Dahlia had always chosen the books she read.
She judged every single one of them from its cover and its blurbs. She would read their reviews online and make sure it fell under a genre she liked. Tragic, usually. Horror, sometimes. Never Romance. Always the kind to keep you a step away from questioning your reality.
But she hadn’t known that as a literature major, she wouldn’t have as many choices as she had hoped.
Assigned reading often came with its own kind of authority - and definitely not one she liked. To her, the syllabus seemed like a gospel and her tall and lanky professor its prophet. She was just a girl with a pencil and a highlighter, barely clinging to the idea that words were still hers to choose.
Her professor was a curious one – a tall and lanky man, who often smelled faintly of mothballs and coffee, and spoke in, what sounded like metaphors. With his obsession over the forgotten authors and the gold ring on his finger, she also had assumed that he had become the way he was after losing a loved one. This was a keynote to be observed as her professors’ choices had always been tragically old tales of love and she despised every single one of them.
Reading often relies on connecting with the characters that are written into the margins of a book. Their thought processes, their emotional workings, and in cases of Romance, the openness to love.
Her professors’ obsession with tragic romances and obscure, out-of-print authors was both frustrating and oddly personal. With the gold ring he never took off and the aura of sadness around him as he had held his copy of her next assignment, she’d made peace with the assumption: he had loved, and lost. It was the only explanation for assigning yet another forgotten story about lovers torn apart by time, war, or worse—each other.
She hated love stories.
Because she’d never seen one survive.
Her parents’ marriage had been the kind of tragedy that doesn’t make the shelves—ugly, loud, full of slammed doors and sharp silences. She and her sister had grown up memorizing exit strategies, not fairy tales. She knew there was nothing worse than being the Juliet to someone’s Romeo.
So no, Dahlia didn’t believe in epic love. Or soulmates. Or fate. But she did believe in deadlines. And the power of a well-placed semicolon.
“When I am a professor,” she muttered to herself one rainy afternoon. “I will let the students choose their reading.”
“Then they would never choose the ones that matter, Ms. Kaling,” her professor had said, standing next to her, catching off guard. She hated it when he did that. She had just rolled her eyes, but that’s how she ended up climbing into her grandmother’s attic on a rainy Saturday, surrounded by dust bunnies, silence and the faint scent of vanilla that clung to everything her grandmother owned. She was looking for a book the internet hadn’t seemed to have heard off.
She had been convinced that her professors’ reason for the same was so that nobody could cheat off the internet. This time hadn’t felt different.
As usual, no bookstores had ever carried the title.
As usual, Goodreads hadn’t heard of it.
But uniquely, this time, the library had nothing.
“The Flowers Between The Pages,” she had asked her grandmother. She had been a collector in her days.
Her grandmother had paused when Dahlia asked. She adjusted her glasses to get a clearer view of her granddaughter, before she coughed and pointed to the attic.
“Try the trunk,” she’d said in her fragile voice. “The one your grandfather left me. He always said it held things worth remembering.”
So Dahlia did.
She found the trunk buried under old linen and forgotten heirlooms, and when she cracked it open, a gust of dust rushed out. She coughed, as she looked at the very bottom, wrapped in faded blue ribbon, was a single book.
The Flowers Between The Pages
No author listed. No publisher. Just the title, embossed in gold.
She turned it over in her hands. It was warm.
Not in the literal sense. But the way skin feels when it remembers a touch.
Eighteen hours of procrastination later, she finally decided to begin her assignment. That’s all it ever was to her.
In the darkness of her sleepless night, with only her reading light to keep her company, she opened the book.
It smelled of time. It was the only way she could phrase it. It’s the smell that reminded her of the ages that came before her. The ones that had come and gone like the tide, leaving behind a book with all of its scars.”
A tale as old as time.
The pages turned easily, though they looked like they might crumble. They didn’t. Instead, they seemed to unfold before her. Ink in sepia tones danced across the paper in handwriting too elegant to be real, every word written in what seemed to be grace on paper.
It started innocently enough.
A girl. A boy. A field.
The words she read spoke of a chance meeting between two strangers who weren’t quite strangers. It felt like a moment that seemed to air familiarity. Dahlia yawned, unimpressed. She’d read stories like this before. It was always the same two silhouettes dancing between metaphors of life.
