Evie James

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Introduction

Most love stories start with a man. Mine starts with a house called Pebblestone, a Rottweiler with boundary issues, and two small boys who think I’m indestructible. It starts with me: a woman who has survived enough chaos to qualify as a minor natural disaster, standing in the wreckage of a life that didn’t go to plan. It starts with me deciding, quietly, not to lie down in it. There are no fairytales here. Only saltwater and petrol fumes. A kitchen bench stacked with pancake

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Author's Note

Gypsy Love

Prologue

Chapter 1: Pebblestone

If you've ever...

Loved someone who couldn’t stay.
Not the polished version.
The real one.

Held everything together alone.
The nights.
The laughter.
The tears.

Started again anyway.

Because we all walk through fire and water.
And we all find air in the end.

...then this story is for you.

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I went into labour nine days before I let myself give birth. My body knew what my mind refused to admit:
I wasn’t safe yet.

I didn’t get the luxury of just being a mother.
I became a fortress.

I didn’t know then the full impact this birth would have on us all, but as that new day dawned, with my newborn curled under one arm and my firstborn tucked against the other, I made a vow:
I will not let the world hurt my children.
Not fate.
Not fear.

And I didn’t, and I haven’t.
Not then.
Not ever.

Pebblestone was not my dream house.
It was the house I had left.

Or at least, the house I would have left, if leaving had been an option.

A life held together with all my strength, faith, and a will that had shown it would not break.

I know I should close the door.

But I don’t.

Because love like this:
wild, impossible, ruinous.
It doesn’t just die.
It lingers.
Like smoke on fabric.
Like salt on skin.

I am the drowning mermaid, holding my heart out from beneath the waves.

And maybe I’ll never stop.
Maybe this is just the cost of love:
to ache beautifully for something that was never going to stay.

She isn’t who survived the storm — she’s who grew through it. 

Once she thought love was fire or tide, but it was always the earth beneath her feet — steady, ancient, alive. 

Now she walks toward the light not to escape the past, but to honour it. 

Every scar, every brushstroke, every breath — proof that creation is what remains when destruction has had its say.

Maybe that’s what soulmates really are,
not the ones who stay,
but the ones who arrive like a whisper in the dark,
fleeting but perfectly timed,
reminding you of the person you were before the world demanded otherwise.
They don’t build a life with you…
they remind you how to live yours.

He said goodbye that night.
I said goodbye the next morning.

For a long time, I thought he was the fire. Wild, magnetic, impossible to hold.
But looking back, I see it now.
He was the smoke.
I was the flame.

He drew warmth from me, called it love, then feared the burn.
And I mistook his shadows for depth.

This poem wasn’t written to forgive him.
It was written to remember myself.

Come back as a man who has tasted fire and no longer runs. 🔥

This one was drawn in the lead up to Mum’s heart surgery.
It started as a way to breathe through the waiting, and became something else entirely.

He’s the cave — dark, hollow, comfortable in his own shadow, avoiding the world.

I’m the woman standing in the light..

Roots stretched and tangled beneath us.
Mine warm him. His drain me.
And still, I stay.
Holding us both up because that’s what love was, self-erasure dressed as devotion.

Looking at it now, I see the truth I couldn’t then:
The light wasn’t his to give. It was mine all along.

It was gravity.

Even after the loss, the silence, the exhaustion, I still wanted to believe that two people who’d broken each other could learn to be soft again.

So when he texted, I said yes.
And somehow, we ended up in Fremantle: barefoot in the rain, silk and laughter under the fairy lights.

He sketched me that night. Quick lines, careful eyes. Like he was trying to capture me before I disappeared.

We found the car the next morning, ten metres from where we started.

A perfect loop.

The kind of love that never moves forward, but only circles back… until you’re too dizzy to tell the difference between forgiveness and gravity.

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