Chapter 1: The Girl in the Delivery Uniform
Chapter 1: The Girl in the Delivery Uniform
"I thought you were dead."
The words left Ethan's mouth before he could stop them.
The engagement party froze.
Crystal glasses hovered halfway to lips. Conversations died. Even the pianist near the grand staircase missed a note.
Across the room, the woman in the delivery uniform stood motionless.
Lily Harper.
Her hands tightened around the insulated catering bag she had been carrying.
For a moment, neither of them breathed.
Twenty years disappeared.
The ballroom vanished.
All Ethan could see was a hospital room painted with cartoon clouds and a little girl with no hair folding paper cranes beside him.
"Lily?" he whispered.
Tears instantly filled her eyes.
Nobody had called her name like that in years.
Not the soft way he used to.
Not like someone who remembered.
His fiancée, Vanessa, stepped forward.
"Ethan?"
But he barely heard her.
Lily stared at the small white scar on his finger.
The scar she had accidentally caused when they were ten years old while cutting colored paper for their cranes.
He still had it.
And suddenly she knew.
He remembered too.
"Ethan," she said quietly.
The room erupted into confused whispers.
Vanessa looked from one face to the other.
"What is happening?"
Neither answered immediately.
Because twenty years earlier, they had made a promise.
A childish promise.
The kind only children facing impossible things would make.
When Ethan left the hospital after recovering from a severe heart condition, Lily was supposed to follow a few months later after completing leukemia treatment.
They promised to meet again.
Every year on the same date.
At the hospital garden.
Then Lily disappeared.
The nurses told Ethan she had passed away.
His parents confirmed it.
And for twenty years, he carried that grief.
May you like
Now she stood in front of him.
Alive.
