tightness in my chest, the ache behind my eyes.

  “You don’t know me,” I said, watching him pour a second cup from a dark ceramic pot. “Do you?”

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  His pause was brief. “No,” he said. “But I knew the person who left your name behind.”

  We drank in silence for a while.

  The tea tasted like rain hitting warm stone. Not sweet, not bitter—just grounding.

  He went back to his sketching. The lines were delicate and uncertain. Not a map after all, but a face. Not mine. Not quite.

  “I think you’ve been here before,” he said quietly. “Not like this. But the shape of your silence matches one I remember.”

  My throat tightened. I didn’t know what I’d lost, but it was starting to whisper at the edges.

  “You speak like someone who’s been alone a long time.”

  He smiled again. “That’s because I’ve been waiting for someone who chose to forget.”

  His name was written on the spine of his journal. Caleb.

  It fit. He looked like someone who carried names carefully.

  I didn’t know him, not really. But I wanted to.

  He set the pencil down.

  “You left behind the rain,” he said.

  “What?”

  “This place—The Pavilion—it collects unfinished weather. Yours was a storm. It stayed after you left.”

  I looked around. Nothing moved. Nothing changed.

  “I don’t remember the storm.”

  “You weren’t supposed to,” he said gently. “But sometimes, when people are ready to know what they’ve tried to outgrow, they return.”

  I touched the teacup’s edge. “And you?”

  “I stayed,” he said. “To listen to what the storm never got to say.”

  A silence followed. Not heavy. Just wide.

  I wanted to reach for him. Not because I knew him, but because I could feel him listening even now—to the person I hadn’t yet spoken into being.

  “Why me?” I asked, but my voice faltered halfway through.

  Caleb leaned forward, resting his hand lightly over mine. His skin was cool, like stone that had forgotten how to hold warmth.

  “Because you left something here,” he said. “And I wanted to see what happened when you came back to claim it.”

  A breeze stirred the curtains then, faint but real.

  I stood, heart caught in my ribs.

  He rose too, slower.

  “This place doesn’t hold forever,” he said. “Only long enough.”

  “For what?”

  “To remember.”

  He stepped toward me. His hand brushed my cheek, the touch impossibly light. I leaned into it without meaning to.

  “Will I forget you?” I asked.

  He didn’t lie.

  “You’ll remember something soft,” he said. “And maybe, in a dream or a sudden stillness, you’ll wonder what name it had.”

  “And if I come back?”

  “I’ll still be here. Or maybe I won’t. But the weather will wait.”

  The sky flickered—softly, like breath pulling away.

  The air returned to itself.

  I blinked and stood at the edge of the city park, the trail muddy beneath my boots. Rain had started again, gently. A storm just past its fury.

  In my pocket: a scrap of paper. Unfamiliar pencil. A name.

  Caleb.

  Beneath it, in handwriting I now knew was mine:

  “Tell him it’s okay now. The sky remembered.”