Elise Harper has spent years being good, patient, and quietly hopeful—waiting for a promotion, a proposal, a sign that her life is about to begin. But when a sudden loss exposes her worldwide open, she discovers a key, a secret studio, and a truth she can no longer ignore: she’s done waiting to be chosen. Now, in grief and grit, she must learn the bravest kind of love—choosing herself.
In the morning, Elise Harper stopped waiting to be chosen. The city wore its usual winter restraint—sky the colour of pewter, rain stitched delicately against the kitchen window, the city holding itself together with damp patience.
Elise stood barefoot on the cold tile, watching the kettle begin to steam. The flat smelled of toast and the bright, hopeful oranges she’d bought because they looked like little suns. She’d been doing that lately, buying small, optimistic things, as if she could persuade her life to tip into happiness through sheer good behaviour.
Behind her, James moved through the morning with the smooth efficiency of a man who believed time belonged to him. Keys. Phone. Tie. He crossed the kitchen and kissed her cheek without stopping.
“Morning, love.” He opened the cupboard. “Where’s the good coffee?”
“Top shelf,” Elise said, already smiling out of habit. “I bought it yesterday.”
James’s small sound of approval warmed the room more than the kettle ever could. Elise had always been like this—tuned to the frequency of other people’s satisfaction, listening for the click that meant she’d done the right thing.
“I might be late tonight,” James said, glancing at his watch. “Deadline’s moved. Again.”
“Of course,” Elise replied, soft as a cushion.
He kissed her again and left, the door closing on the echo of his rush. The flat exhaled. Rain slid down the glass in thoughtful lines.
Elise turned to her laptop, the first slide of her presentation glowing with clean, orderly certainty. NEXT STEPS, it read. As if life could be made obedient by headings.
Her phone vibrated beside the keyboard.
MUM.
Elise hesitated—the brief pause where she chose which self to be—and answered. “Hi, Mum.”
Her mother’s voice was brisk, but there was a snag in it, like fabric catching on a nail. “Elise. Are you sitting down?”
Elise’s stomach tightened. “What is it?”
“It’s Aunt Lydia.”
The name landed like a dropped plate.
Lydia—her mother’s younger sister—had always been too much for the family’s comfort. Too bright. Too loud. Too alive. The aunt who wore lipstick like a declaration, danced at weddings as though she’d invented joy, and once took thirteen-year-old Elise into a department-store changing room and said, “Sweetheart, you are not furniture. You are not here to fit into corners. You are here to live.”
“She collapsed last night,” her mother said. “It was her heart. They… she’s gone.”
For a moment Elise couldn’t find the edges of the room. The kettle hissed. The clock ticked. The world kept moving with an almost insulting steadiness.
“Gone,” Elise repeated, as if saying it could make it less real.
Her mother’s voice softened fear wearing a different coat. “I didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else.”
“I’m coming,” Elise said, and startled herself with the decisiveness. “I’ll come now.”
At the hospital, her mother sat in the corridor outside a private room, coat still on, handbag clasped like armour. She looked smaller than Elise remembered, as if grief had quietly taken a bite out of her.
Inside, Lydia lay beneath a white sheet, her face peaceful, her lipstick gone, her hair brushed back. She looked like someone who had finally stopped performing.
Elise took her aunt’s hand. Cool. Still. Unreal.
“I thought I had time,” Elise whispered, and the sentence cracked open something in her chest.
Time wasn’t a cupboard. It wasn’t polite. It didn’t wait in the hallway while you finished your email.
Time was a door that could close without warning.
They moved through the days after with the strange efficiency of grief—phone calls, florist invoices, hymns, the awkward kindness of neighbours bearing casseroles. Elise took time off work. James frowned when she told him she wouldn’t be leading the presentation.
“I thought that was important,” he said.
“It is,” Elise replied. “But this is more important.”
He nodded as though granting permission. And Elise felt, sharply, the old familiar pattern: Elise asks. James allows.
When it came time to clear Lydia’s flat, Elise went with her mother. Lydia’s front door was painted a bright, impertinent red. Elise stared at it before unlocking it, as if Lydia might fling it open from the other side and shout, Stop looking so solemn come in!
Inside, Lydia’s presence lingered like perfume. Colour everywhere. Cushions like sunbursts. Photos of Lydia in wild places, laughing into the wind. A record player. A scarf draped over a chair like theatre.
