At first, she just stood there, trembling. Then her right foot moved. Then her left. A slow, clumsy sway. The rain drummed a wild rhythm on the hood of the coat— tap, tap, tap-tap-tap —and she began to turn.

On a sudden impulse, she slipped on his old, oversized raincoat—still smelling faintly of his pine soap—and stepped outside.

“Some people walk in the rain. Others just get wet. And a few, after enough storms, learn to dance again.”

She stopped spinning and looked up, breathless, smiling for the first time in years. The quote from her mirror came back, but this time with a new ending she wrote herself:

It started as a whisper, then grew into a roar against her windowpane. The old oak tree in the courtyard swayed, and the gutters sang a gurgling song. Elara pressed her palm to the cool glass. Leo had loved the rain. “Don’t just get wet,” he used to laugh, pulling her outside. “Feel it.”

She wasn’t dancing gracefully. She was dancing brokenly. Her arms wrapped around herself as if Leo were still there. She spun until her hair was plastered to her cheeks and her tears mixed so completely with the raindrops that she could no longer tell them apart.