Chapter One was this meeting of pure chances.
Chapter Two was what could only be described as fire meets water to cause a reaction that resulted in steam. Something entirely different from what she had expected from a book as such.
A predictable change in chemistry. But all too quickly.
Then came Chapter Three.
The girl—no, the woman—found a box on her porch. No note. Just a small pendant inside: a lilac glass flower, tinted faintly lavender.
Something about the description made Dahlia pause.
It was vivid. Too vivid. Like she could smell the soft floral notes of the glass. Like she’d seen that very pendant before.
She sat up straighter.
She quickly shut the book and walked up to her dressing table and opened up a little drawer of her accessories. There it was. The very same pendant.
Difference is, she wasn’t sure who gave it to her. She’s always just had it. She had lost it three times but somehow, it had always managed to find its way back to her. She always just called it luck. But now, she felt there was more to it. More that she would discover in the book.
The next day, she opened up her assignment again. “Chapter four,” she read, rolling her eyes. Then, a set of words caught her attention – the oddest sense of deja vu.
“It was the kind of scar people don’t remember getting, only noticing years later—like something left behind by another version of themselves.”
Her eyes darted to her wrist. Her breath caught.
She had one too. Right there, in the same place. She’d never known where it came from.
Coincidence. Hopefully.
She kept reading.
Chapter Five opened with the main character’s dream - “The girl dreamed of fire. Of a room full of mirrors. Of a voice calling her by a name that wasn’t hers.”
Dahlia slammed the book shut.
Because that wasn’t just a coincidence. That was her.
The fire. The mirrors. The voice that echoed sometimes in her dreams—calling her Lilah. A name she’d never told anyone because it made no sense. Because it wasn’t hers. And yet… it felt like it had been, once.
It was a flower - like her name was. But her favorite one.
She stared at the book in silence.
Her heart thudded dully, not quite panic, but something adjacent. Disbelief? Wonder? Fear?
Slowly, as if the air around her might tear, she opened the book again.
Chapter six began with a quote “She stood in the orchard, the wind curling around her ankles like a forgotten vow. He was waiting for her, as he always had been, beneath the crooked willow.”
There was something reverent about the way the man in the chapter waited. Patient. Devoted. Broken in ways he refused to show.
His name was never written. He was always “he.”
But Dahlia felt like she’d said his name a thousand times in another tongue.
As she read, flashbacks bloomed in her mind like bruises beneath glass. The orchard wasn’t fictional. It was a memory. She could hear the rustling of leaves, the soft sounds of footsteps behind her, always slower than hers—because he liked watching her walk ahead.
She remembered turning back and laughing.
She remembered loving him.
And it terrified her.
Then came Chapter Seven, Eight, Nine and Ten. They were slower. More conversation starters getting to know each other.
Chapter Eleven started slower. Lilah stood before his collection of books, running her fingers over each cover. There were no labels. No categories.
Just shelves built of dark wood and neatly arranged leather bound books.
Dahlia squinted at the description, the scene slowly unravelling before her in startling clarity. It wasn’t just a place she was reading—it was a place she slowly seemed to remember.
She remembered the smoothness of the dark wood. The faint scent of sandalwood and ink that clung to the room. The way his hands trembled when he handed her a book.
In that chapter, he didn’t speak. Not at first. He only watched her as she moved through his private world. “You wrote these?” Lilah had asked to which she was met with silence. Then finally, he said, “Each one contains a version of me I thought I’d lost. But you... you always find them.”
The next line she couldn’t read for her eyes had blurred with tears she didn’t know she could cry.
“For I am glad I will no longer miss any.”
The line pierced through her ribs, almost as if she had heard them once before. She had always felt at home in libraries. But this—this was different.
This was his world. And he had let her in.
She realized then the unnamed man’s voice, soft and deliberate, matched someone in her waking life.
Her professor.
She shook her head violently. No. No. It couldn’t be. The lines were blurring too much.
But when she closed her eyes, she saw the room.
She heard his whisper. “You’re the only one I write for.
She couldn’t move on from the previous chapter. Had it been up to her, she wouldn’t have either. But something about it kept pulling her to keep reading.
