Chapter Text
A bustling school yard in the late morning. Students are trickling into lunch or outdoor break. Miss Beale is supervising from a bench, grading some tests quietly.
A soccer ball whizzes past her feet.
Miss Beale doesn’t flinch. She’s used to chaos. She waves a warning at a cluster of boys, then goes back to grading.
Then, in her peripheral vision—something shifts.
A woman is standing just beyond the gate. Civilian clothes. Broad shoulders. Boots that don’t belong to a school parent. She’s watching the field like it’s a battlefield, scanning. Her gaze stops—locks—on Emily Mitchell.
The woman smiles.
Miss Beale squints.
No.
It can’t be.
She stands slowly, the red pen in her hand forgotten.
And then she hears a scream—Emily sees the woman across the yard.
“BECA?!”
The sound tears across the playground. Emily is running. Kids turn and cheer, unsure why.
Miss Beale doesn’t join them. She stays where she is, heart hammering. It’s not her place.
Because now she’s sure. That’s Beca Mitchell—the girl who never came back after graduation. The girl she once spent every third-period study hall staring at from two rows behind.
And she’s standing in the schoolyard, hugging her little sister like nothing else in the world matters.
Miss Beale exhales a shaky breath.
For a second, she forgets she’s a teacher. She’s just someone watching the girl she never stopped thinking about come home.
Her feet remain planted, but inside, everything lurches. The breath in her lungs feels sharp, unfamiliar, like she’s forgotten how to inhale properly.
Beca.
She looks older, but not in the way Chloe expected. Her hair’s a bit longer, her frame a bit leaner. But it’s in the way she carries herself — shoulders squared like she’s bracing for something, eyes darting over the schoolyard like she doesn’t quite believe she’s safe yet.
Chloe watches her fall to her knees as Emily crashes into her, the kind of reunion only a child can make feel so simple.
Beca wraps her arms around her tightly, burying her face in Emily’s shoulder, and Chloe feels the cracks in her carefully built composure splinter like glass.
She’s here. She’s real.
Chloe thought she’d cry if this day ever came — imagined it late at night, face buried in a pillow, wondering if she’d ever get the chance to look at Beca again and not ache.
But now? She just feels… stuck.
Overwhelmed. Unprepared.
She hasn’t even moved, hasn’t taken a single step toward them. Her body won’t budge, like her heart hasn’t decided if it’s ready.
Because what do you say to the girl who disappeared without warning?
To the girl you loved so fiercely it burned, and who left you with ashes and silence?
A thousand versions of this moment flashed through her mind over the years. Some ended in screaming. Some in kisses. Some in Chloe slamming a door and never looking back.
But this? This quiet, open, sun-drenched moment in the middle of a schoolyard with Emily laughing and crying at once — this is somehow more terrifying than all of them.
Beca pulls back just slightly, brushing a tear from Emily’s cheek. Then she lifts her head — and her eyes find Chloe.
There’s a beat. Just one. But it’s loud enough to shake her bones.
Chloe’s lips part. She doesn’t speak.
Beca doesn’t either.
But in that small distance, that brief second of shared breath across the schoolyard, Chloe sees it.
Regret. Hope. Fear.
She wonders what Beca sees in her face — and if it matches the storm brewing behind her ribs.
The bell rings.
Children scream with joy. The world keeps moving.
But Chloe? She stays exactly where she is.
Because no one told her that homecoming could hurt like this.