Page 27

Stay with me.

Please.

Just stay.

Then The Light.

It surrounded me with a warmth unlike anything I’d ever felt. It was gentle enough that I didn’t question trusting it. There was no anger in its presence. No impatience. Only a quiet certainty that frightened me more than any threat could’ve.

You’ve endured what was asked of you.

For one impossible moment, the pain was gone. I could breathe without fighting for every inhale. There was no heaviness in my body, no exhaustion pulling me under, no fear of what the next hour might bring.

There was only peace.

And Samuel’s voice.

I turned away from The Light, searching for him through a brightness that seemed to stretch forever. I could still hear him calling for me, still feel the desperation in the way he clung to the body I’d already left behind.

Then The Light spoke again.

His path is not yours to walk.

I wanted to argue. I wanted to scream that it already was—that every path I’d chosen since the day I met Samuel had somehow led me back to him. We’d built a life out of wrong turns, second chances, and promises we had no business making when neither of us knew how much time we’d be given.

His path had been mine for years.

Death didn’t get to change that.

I remember shaking my head and reaching for him, though there was nothing solid beneath my feet and no distance I understood between us. Then I saw the thread, silver and shining, running from The Light to me and from me to Samuel.

I held on.

After that, everything blurs.

Time doesn’t move here the way it did when I was alive. It stretches until a single moment feels endless, then disappears without warning, stealing hours before I realize they’ve passed.

Sometimes I close my eyes and open them somewhere else, with no memory of moving. Other times, I watch the second hand on a clock circle its face again and again without feeling as though any time has passed at all.

I don’t know how long I remained beside Samuel at the creek.

Dad and Knox found Samuel there sometime in the night, still holding me, half-frozen and beyond answering when they said his name. I watched my brother pry him loose. Watched my father help carry him back toward the cabin. Between them, Samuel’s body was limp and unresisting. He’s already gone somewhere neither the grief nor the cold could follow.

I stayed behind with what was left of me.

I don’t know why. Maybe some part of me needed to see it through to the end, or maybe I simply couldn’t make myself leave my own body lying there in the snow, even knowing it wasn’t me anymore—not really.

My father came back for that part. I don’t know how long it took him, only that at some point he was there, kneeling in the snow beside me the way he used to kneel beside my bed when I was small and couldn’t sleep. He didn’t say much. He gathered the blanket around me and waited there in the cold until the people from the funeral home arrived, quiet and practiced from doing this exact thing more times than anyone should have to.

I watched my father do what my husband was unable to do. Someone had to stay with me until the end. Watching him, I understood that it was always going to be him.

The days that followed come back in pieces.

Flowers crowded every flat surface at my father’s house, their sweetness becoming so heavy that even I imagined I could smell them. People carried food through the door because casseroles were easier than admitting no one really knew how to help. They hugged Samuel, touched his shoulder, and told him how sorry they were while he stood perfectly still and waited for each of them to let go.

They spoke about me as though I weren’t standing beside them.

Some of the stories were wrong.