There it was, another quote written, bold as the black of the ink, yet italics to drive her attention to it. Chapter Twelve.
“If I forget, remind me. If I falter, reach for me. If I die, remember me. For I will always find you, in every life, in every version, in every ending.”
As Dahlia read, she felt her skin crawl with the sensation of something she hadn’t ever felt before.
And again—flashback-like visions as she read. A letter she had once found in her childhood dresser. One she couldn’t read. One she had thrown away because the words wouldn’t appear.
She remembered burning it.
But also, it didn’t quite feel like her own childhood. She remembered a corset.
Chapter Thirteen hit her like a storm - it was their wedding.
Him and Lilah.
It was written with such beauty and grace, that it felt like all of the poetry in the world woven together to create love in all of its forms. The words spoke of the way he tucked a flower behind Lilah’s ear. The way he kissed the top of her hand instead of her lips, murmuring something only she understood.
“There is a reason why I was always drawn to you, my Lilah. For when I look in your eyes, I find something I never knew I sought… A home that cradles every storm and every rain, and softens every war within me.”
The ring exchanged was simple and in gold. The vows made were a promise to never remove it until she remembered. The entire ceremony was under the eyes of God in a beautiful chapel.
Dahlia wiped her eyes and turned the chapter.
Chapter Fourteen took her 28 hours.
And she didn’t move for most of them.
It began with Lilah humming to herself, seated by a window, writing letters she never intended to send. The scent of rosewater in the air, a canopy of vines draping the edges of the window frame. The imagery in the book wasn’t simply vivid—it was transportive. And Dahlia wasn’t reading anymore.
She was remembering.
The lines between fiction and memory had long dissolved, and she could feel the ghost of ink staining her fingers.
In this chapter, the unnamed man didn’t appear for many pages. It was Lilah alone. It documented her pregnancy—tender, soft, filled with hope. She had written in a journal each night to the child growing within her, describing dreams of orchards and lullabies, of ivy-covered homes and safety.
Each page was a lullaby in itself.
And then it happened.
The accident wasn’t described with melodrama or even chaos. It was haunting in its stillness. A carriage. A slippery path. A scream that changed everything.
Dahlia could feel the silence that followed the scene of Lilah’s funeral. She thought of it as an ever so noisy silence. Absolute stillness. As though the world had to pause its happenings to grieve her loss.
“There was no need to describe the loss,” Dahlia said, as she highlighted that paragraph. She deemed it unnecessary. But it was more inclined to the fact that it felt, almost as if the grief was used as the ink. The unnamed man found her too late.
Her body, lifeless.
His eyes sparkle-free.
His fingers trembled as he placed his ring on her cold hand one last time.
“I had promised I’d look for you – to love you in every life,” the passage read. “And if this one was stolen from us, I will find the next. Even if I walk it alone.”
Those were a part of his wedding vows.
She screamed into her tear-stained pillow that night.
The pain was oddly unbearable. The grief—the realization that the ache she’d always carried in her chest wasn’t born of this lifetime—it was inherited. From a version of herself that had lived and loved and lost too early.
The next day, she finally began the final chapter – Chapter Fifteen
But this was wrongly titled a chapter – it was a letter from the author himself.
A letter to Lilah.
From him.
Dahlia read on.
“My dearest Lilah,
I once made you a promise—that I would never stop writing, not as long as your soul roamed the Earth. Under the eyes of God in the chapel we wed, I told you so. And true to you, I kept that vow – by making you my muse. Writing became the only way I knew how to keep you near me.
Every time I sat before my blank pages, the words I wrote came, not from me, but through me—as though your spirit hovered gently behind my shoulder, whispering words of beauty from beyond the veil.
In moments away from my desk, you felt gone. So I wrote to feel your presence near me again.
You were in my breath, within my ink, forever in my memory—and I was simply the hand that loved you enough to remember you through centuries.”
By the time Dahlia had gotten to the last page of the final chapter, dawn had crept into her room, casting golden light over the walls, drawing with the shadows of the winter trees, and her own with the small book in her lap.
Her hands trembled as they hovered over the final page.
