The Distance Between
Copyright© 2025 by Art Samms
Chapter 42
ELIAS
There’s a strange kind of peace in returning home after a trip—like the world exhales with you the moment the plane touches down. Galway greeted us with a familiar cool drizzle, the kind that settles on your skin like a quiet welcome. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed it until we stepped outside.
Life slipped back into its rhythm almost immediately.
Work. Walks along the bay. Evenings at The Silver Rose. Nothing dramatic—just the living of a life that felt finally, unquestionably ours.
Weeks passed. Then months.
Summer folded into early autumn. The light changed in that uniquely Irish way—softening, lengthening, turning deep gold, almost orange, in the late afternoons. My students grew used to my teaching style; I grew used to their humor, their accents, their stubborn refusal to stop calling me “Berlin” after Lucas let the nickname escape into the wild one evening.
Leila’s workdays grew smoother, too. Her team couldn’t imagine their remote meetings without her warmth and competence—and neither could I. Every so often, I would pass her office door and catch her deep in conversation, laughing with Aoife about some pub or festival coming up. Galway suited her better than any city ever had.
And Darya...
Her life blossomed in a way that felt both inevitable and miraculous.
It happened quietly, without any grand declarations at first. A message here, a shared joke there. Lucas stopping by our table at The Silver Rose more often. The two of them slipping into conversations so quickly, so naturally, that sometimes I felt like Leila and I were witnessing something forming molecule by molecule.
Before long, they were seeing each other regularly—never making a big deal about it, never announcing anything. Just ... spending time together. And every time Darya came home from work, or from a walk along the bay, or from meeting Lucas for a coffee, there was a softness in her eyes I hadn’t seen in her before.
She was happy.
Not the fleeting, adrenaline-fueled happiness she’d used as armor in Berlin or Istanbul.
A quieter happiness. A rooted one.
Sometimes, late at night, when the apartment was still, I’d think about how far she’d come—how far all three of us had come. From Berlin’s cold nights and visa paperwork and fear ... to this calm, steady life on the Irish coast.
There was a sense—impossible to articulate—that something in our little world had settled into place exactly as it was meant to.
And watching the two of them grow closer only reinforced it. Not dramatic. Not rushed. Just natural, like tide coming in. Peaceful, earned and real.
LEILA
By late afternoon the sky had sunk into that soft, bruised blue Galway does so well—half twilight, half mist. The three of us were walking along the bay, the wind cool but not unfriendly, brushing our hair back and carrying the sound of distant gulls. It was Sunday, and the world felt unhurried, as if the whole city had decided to move in slow motion with us.
Elias walked on my right, hands in his pockets. Darya was on my left, bundled in her favorite oversized scarf, curls bouncing a little in the wind. We’d all been quiet for a while, the good kind of quiet, where every footstep feels like a shared thought.
Then Darya said, softly, “Do you two remember the food stand?”
I laughed instantly. “The one near the university? Where you introduced yourself to Elias before I did?”
She nodded proudly. “Of course. You were starving, I was starving—and he looked completely lost.” She nudged him with her elbow. “I thought, if I don’t rescue this German, he’ll never find his way back home.”
Elias rolled his eyes, grinning. “I wasn’t that lost.”
“You absolutely were,” I said. “You couldn’t even order. You just pointed at a picture and prayed it wasn’t full of spicy peppers.”
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