The Wind That Blows The Dove

The fog had rolled into Seabrook like a tired gray animal, stretching its limbs across the coastal town until everything felt muted—streets, storefronts, even the gulls themselves. It wasn’t an unusual morning on the Southern California coastline, but something about this fog felt heavier, denser, as if it carried secrets in its folds.

Hannah Reyes stood outside Fire House 87 Café, hugging her navy cardigan tight around her shoulders while she waited for her to-go order. The old firehouse, now a coffee shop and museum, always smelled faintly of roasted beans, lemon polish, and history. Sometimes the ghosts—if the rumors were true—made their presence known by rattling the ladder display or knocking over a spoon. Hannah honestly didn’t mind. Ghosts didn’t scare her. The living world did.

A cold gust curled around her legs, teasing at the edges of her skirt. She shivered. The fog shifted. The air felt restless.

“Order for Hannah!” called Marta, the barista—who also swore she once saw a Dalmatian-shaped mist wander through the old fire truck.

Hannah stepped inside, grabbing the warm cup like a lifeline. “Thanks, Marta.”

“Long day ahead?” Marta asked, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Just… distracted, I guess.”

“Still thinking about him?” Marta said softly.

Hannah’s eyes darted away. “I don’t know if I’m thinking about him or… trying not to.”

Marta offered the kind of sympathetic smile only someone who had been burned by love could give. “Careful. What you run from tends to chase you.”

Hannah stepped outside again—only to realize the fog had thickened. The air felt electric, like the moment before a curtain rises.

And that was when the wind struck.

Not a lazy breeze, not a coastal drift—this was a sudden, fierce gust that barreled down the street as if it had orders to give. It yanked at Hannah’s hair, tugged violently at the sleeve of her cardigan, and sent napkins, flyers, and autumn leaves spiraling upward like startled birds.

“Whoa!” she gasped, taking a step back.

Somewhere nearby, a car alarm chirped.

And then she saw it.

A single page, torn roughly from a notebook, tumbled high above the street—twisting, fluttering, fighting the wind’s wild dance. It looped like a leaf caught in a whirlpool of air. For one dizzying moment it hovered right above her head.

Then the wind died.

Just—stopped.

The page wavered.

And fell.

Hannah caught it in both hands, heart pounding.

The handwriting was slanted but careful, a kind of earnest neatness she recognized from somewhere she couldn’t place.

The words read:

“The wind that blows the dove

is the wind that blows my love.

Hope it’ll find its way to you

wherever you are.”

Her breath hitched.

This… this was familiar. Not the poem—she had never heard it before—but the voice behind the handwriting. Something in the looping Y’s and the way the T’s carried long horizontal lines.

Her pulse quickened.

“Isaac?” she whispered.

The name slipped from her lips before she could stop it.

She hadn’t said his name out loud in months.

Isaac Turner had left Seabrook last spring, after the accident. Not his accident—hers. The one she insisted didn’t matter, the one he insisted did. They danced around each other in the weeks that followed, tangling in broken conversations, unfinished sentences, unspoken fears. When he tried to talk, she shut down. When she tried to pretend everything was fine, he saw through her.

One night, he left her a note saying he had been accepted to a marine biology internship in Monterey and didn’t know when he’d be back.

He never called.

She never asked him to.

Hannah folded the page carefully, almost ceremonially. It felt… sacred.

She had to know where it came from.

The fog thinned as the day wore on, replaced by fractured sunlight and a growing wind. Leaves raced along sidewalks, brushing the ankles of pedestrians. Traffic lights swayed above intersections.

Hannah headed toward the beach—without knowing why. Maybe because that was where Isaac had always gone when he needed clarity. Maybe because she hoped the wind would guide her. Or maybe because the phrase “wherever you are” echoed endlessly in her mind.

She walked past the pier, past the fisherfolk repairing nets, past teenagers weaving around with surfboards plastered with neon stickers. Seabrook was the kind of place where the ocean served as a compass for everyone—dreamers, wanderers, people running away, people trying to find something lost.

She reached their old spot: a bench looking out over the waves, tucked behind a thicket of sea grass. Here, Isaac had told her he believed the ocean carried messages. “Water moves,” he once said. “It never holds still. Everything it touches, it brings somewhere.”

The notebook page fluttered in her hand.

She stared at it.

Could it be possible?

Had the wind truly carried this from him to her?

Something about it felt too pointed, too poetic—too intentional to be dismissed.

She sank onto the bench.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” she murmured.

The wind answered by picking up again, stronger now.

A newspaper page slapped against her boot. Down the beach, a hat blew off someone’s head and tumbled like a dune-buggy. The sea grass bowed and hissed. The ocean shifted color—gunmetal gray beneath a gathering sky.