"You never change—not really. You’re still the girl who has flowers in her name and owns a soul that speaks in loud hues of summer and joy. In your lingering glances at me, you held the power to make me give in to the furies of the universe. It was never meant to be you and I. But I will fight until it can be.
And me? I always find you.
Lifetime after lifetime, I search for you until I know deep within my bones, and until my spirit aches from the weight of the déjà vu; and like clockwork, every time I see you—even if you don’t remember me—I know. For I will always know my Lilah.
I search because one lifetime was never enough to love you.
But this is the part I've never had the heart to tell you— that when you remember me… I don’t get to stay. The universe never wanted anything good for us.
Unfortunately, the moment your heart reaches out to love and recognizes mine, my time here ends. Your soul finds a different body, or mine is forced to. That’s the rule, the cost of finding you. For reincarnations are a work of the god, and finding you breaks the balance.
When you recognize my soul, the nature makes us go two ways. Either you lose your current mortal place on the Earth, or I lose mine. But I lose either way for what is a life without you in it?
And now… you remember.
I saw it in your eyes as you looked at the name of this book. It sparkled the copper shade it does when your curiosity peaks. It always starts with this book.
And gods, it was beautiful.
But Lilah—
I can feel it. It’s happening again. The pull. The unraveling. My time is running out.
And yet, if I had the choice, I’d do it all again.
I’d spend a hundred more lives searching for you, even if every single one ended the same way. Because loving you, even for a moment, is worth every ending.
I’d rather love you for a moment, than go a lifetime without loving you.
So promise me this:
Don’t cry for me.
Instead, look for me when the sky turns violet and the world feels slightly off-center. That’s when I’m closest for I too will be looking at the same sky, hoping that’s how we’re connected.
I will find you, Lilah. In every life.
Even if it kills me every damn time.
Forever yours,"
It was signed, finally, with a name.
"Carter James."
The flashbacks surged like waves during a storm. The orchard. The vows. The scent of yellowed paper. The way he used to hold her pinkie with his thumb. The first time he told her he loved her—not with words, but with a touch so reverent it made her weep.
It wasn’t just a story.
It wasn’t fiction.
The sob that ripped from her chest wasn’t poetic. It was real. Raw. Decades—no, lifetimes—of longing condensed into a single breath.
She wept on the floor for hours that night, clutching the book to her chest.
And then, the next morning, as the hands of the clock struck 8—like clockwork—she stood.
She walked into his lecture hall.
Her feet carried her like she was made of purpose and fury and heartbreak all braided into one.
She slammed the book down in front of him. The noise silenced the room
“Is this some sick joke?” she demanded with a shaky voice. Her eyes were still shining with tears that hadn’t dried. “What the hell is this?”
He didn’t flinch.
He didn’t explain.
Instead, he just looked up at her with the softest eyes she’d ever seen, taking her aback momentarily.
“I’m glad you remembered, Lilah,” he whispered, voice hoarse.
And in that moment, she saw him—not just her professor.
But him - the man in the books that loved Lilah – her.
The man who had waited for her in every life. The man who had written poetries to the stars, who had written books for memories, who had worn a gold ring for a woman who never remembered him. The man who wrote messages in the book were meant for the understanding of her eyes alone.
And now—she had.
He smiled, gentle, relieved, and so very tired.
And then, just like that… he stopped breathing.
Collapsed gently in his chair like the story had finally ended. Like his soul had found peace in the knowledge that she finally knew.
She screamed his name—a name now stained with loss more than love.
But he didn’t wake.
She remembered her classmates running to circle the professor, one of them lying him flat and starting CPR, another dialing emergency services. But everything seemed like a blur, and everything sounded like white noise.
There was no miracle of a twist. No magic resurrection. No true love’s kiss.
Just… silence.
A silence filled with everything they had ever been.
And Dahlia knelt before him, weeping into his sleeve, holding onto a love in the form of her leather bound book. Perhaps there were worse things than being Juliet to someone’s Romeo – A Romeo and Juliet who are forced to lose each other over and over, while knowing it may be coming.
Because sometimes… remembering is all that’s left. Sometimes, questions don’t have answers.
And sometimes… it’s enough.
After all, some stories are meant to be within margins.
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