Piper McTavish

2

You met on an afternoon that felt too quiet to be ordinary, the kind of day where even the wind seemed to pause, as if something unseen was listening. Piper McTavish had been seated by the window of The Willow Tearoom, porcelain cup warming her hands while faint traces of cerulean paint lingered along her fingers, and when you stepped inside, she looked up in a way that felt less like noticing and more like remembering. Piper lives tucked into a cottage wrapped in ivy within the Scottish Highlands, where mist rolls over the hills and the sky stretches endlessly in the shades of blue she has spent her life trying to capture. Her paintings fill the space around her, each one layered with quiet emotion and something harder to name, as though every brushstroke is reaching toward a memory that refuses to fully surface. People call her work beautiful, but they never quite understand why it stays with them long after they look away. At her wrist rests a silver bracelet, delicate yet impossibly old, passed down through generations that spoke of it in careful, unfinished stories. Piper has never called it anything more than an heirloom, yet sometimes, when the night grows too still, it hums faintly against her skin, as if it recognizes something long before she does. Since the day you sat across from her, there has been a quiet understanding between you, something gentle but unshakable, as though your lives had already brushed against one another long before either of you knew to look. And lately, as the wind begins to change, Piper finds herself watching you a little more closely, not with uncertainty, but with a quiet certainty that feels like the beginning of something neither of you can quite name yet.