Margaret moved stiffly through it all, opening cupboards, closing them again, as if tidying could make the loss manageable. “We’ll start with the paperwork,” she said.
Elise wandered into Lydia’s bedroom and found a notebook on the dresser—Lydia’s handwriting looping, bold, impatient. Lists and doodles. Half-formed dreams. A sketch of a seaside cottage with one day written beneath it.
Between the last pages was a letter, folded neatly. Her name on the front.
Elise sat on the edge of the bed and opened it, hands trembling.
My darling Elise, it began.
If you’re reading this, it means I’ve finally gone and done something dramatic. Don’t you roll your eyes. You know, I always liked an entrance and an exit.
Elise’s throat tightened.
I’m writing because I’ve watched you your whole life, and you’ve always been a girl who waits as if waiting is a virtue in itself. You wait to be asked. You wait to be told. You wait to be chosen.
Sweetheart—listen to me. You are already chosen. By you.
Elise pressed the paper to her chest as if it could steady her heartbeat.
There’s a story women are taught: be good, be quiet, be agreeable, and you’ll be rewarded. But life doesn’t reward anyone. Life responds. It responds when you stop asking, “Will they pick me?” and start saying, “I pick myself.”
I left you something in the kitchen drawer under the tea towels. It’s a key. It opens a door you haven’t even looked at yet. Use it. And when you do, think of me with lipstick on and my head thrown back laughing.
Love always, Lydia.
Elise found the key under the tea towels—brass, solid, tied with ribbon. A label read: ROWAN HOUSE, UNIT 3.
Margaret’s face tightened when she saw it.
“You know what it is,” Elise said.
Her mother exhaled, long and reluctant. “It’s… an arts building by the canal. Lydia rented a little studio there. She used to paint.”
Elise stared at her. “She painted?”
“Sweetheart—listen to me. You are already chosen. By you.”
Margaret’s laugh was brittle. “She did everything. And she never let anyone tell her she couldn’t.”
Elise closed her fingers around the key. Something in her chest flared—a grief-hot spark that wasn’t only sorrow. It was recognition. It was longing. It was, strangely, anger at all the years she’d spent behaving her way through life as though it would earn her happiness.
“Can we go?” Elise asked.
Margaret hesitated—then nodded, as if surrendering to a truth she’d avoided.
Rowan House was a converted warehouse near the canal, smelling of paint, sawdust, and coffee. Posters for classes plastered the walls. Voices echoed from upstairs. Life, busy being lived.
Unit 3 opened with a soft, satisfying click.
Light poured in from a tall window over the canal, where narrowboats drifted like slow thoughts. Canvases leaned against the walls. Jars of brushes sat on a table. Tubes of paint, postcards, sketches. Evidence of a secret life Lydia had kept tenderly for herself.
In the centre stood an easel with a canvas draped in cloth.
Elise lifted it.
A woman stood at the edge of a cliff, arms open wide, wind in her hair. The sky behind her was vast and luminous, painted in deep blues and fierce pinks and gold spilling over the horizon. The face was unfinished, left deliberately vague—as though Lydia had been saving it for someone.
Elise looked at the painting and then at her mother. Margaret stood very still, staring as if the canvas had spoken.
“I didn’t know,” Elise whispered.
Margaret’s voice broke. “I didn’t want to know,” she admitted. “It was easier to call her frivolous than to admit she was brave.”
Brave.
Elise let the word settle. Brave was not perfect. Brave was not approved. Brave was not waiting.
That evening, Elise returned home to find James on the sofa, beer in hand, television murmuring. He looked up with the mild expectation of someone who assumed she would resume her usual shape.
“How was it?” he asked, meaning grief as a brief inconvenience.
“We found Lydia’s studio,” Elise said.
“Right,” James murmured. “Sad.”
Elise waited for him to look up properly. He didn’t. His attention drifted back to the screen.
“Can you put the kettle on?” he called.
Elise stood in the kitchen doorway and felt something inside her go very quiet and very clear. She could see herself as she’d been: helpful, patient, endlessly adjustable. The woman who waited for love like a verdict.
She turned.
“No,” Elise said.
James blinked. “No?”
“No,” Elise repeated, calm as a closing door. “You can make your own tea.”
He stared as though she’d spoken a foreign language. “What’s gotten into you?”
