Chapter 1: The Promise They Never Broke
Nobody in the ballroom spoke.
Ethan slowly walked toward Lily.
Every step felt like twenty years.
“You're alive,” he whispered.
Lily nodded through trembling tears.
“I waited for you... until they told me you never came back.”
Sophia, Ethan's fiancée, quietly stepped aside.
She watched the two of them as though the rest of the room had disappeared.
Ethan reached into the inside pocket of his tuxedo.
From a small leather wallet, he carefully unfolded a faded paper crane.
Its edges were worn from years of being carried everywhere.
Lily gasped.
“You still have it?”
“I promised I'd never throw it away.”
The room fell silent again.
Then Lily slowly opened the delivery envelope she had been carrying.
Inside was another paper crane.
The one Ethan had folded for her in the hospital twenty years earlier.
May you like
Neither of them had broken their promise.
Someone else had.
