Every Rooftop Has a Ghost

He kept appearing. Not in a way anyone else would notice. Just — there, at the edge of the terrace each morning when I went up for coffee, a quiet constant. We didn’t talk about anything important. The city. The coffee, which was very good. The fact that Dagmar had added a second flower girl at the last minute and thrown the processional into gentle chaos. Small things. Safe things. The kind of conversation you have when you are very carefully not having the conversation you need to have.
On the third morning, the morning before the wedding, I went up earlier than usual. The sky was still pale. The city below was just beginning to stir — the distant sound of a tram, pigeons on the copper dome of a church, the smell of bread from somewhere below. I stood at the railing with my coffee and let myself feel the strangeness of being in a beautiful city with a bruise I’d convinced myself had healed.
I heard the door. I didn’t turn.
He came to stand beside me at the railing. Not close enough to touch. Close enough that I could feel the warmth of him in the cool morning air.
For a while, neither of us said anything. The city did the talking — the bells of a distant church, the tram again, a pair of swifts cutting across the pale sky in a fast, looping arc.
“I’ve been trying to figure out what to say to you,” Alistair said finally. His voice was quiet. The kind of quiet that means something.
“For the last three days,” I said, “or the last eight months?”
A beat.
“Both,” he said.
I turned to look at him then. He was already looking at me, and his expression was the one I’d spent eight months trying to stop seeing when I closed my eyes — that particular careful openness, like a door held just slightly ajar.
“I ended things,” I said, “because I thought you were already halfway gone. You were so quiet. I thought quiet meant finished.”
“I was terrified,” he said. Simply. No performance in it. “Not of you. Of how much it mattered. I’ve never been good at saying that out loud before it’s too late.” He paused. “I’m trying to be better at it.”
Below us, the city was waking up. The light was shifting from pale to gold, slowly, the way important things always move.
I thought about eight months of fine. Of the novel on the plane. Of standing in the doorway of this rooftop and seeing him there and feeling the whole careful architecture of my settled life develop a crack straight down the middle.
“Say it, then,” I said. “Out loud. Before it’s too late.”
He set his coffee cup on the railing. He turned to face me fully, and the morning light caught the side of his face, and he said: “I never stopped. I don’t think I’m going to. And I would very much like to stop being at the other end of the terrace from you, if you’ll let me.”
The swifts came back, a fast bright arc across the sky.
I reached out and took his hand, and the city rang its bells, and everything that had been pretending to be resolved finally, properly, was.

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About the Author

Elara Wynford — Her dreams comes true or not? Who knows, she stopped differentiating reality from dreams 10 years ago. Each of her stories has part of a dream…

— Elara Wynford

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Categories: Romances, Second Chance

July 30, 2026

10min-stories