The Love That Waited Ten Years

The Love That Waited Ten Years
By Lila Hart

I saw him again on a Tuesday.

Ten years had passed since we last spoke. A decade of weddings, losses, moves, jobs, and everything life throws at you when you’re busy trying to forget the one person you never truly did.

He was standing in front of the flower shop on Main Street, looking at the same dahlias he used to bring me back when we were just two college kids pretending we weren’t in love.

He hadn’t changed much. A few more laugh lines. A little more stillness in his shoulders. But those eyes—the ones that used to read me like a familiar page—still held that same quiet warmth.

I didn’t plan on speaking. I could’ve walked past and pretended he was someone else. But fate has a sense of humor, and he turned just as I hesitated.

“Ava?” he said, like a question, like a prayer.

I smiled. “Hi, Noah.”

We ended up at the café down the block, a place that had survived the tides of time better than we had. He ordered chamomile tea. I got my usual black coffee, extra cream. Funny how some things don’t change, even when everything else does.

“So,” he said, stirring his tea. “How have the last ten years treated you?”

“Like a storm,” I replied. “You?”

“Like a lesson.”

We danced around the real questions for a while. Asked about jobs, family, places we’d visited. But beneath it all was the silence we both remembered. The one filled with the words we never said back then.
You see, we loved each other. Madly. But we were young, scared, and in two different chapters of our lives. He wanted adventure—backpacking through Europe, chasing foreign dreams. I wanted roots, a quiet home, something steady. So we let go, each believing that love wasn’t enough without timing.

But time—it does strange things to a person.

I dated. So did he. I almost married. So did he.

But every birthday, I’d wonder what Noah was doing. Every rainy day, I’d remember how he used to read poetry out loud when the thunder scared me. Every time I passed the bookstore where we first met, my chest would ache with the ghost of him.

And now, here we were, sitting across from each other, years later, with coffee between us and time still playing tricks.

“I kept the letters,” he said suddenly.

I blinked. “What letters?”

He pulled out a small, weathered envelope from his coat. “The ones you left in my dorm mailbox. You never signed them, but I knew they were from you.”

My heart paused.

“I read them every year on my birthday,” he added. “Made me feel less alone.”

I had written them after we broke up—short notes of regret, hope, and everything I never had the guts to say out loud. I never thought he read them. Never even knew if he knew they were from me.
But he did.

“I never stopped loving you, Ava,” he said, voice steady. “I just stopped believing we’d find our way back.”

And suddenly, all those years felt like seconds.

I reached across the table, placing my hand over his.

“I think love never really leaves,” I whispered. “It just waits.”

We stayed at that café until the sun dipped behind the buildings and the streetlights blinked on like stars returning to the sky.

He walked me home in silence—familiar and comforting.

At my door, he paused. “Do you think... we could try again?”

I looked up at him, at the man who once left to find the world, only to return and find me again.

“I think we were always just on pause,” I said.

And for the first time in ten years, he kissed me.

Soft. Certain. Like time hadn’t won after all.