And then—another flash of white.

Hannah squinted.

Another page?

Yes—a second one, tumbling down the shoreline like it was late for an appointment.

She stood. “Hey!”

The page skittered away, racing toward the lifeguard tower before ducking beneath it like a mischievous child in a game of hide-and-seek.

Hannah chased it, dropping to her knees in the sand. The page was half-buried, edges damp.

She pulled it free.

And froze.

It said:

“If the tide takes my voice away,

I hope the wind carries what I couldn’t say.”

It was the same handwriting.

Her heartbeat changed rhythm.

Was this a trail?

Was the universe leaving her breadcrumbs?

Before she could think further—

“HANNAH?!”

She spun around.

A lanky Black man in a windbreaker was jogging toward her, curly black hair damp like dewy grass from the marine layer. It took her a moment to place the face—then she remembered.

Michael Simmons, local reporter for Seabrook Viking News. He often hung around the beach hunting for human-interest stories.

“Hannah!” he called again. “Is that you?”

“Yes! Hi!” she answered, still gripping both pages.

“What are you doing out here? The wind advisory just turned into a full-blown warning. Danny radioed in that the gusts are hitting almost forty miles an hour!”

“Oh.” She blinked. “I didn’t notice.”

“Hard not to—” He studied her face. “You okay?”

She hesitated.

Then she held out the two pages.

Michael read them quickly.

“Interesting,” he said slowly.

“Coincidence?” she asked.

Michael shook his head. “If there’s anything I’ve learned as a journalist in this town, it’s that Seabrook doesn’t do coincidence. Something is happening.”

“But… what?”

Before he could answer, a shrill whistle blew from down the beach.

A lifeguard shouted, “Everyone off the shoreline! Storm front approaching!”

Michael’s eyes flicked toward the darkening horizon. “Come on. Let’s get you to the pier. At least it’s sheltered up there.”

Hannah nodded numbly, and the two of them hurried toward the pier as the wind escalated into something feral, loud, alive.

Beneath the pier, the air throbbed with tension. The wooden pillars trembled as waves battered them. Seagulls darted inland, screeching. Sand blasted across the beach in thin stinging sheets.

Hannah leaned against a pillar, clutching the two pages like they were driftwood in a storm.

Michael kept a cautious eye on the waterline. “We might get hit harder than forecasted. There’s a cold front sweeping down from—”

But Hannah wasn’t listening.

She was staring past him.

At the shoreline.

A figure stood there. Tall. Still. Facing the sea.

Her breath caught.

“No way,” she whispered.

The wind roared so loudly she wasn’t sure if Michael heard her.

The figure wore a salt-stained hoodie, hood up, hands deep in pockets. The posture, the silhouette… it was impossible. Too much of a coincidence. Too impossible not to be true.

Hannah didn’t think.

She ran.

“HANNAH!” Michael shouted. “HEY! It’s dangerous—!”

But his warning dissolved into the wind.

Sand kicked up around her legs. Her hair lashed her face. The gusts shoved at her like hands trying to push her back.

But she kept going.

When she was ten feet away, the figure turned.

And her world stopped.

It was him.

Isaac.

Windblown. Older. Eyes softer than she remembered and sadder too.

“Hannah?” he said, voice barely audible through the storm.

She skidded to a stop, chest heaving.

“You—” She swallowed. “You’re here.”

“I’ve been back for two days,” Isaac said. “I tried to find you but… I didn’t know how to start.”

Hannah held up the pages, shaking. “Did you write these?”

He blinked. “Yes. But… how do you have them?”

“They… blew to me,” she said. “The wind carried them.”

Isaac stared at her, eyes widening as he took in her trembling hands, the torn edges, the smeared ink.

Then he laughed under his breath—this disbelieving, almost awed sound. “I threw them away.”

“You what?”

“I couldn’t sleep last night. I wrote a bunch of things I’d wanted to say but never had the courage to. Then I thought I was being stupid and dramatic. So I ripped them out and tossed them in the recycling bin outside my mom’s house.” He shook his head. “I didn’t think anyone would see them ever again.”

Hannah stared at him. “But why write them at all?”

Wind whipped across both their faces. The sky flickered with distant lightning.

Isaac’s jaw tightened.

“Because I left things unsaid. Too many things.” He looked down at the pages in her hands. “I didn’t know how to talk to you after the accident. You kept pushing me away. I kept trying to fix things you didn’t want fixed. I didn’t understand what you needed.”

“I didn’t either,” she whispered.

“I wanted to stay,” he said. “But every time I tried to help you heal, you acted like you didn’t want me to see you hurting. And then when Monterey accepted me… I took the chance. But I shouldn’t have left without talking to you.”

