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The rain had always been an unavoidable guest in the life of Cillian Sharpe. Growing up in a small village on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, where clouds sat low enough to skim the rooftops, he had learned to embrace wet shoes, damp coats, and a horizon eternally smudged by mist. But the rain on the evening of March 17th, 2019, was different — colder, sharper, and heavy enough to feel personal.
It was the night he met her.
The village pub, The Moor’s Gate, was as it always was: warm, wood-smoked, and filled with the familiar scent of damp wool and ale. Cillian had claimed his usual corner near the window, a pint of bitter half-empty beside a notebook worn at the edges. A writer in theory but a carpenter by necessity, his stories lived in the margins of invoices and the backs of receipts. That night, however, words felt slippery, impossible to grasp.
And then she arrived.
She wasn’t from the village — no one dressed like that here. Her coat, a deep shade of plum, trailed droplets onto the floor. Her boots were sturdy but not the sort meant for trudging through sodden fields. And her face — sharp, serious, and a touch curious — wasn’t one he’d seen at Sunday markets or church fêtes. She walked to the bar, ordered a cider, and turned towards the room.
Their eyes met for no longer than a heartbeat, but it was enough. He felt the flicker of something he couldn’t name, not yet.
Her name was Eleanor James, and she wasn’t supposed to be there. London was her home — tall buildings, taxi horns, and the kind of rain that came sideways through alleyways. She was a travel writer of sorts, though she often wondered if writing lists of "Ten Hidden Tea Rooms You Must Visit" counted as literary achievement. The village had been a last-minute choice, a place to disappear for a few days after her engagement collapsed like wet paper.
She hadn’t expected much — a few good walks, a fire-lit corner, perhaps inspiration for an article on the best scones north of Manchester. What she hadn’t expected was a man with ink-stained fingers and eyes the colour of slate.
It took three days for them to speak. Eleanor had found the rhythm of the village: mornings thick with mist, afternoons punctuated by the chatter of walkers in muddy boots, evenings with the hum of stories passing between locals at The Moor’s Gate. Cillian was always there, always writing — or pretending to — and always glancing her way. She noticed, of course, and she might have smiled to herself each time.
On the third day, the rain had lightened to a drizzle, and Eleanor found herself sitting opposite him without quite meaning to.
“Do you always watch strangers this much?” she asked, her smile teasing but soft.
Cillian set down his pen, the blush creeping up his neck too obvious to hide. “Only the ones who wear plum coats in places like this.”
She laughed — a sound that felt out of place in the quiet room, yet oddly welcome.
“I’m Eleanor.”
“Cillian.”
The words hung there, fragile but full of promise. And just like that, something began.
They walked the Dales together the next day, following paths so old they seemed etched into the land itself. The air was cold enough to sting, but neither seemed to mind. They spoke in half-sentences at first — the safety of strangers learning the outlines of each other. She talked of cities; he spoke of wood and stories that never quite found endings.
“Do you ever finish anything you write?” she asked as they rested on a stone wall, boots dangling above a stream swollen with rain.
He considered her question. “Not really.”
“Why not?”
“Maybe I’m waiting for the right story.”
“And how will you know when you find it?”
He looked at her, the wind tugging at her hair. “I imagine it’ll look a bit like this.”
Eleanor stayed longer than she meant to — a week became two, then three. The village began to treat her as one of their own, her name murmured with the fondness reserved for familiar faces. She and Cillian slipped into a rhythm as natural as the tides: walks in the morning, writing in the afternoon, evenings spent in the corner of the pub where time softened and stretched.
It would have been easy to stay forever, but life, even in stories, is rarely so simple.
A letter arrived for Eleanor one morning, slipped under her cottage door. The handwriting was unmistakable — her ex-fiancé, Oliver, whose words had once been a comfort and were now just ghosts on paper. He wanted to talk. To explain. To fix.
Cillian found her on the hilltop that afternoon, her hands crumpling the letter as the wind tried to steal it away.
“You don’t have to go,” he said quietly.
“I know.”
“Do you want to?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she reached for his hand, fingers cold against his warm palm. They stood there, silent, until the sky bruised purple and the first stars began to blink awake.
Eleanor left the next morning. There were no dramatic goodbyes, only a brief touch of hands and a promise too fragile to put into words. Cillian watched her car disappear down the narrow road, the kind of departure the village had seen countless times before. But this one felt different.
Months passed, then a year. Letters came, not from Oliver, but from Eleanor. Postmarked from places that blurred into each other — Paris, Edinburgh, Cornwall, Lisbon. They weren’t love letters, not exactly. They were fragments of days, observations jotted in the margins of her travels. Cillian replied, his words less graceful but just as full of longing.
The village whispered about him, about her, about the letters he read and reread by the firelight. But no one asked too much — everyone knew that some stories took longer to unfold.
It was late November when she returned. The village was hushed with the weight of approaching winter, and Cillian was stacking wood outside his small workshop when her shadow crossed the threshold.
She looked the same and yet different — her hair shorter, her face thinner, her smile a little more hesitant.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” he replied.
There were no grand declarations, no need for them. Instead, she handed him a small notebook, its cover worn from too much handling.
“I wrote something,” she said. “About us. About here.”
He opened it, the pages filled with her handwriting, some neat, some hurried, all familiar. It was their story — the walks, the rain, the silences filled with more meaning than words ever could.
“I thought maybe you could write the ending,” she said softly.
Cillian swallowed hard, the weight of the moment pressing against his chest.
“I’ve been waiting for the right story,” he whispered.
“And?”
“And it looks exactly like this.”
She smiled then, the kind of smile that felt like sunrise after too long a night.
And in that small village, under the ever-present rain, two lives began to stitch themselves together — not perfectly, not neatly, but beautifully, in the way only real love stories can.
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