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She calls herself Jane here.
The town is small enough that everyone knows everyone, but not so small that they ask too many questions. She says she’s from far away, which is true. She says her English is better than her Icelandic, which is obvious. No one presses. People are kind in the way that gives you space.
It’s 1989. The world is loud and bright somewhere else. Here, it feels paused.
She rents a room above a closed-down fish shop with peeling blue paint. The sink clogs if you let the water run for too long. The window rattles when the wind comes in from the ocean. At night, she lies awake.
Jane writes letters she never sends.
She writes to Joyce and says she hopes the Byers’ house smells like coffee again.
She writes to Mike next. Those letters are shorter. They hurt more. She never says his name out loud when she’s done.
Sometimes she writes to a man with a gruff voice and soft hands, a man who taught her how to be angry without breaking everything. She tells him she remembers. She tells him she’s trying.
She burns them all in the sink, one by one. The flame eats the paper fast, greedy. The words blister and vanish. The smoke stings her eyes. The ash smells sharp, clean, like the truth. When it’s over, there’s nothing left to explain.
During the day, Jane works at the bakery down the street. It’s not official. She doesn’t need it to be. She kneads dough with flour up to her wrists and learns the rhythm of ovens. In exchange, she takes home bread still warm in paper that leaves grease stains on her coat. The owner hums while he works. He never asks her where she’s from.
She learns the shape of the days.
In summer, the light refuses to go away. It hangs in the sky like it’s afraid of missing something. Jane stands by the window at midnight and watches it glow, pale and stubborn. In winter, the darkness settles in heavy and complete, like it plans to stay forever. She learns that both are survivable.
Loneliness here is different. It doesn’t claw at her throat. It sits beside her. It lets her breathe.
Weeks in, the radio crackles to life in the bakery with some american pop song. Jane keeps stacking mugs. She keeps her face carefully blank. The song passes. Outside, the street is bright with snow and reflected light. Inside her chest, something aches and something else lifts, and she lets them coexist.
Nobody knows she’s here. That feels important. That feels like mercy.
She doesn’t know how long she’ll stay. She knows she won’t vanish. She is done with that kind of disappearing.
Somewhere far away, a boy with sad eyes is still looking at empty spaces and wondering if he missed something. Somewhere else, a town thick with memories keeps spinning without her in it. The world keeps going. It always does.
Sometimes, in the quiet hours before the sun drags itself across the horizon, Jane lets herself remember the girl she used to be. Eleven. The girl who screamed, who fought, who clung to pieces of a life that never wanted her whole. She remembers the lab, the lab coats, the way fear tasted in her mouth and the hollow ache of knowing the world was too big and too cruel to make sense of. She remembers friends she can’t see ever again, the mother she could never have and the home she could never keep. And then, like smoke coming from the sink, she lets that old self dissolve.
One evening, she walks down to the shore. The cold cuts through her boots and into her bones. The ocean stretches out endlessly, dark and alive. Jane stands there until her hands go numb. The wind pulls at her hair like it wants her attention.
She smiles. Just a little.
It surprises her.
She doesn’t know if this is running away or running toward.
Maybe it’s both. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
The world doesn’t end. It never does when you expect it to.
The ocean keeps moving.
So does she.
Goodbye Jane, we hardly knew you.