The Search for Lily Myers ✓

21 | Cloud Nine

Grief comes and goes in waves, but they'd finally receded long enough for Amelia to breathe.

She fell asleep after her date feeling secure and woke up the next morning feeling refreshed. She'd grown accustomed to the nights of tossing and turning, the anxious thoughts that sometimes kept her awake well into the early morning, that she'd almost forgotten what an actual good night's rest felt like. She didn't sleep so poorly every night, but she did on most, and yet the only thing that'd been on her mind as she drifted off to sleep last night was Henry.

She was smiling into her pillow as soon as she started to regain consciousness, remembering the soft pressure of his lips on her skin when he'd kissed her goodnight. She couldn't keep this all inside—she needed to tell someone.

As if Natasha subconsciously knew this somehow, there was a text from her waiting on Amelia's phone.

would you be up for coming with me to the farmer's market today? I was gonna get more plants

She already had quite the collection of houseplants, but unlike Amelia, she was capable of keeping all of them alive. And Amelia still enjoyed wandering around the garden center and the rest of the market even if she possessed whatever the opposite of a green thumb was.

So they determined that they'd meet there in an hour, which gave her just enough time to get ready and eat breakfast without being rushed. She allowed herself to stay curled up in her blankets for a few minutes longer, blissfully replaying last night in her head before eventually making herself slouch out of bed.

It was a nice start to her morning to see herself in the bathroom mirror looking a little less tired of existence than she had the day before, which had been a little less than the day before that. It wasn't like she was going back to "normal," as if she could simply revert to a previous version of herself—like she'd told Henry, the girl she'd been a year ago was long gone now. She was more hardened now, more calloused, but she also liked to think that she was at least a little bit wiser. She could try to be grateful for the good, the growth, that had come out of her relationship with Colton even if it could never outweigh the bad.

Now that it was mid-October, the weather was finally reaching a point of being consistently mild, so she grabbed a cardigan to throw on as she walked out the door. Outside, she was greeted by the predictably cool-but-not-cold temperature.

Fall always had a way of reminding her of her mixed emotions towards her hometown, how much she loved it and hated it all at once. It irked her every year without fail that the leaves changed colors so late, that it wasn't unheard of for Halloween to still feel like summertime. In another couple of months, she'd be wishing for snow while simultaneously being so grateful that she wasn't drowning in feet of it, that she wasn't scraping it off of her car every single morning.

The duality of her relationship to the place in a broader sense wasn't all that different. Nashville was her home; it was always going to be the place where she'd been born and raised even if she tried to disown it. She loathed the bad traffic, the depressingly stereotypical abundance of country music, the humidity so bad in the summer that she felt like she needed gills to breathe. But it was also a place for the arts to flourish in a region of the country that otherwise didn't allot much value to them, where people of all beliefs and backgrounds could come together and feel safer than they did in the surrounding areas. She could spend a day wandering through museums, she could go to a rock concert one night and an opera the next. She could lounge outside in the middle of February and let the warm sun drip down on her like honey.

Nat was already waiting for her at the farmer's market—her bright red hair made her easy to spot in the parking lot. Amelia pulled her car into the closest available space and attempted to wipe the stupid grin off of her face before she hurried over to meet her friend.