It rained for six days straight.

The kind of rain that soaked through coats and clung to your skin. But Ivy still showed up. Same train. Same seat. Same journal. The bandage on her wrist was gone now, replaced by a faint, purplish scar.

James stopped pretending to do anything else on the train. He didn’t read, didn’t scroll through his phone. He just sat across from her, talking about everything and nothing.

“What’s your favorite sound?” she asked one morning, tapping her pen on the page.

James blinked. “What?”

“Sound. Pick one.”

He thought about it, then said, “The clicking noise when a bike coasts downhill.”

She smiled, scribbled something in her notebook. “That’s a good one.”

“What about you?”

She paused. “The sound of someone coming home.”

He didn’t ask who. He figured it mattered more that she said it than what it meant.

Sometimes she’d disappear into silence, eyes heavy, body curled inwards like she was bracing for something. James learned not to ask when she got quiet like that. Instead, he’d talk about the way his sister cried at cheesy rom-coms or how he once got locked in a public restroom for two hours. Ivy would laugh again, soft and slow.

“You ever write about me in there?” he asked one morning, nudging her journal.

She looked down at it, then at him.

“I write about everything I want to remember,” she said.

Then she reached into her coat, pulled out a folded piece of paper, and handed it to him without saying a word.

James opened it after she left. Just a few lines, hand-written in her messy, looping print:

Some mornings, I remember how to breathe because he smiles first.

Some mornings, I don’t.

But he still does.

He read it again and again. Folded it up and kept it in his wallet.

And the next morning, he waited for her.

Again.