The waves crashed harder.

Hannah felt tears burning. “Why didn’t you call?”

Isaac’s face crumpled in regret. “I was scared. I thought I’d made it worse. I thought you hated me.”

“I never—never—hated you.”

The wind howled, swirling around them like a live thing. Nearby, a trash can toppled and rolled.

Isaac stepped closer. “Then why didn’t you call me?”

She shook her head, voice cracking. “I didn’t think you wanted me to.”

A moment hung between them—raw, painful, drenched in everything they never voiced.

Thunder rumbled.

Michael appeared at the top of the shoreline, shouting, “HEY! You two! GET AWAY FROM THE WATER!”

But neither moved.

Hannah held out the first torn page.

“The wind that blows the dove is the wind that blows my love,” she recited softly. “Hope it’ll find its way to you wherever you are.”

Isaac’s eyes glimmered. “That one was the first thing I wrote. I was thinking about your favorite painting at the firehouse—the dove on the old ladder. I thought… if words could travel like birds, maybe those would.”

“And they did,” she said. “The wind brought them.”

He looked genuinely shaken. “Then maybe that’s a sign.”

Lightning speared the sky. The wind became a wall of sound.

Hannah stepped closer until their foreheads almost touched.

“Tell me,” she whispered over the storm. “Tell me now. Say what you couldn’t before.”

Isaac cupped her face with both hands. They were cold, trembling slightly.

“I never stopped loving you,” he said hoarsely. “I thought leaving was the right thing, but all it did was show me how wrong I was. I love you, Hannah. I always—”

A monstrous gust blasted between them.

Hannah staggered.

Isaac grabbed her arm, pulling her into his chest before she could fall. They clung to each other as wind whipped violently around them, sand pelting their legs, spray licking their faces.

Michael shouted again from far away, “GET UP HERE!”

Isaac pressed his forehead to hers. “We need shelter.”

She nodded.

Hand in hand, they fought their way back toward the pier, each gust feeling like a challenge issued by the sky itself. The storm was no longer posturing—it was showing its teeth now. Waves surged higher, spraying over the shoreline and soaking their shoes.

Beneath the pier, Michael looked exasperated and relieved. “Are you two out of your minds?! This is not the time for romantic reunions! There’s a storm cell moving faster than predicted—come on!”

They scrambled up the stairway to the pier. Wind rattled the railings. Boats in the marina pitched dangerously. The town’s emergency siren began to wail.

“What do we do?” Hannah asked.

Michael pointed toward Fire House 87 in the distance. “That place has thick walls and a basement. We wait it out there. Come on!”

Together, they ran.

Fire House 87’s interior smelled like wet pavement and coffee beans when they burst through its doors. Marta’s eyes widened. “Whoa! Storm’s getting nasty out there!”

“Basement?” Michael panted.

“Go!” she said, waving them toward the back. “Already opened it!”

Hannah and Isaac descended the stairs into the sturdy concrete basement. Michael followed after taking a quick headcount upstairs.

The storm outside roared like something ancient.

Down here, though, the air felt still. Heavy. Safe.

Hannah sank onto a crate, hands shaking as the last of the adrenaline ebbed.

Isaac sat beside her. Not too close. Just near enough that she could feel the warmth of him.

After a long silence, he spoke.

“I meant what I said.”

She swallowed. “I know.”

“Do you… still feel something? Or have I imagined all of this?”

Hannah reached into her cardigan pocket, slowly pulling out the two wind-delivered pages. “You didn’t imagine anything.”

Isaac blinked as she placed them gently onto his lap.

“You wrote these,” she said. “But the wind chose to bring them to me. Why? I don’t know. But maybe because the universe wasn’t done with us.”

He exhaled shakily. “Are you done with us?”

Hannah wiped at her eyes. “No. Not even close.”

A rumble of thunder echoed through the building.

Isaac finally allowed himself to smile—a small, cracking-open smile that looked like the first ray of sun after long rain.

“Then,” he said, voice soft, “can we try again?”

Hannah reached for his hand.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “We can.”

The wind shrieked outside, battering the firehouse walls as if demanding entry. But inside the basement the air remained calm, a pocket of stillness carved out of chaos.

Isaac lifted the first page again, reading it beneath the single amber bulb.

“The wind that blows the dove…” he murmured.

“…is the wind that blows my love,” Hannah finished.

He looked at her.

“Guess it found you.”

She smiled through fresh tears. “Guess it brought you back.”

Above them, the storm raged, not knowing—or perhaps knowing too well—that sometimes the wildest winds carry the gentlest truths.

And sometimes, a torn page travels farther than fear ever could.