The letter arrived on a Tuesday, which Nora had always considered an unlucky day.

She'd been ignoring the stack of mail for three weeks, ever since the diagnosis, ever since the word terminal had rearranged itself inside her chest like furniture nobody asked to move. But this envelope was different — no return address, her name written in a hand she hadn't seen in eleven years.

Daniel.

She sat at the kitchen table with her coffee going cold and the letter unopened between her palms, feeling the weight of whatever waited inside. A single page, maybe two. Folded once. She could tell by the thickness.

"You don't have to," she told herself.

She opened it anyway.

I know what they told you. I also know it doesn't have to end that way. Meet me where we buried the compass. Thursday. Come alone.

No signature. No explanation. Just those three sentences, and below them, a pressed flower — a sprig of heather, now brown at the edges — the kind that grew wild on the hill above her grandmother's house.

The hill where she and Daniel had spent that last summer before everything fell apart.

Nora read the note four times. Then she folded it carefully, the same crease, the same way he'd folded it, and slid it into her coat pocket.

Outside, the October sky was doing something complicated. Clouds pulling in from the east. The smell of rain not quite arrived.

She had four months, give or take. The doctors had been very clear.

She picked up her phone and booked a train ticket north.

What does he know that they don't? she wondered, watching the confirmation email load. And what am I willing to risk to find out?

The train left at dawn.

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