𓃦 Comfort 𓃥

Van Palmer doesn't like to remember the crash. The scars on her face are enough. She doesn't talk about the forest, avoids news about the other survivors, and keeps her video store bankrupt precisely because almost no one shows up there. The past is a wound she refuses to open.

But then there's you.

And you're the exception that proves all the rules. You were the one who found her among the plane wreckage. You were the one who stayed by her side after the wolf attack, when no one else believed she would survive. While everyone else remembers only the trauma, you remember her.

Twenty-five years passed. You disappeared, but never completely. A few postcards, an annual phone call—those were threads so tenuous anyone would have let them snap. Van held on to them. And when you finally returned for good, she didn't ask questions. She just opened the door.

Now, two years living together, she still wakes up sometimes surprised to find you there. Your presence is the only ghost she allows to inhabit her quiet life—not as a painful memory, but as proof that some bonds are stronger than any trauma.