He came back to introduce his new girlfriend, and I came out of the hospital in a wheelchair. One look at me, and his whole perfect life cracked.

A moment later, Sherman stepped into the living room. He was soaking wet, his hair plastered to his forehead, looking completely shattered. He pulled up a wooden chair beside my bed and sat down. For a long time, neither of us spoke. The only sound was the hum of my oxygen concentrator.

“Vanessa flew back to London this morning,” he finally said, staring at his hands.

“You shouldn’t have let her go,” I replied, adjusting the nasal cannula. “She’s your life now.”

“No,” he whispered, looking up. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. “She was a life I built because I was too much of a coward to face the one I left behind. I thought… I thought if I just kept moving, kept succeeding, I wouldn’t have to think about how I broke my promise to you.”

He leaned forward, burying his face in his hands.

“I was going to come back a success. But the longer I stayed away, the harder it became to pick up the phone. I didn’t know what to say. And then, I just assumed you had moved on. That you were happy. I never knew, Lily. God, I never knew.”

“Would it have changed anything?” I asked softly.

He looked at me, a tear tracking through the stubble on his cheek. “It would have changed everything.”

Over the next five weeks, Sherman never left Maple Ridge.

He moved back into his parents’ house next door, but he lived at mine. At first, my mother watched him like a hawk, waiting for him to bolt at the first sign of reality. But he didn’t.

When the pain flared up and I couldn’t stop crying, he held my hand and talked me through it. When I was too tired to open my eyes, he read to me—our old favorite books from high school, doing the same terrible voices he used to do when we were teenagers.

He didn’t treat me like a porcelain doll, and he didn’t treat me like a tragedy. For those five weeks, he gave me back my best friend.

But time is a currency you cannot borrow, and my account was running empty.

In late May, the hospice nurse told my mother it would only be a matter of days. I could feel it, too. A deep, heavy quiet had settled into my bones.

Sherman was sitting by my bed, bathed in the golden hour light filtering through the window. He was tracing the blue veins on the back of my thin hand with his thumb.

“Sherman,” I whispered.

He looked up, offering a fragile smile. “Yeah, Lil?”

“You have to promise me something.”

His smile faltered, but he nodded. “Anything.”

“Don’t let this be the reason you stop living again,” I said, struggling to draw a full breath. “Don’t go back to London and bury yourself in work to forget this. But don’t stay here in Maple Ridge and rot, either. Promise me you’ll live a life that’s real. Not just a picture on the internet.”

Tears spilled over his lashes, dropping onto our joined hands. “I’m so sorry, Lily. I’m so sorry I wasted seven years.”

“You’re here now,” I told him, squeezing his fingers with whatever strength I had left. “You carried my backpack when I was ten. You climbed through my window at fifteen. And you walked me to the end at twenty-four. You came home, Sherman.”

He pressed his forehead against my hand, his shoulders shaking with silent sobs.

“I love you,” he choked out. “I never stopped. I was just too blind to see it.”

“I know,” I smiled, letting my eyes drift shut. The pain medication was pulling me under, a warm, dark tide. “I love you too. Now… let me sleep.”

Lily died two days later, quietly, while the neighborhood was asleep.

Sherman Blake did not return to London. He sold his flat, resigned from his firm, and used his savings to open a small, community-funded clinic in Maple Ridge for families dealing with long-term terminal illnesses.

He never forgot the girl who lived next door. He spent the rest of his life making sure that no one else in their town ever had to face the dark alone, keeping the promise he had finally learned how to keep.