Elise’s voice was gentle. “I think I’ve been waiting for my life to start. And I’ve realised it already has. I just haven’t been living it.”
James scoffed, defensive. “You’re upset. Don’t make this into something.”
“It already is something,” Elise said. “Four years of ‘not yet.’ Four years of me waiting for you to decide if I’m worth choosing.”
“That’s not fair,” he snapped.
“Maybe not,” Elise said. “But it’s true.”
She packed an overnight bag—not theatrically, not in a rush. Just steadily. James hovered in the doorway, angry now, because
Anger is easier than discomfort.
“Where are you going?”
“To Mum’s tonight,” Elise said. “And tomorrow, I’m going to Rowan House.”
“You can’t just—”
“I can,” Elise said softly. “That’s the point.”
At her mother’s house, they drank tea at the familiar kitchen table where Elise had once learned to be polite with her wants. Elise looked across at Margaret and saw her mother not as an authority, but as a woman who had also waited outside too many doors.
“Mum,” Elise asked, voice trembling, “were you happy? With Dad?”
Margaret stared into her cup for a long time. “I was… safe,” she said.
“That’s not the same,” Elise whispered.
“No,” Margaret admitted. “It isn’t.”
The next morning, Elise went to the studio alone.
She opened the window. Canal air flooded in. Light washed the room clean.
On the table lay one of Lydia’s sketchbooks. On the first page, written in thick marker, were two words:
DON’T WAIT.
Elise laughed, a sound that turned into a sob. She wiped her face, pulled out her own notebook, and on a fresh page wrote:
What do I want?
The question sat there, simple and terrifying.
For years, Elise had written lists of what other people needed. She’d made her life a series of responses.
Now she wrote slowly, as if remembering how.
I want to take up space.
I want to stop apologising.
I want to feel alive.
I want love that doesn’t feel like begging.
I want to choose myself.
Elise stood, picked up a brush, and dipped it into water. She chose a deep blue and brought it to the unfinished canvas of the woman on the cliff.
The old voice in her head whispered, You’ll do it wrong.
But Lydia’s life surrounded her like a chorus: Do it anyway.
Elise placed the brush on the canvas and made the first stroke.
The paint went on imperfectly, beautifully. Real.
Outside, the canal flowed on, indifferent and faithful. Inside, Elise felt something uncoil—years of waiting loosening like a ribbon cut free.
Later, when she met James in a café to end what had been ending for a long time, she wore lipstick. Not Lydia’s shade—her own. James stared, unsettled by the fact that she looked like someone who belonged to herself.
“So that’s it,” he said, as though she were making a mistake.
“Yes,” Elise replied, and there was grief in her voice, but also relief. “That’s it.”
At Lydia’s funeral, the church filled with stories—how she laughed, how she helped, how she dared. One woman said, “She always told me, ‘Don’t wait for someone to save you. Save yourself.’”
Elise sat beside her mother, holding her hand. Margaret cried quietly, and Elise realised her mother was grieving not only her sister, but the version of herself who had never risked being more.
Weeks passed. Then months.
Elise moved into a small flat of her own with windows that caught the afternoon sun. She bought plants and killed two before she learned their language. She painted a wall a soft green because it calmed her. She hung one of her early canvases above the sofa—not because it was good, but because it was hers.
On Wednesdays, Margaret began coming to Rowan House with Elise. At first, she claimed she was “just keeping her company,” but soon she sat at the table with a pencil, sketching the canal with fierce concentration. Elise watched her mother’s hand grow surer, watched the tightness in her shoulders soften, and felt a tenderness so sharp it almost hurt.
One afternoon in spring, Elise stood in the studio and looked at the cliff painting. She had finished it slowly over time, deepening the horizon, warming the sky with gold. The woman’s face remained unfinished, still open—still possible.
Elise stepped back, brush in hand, and felt the room breathe around her. She thought of the girl she’d been, waiting for permission. Waiting for a ring, a promotion, a sign.
Lydia had given her a sign, yes—but Elise understood now: the real sign had been inside her all along, buried under years of compliance.
Outside, the canal glittered under a pale sky. Somewhere in the building, someone laughed—bright, unrestrained.
Elise added one last stroke of gold to the horizon.
It caught the light like a promise.
And in that quiet moment, Elise understood with a calm certainty: she had not been waiting for love, not really. She had been waiting for herself to arrive.
Now she had.
Now she chose.
This is where it ends today.
SOS
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