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Gone where? How?

Gone is what people say when they lose their keys. When a light burns out. When the last of the whiskey disappears from a bottle.

Raven isn’t gone.

She can’t be.

Gone suggests there’s a place without her, and I haven’t found one yet.

She’s in every room I enter.

Every road I take.

Every stretch of silence long enough for my mind to turn against me.

The trail narrows as I move lower. My breathing becomes uneven, but I don’t slow. The ache in my head sharpens. My stomach twists around nothing.

We stopped here.

The memory arrives before the place does.

Raven stood near the railing, looking down at the water. The sun caught in her hair. She leaned back against me when I wrapped my arms around her, and for one minute I believed we had more time.

Not forever.

I’d stopped asking for forever. I only wanted more.

Another morning where she complained that I took up too much of the bed while somehow sleeping directly on top of me.

Another fight about whether coffee counted as breakfast.

Another night with her cold feet shoved beneath my legs.

More.

I would’ve taken anything.

The walkway opens onto the overlook. The river moves below, dark and restless between banks of snow.

I freeze.

Someone’s standing on the opposite side.

At first, I see only the shape. Then it comes into better focus. A woman with long hair near the trees. She’s still enough that she might be mistaken for part of the landscape.

My heart gives one violent beat.

Everything inside me goes quiet.

She turns her head.

I can’t see her face from this distance, but I know the movement. The slight tilt. The way her hair slips forward over her shoulder.

My hand closes around the railing.

“Raven?”

The woman doesn’t move.