The Solstice Light

The grief was a physical thing here, a presence in the air as real as the ice crystals that glittered under the failing streetlights.

The bus engine was a low, tired growl, the only sound in a world that had forgotten how to speak. Outside the frost-laced window, there was only white. A relentless, swallowing white that erased the horizon, that turned the towering pines into pale ghosts, that buried the road so completely the driver seemed to navigate by memory alone. It had been snowing for three days straight, the radio announcer had said back in the city, his voice a chipper, distant thing. Here, it felt like it had been snowing forever. Like the sky had cracked open and was bleeding out its last, pale essence.

This is what forgetting looks like, I thought, my breath fogging a small circle on the glass. This is the color of it. A blank page. A mercy. But I wasn't here for mercy. I was here for the opposite. I was here for remembrance.

Pine Hollow. The name itself felt like a splinter under my tongue. I hadn’t spoken it aloud in five years. Not since the day I left, promising myself I’d never look back, that the rearview mirror was not a window to the past but a portal to a future scrubbed clean of this place. A future without the particular ache of a northern winter, without the smell of damp wool and frozen earth, without the memory of Leo’s laughter echoing off the ice-choked river.

Guilt is a poor compass. It doesn't point north; it points backward. It had spun in my chest for five years, a frantic, useless needle, until it finally locked into place, pointing me home. The phone call from Mom had been the final jolt. Her voice, thin and brittle as a dead leaf. She wasn't making sense, talking about the shadows in the corners of the house, about Dad sitting in his armchair for hours, just staring at the wall. She’d said he wasn’t sleeping. That no one was, really. ‘The nights are too long, Clara,’ she’d whispered, and the line had filled with a static that sounded too much like wind howling through skeletal trees. ‘It’s just… too long.’

I knew what she meant. In Pine Hollow, winter wasn't a season; it was a siege. A slow, grinding pressure of cold and dark that squeezed the life out of everything. It pressed on the roofs, on the windows, on the minds of the people who were too stubborn or too stuck to leave. And this year, according to the almanac and the old-timers, was set to be the worst in a century. The solstice was coming, the longest night, and it felt less like an astronomical event and more like a final judgment.

The bus groaned to a halt, the hiss of its air brakes a shocking intrusion into the profound quiet. “Pine Hollow,” the driver grunted, not bothering to turn around. His shoulders were a testament to a lifetime of driving this same, lonely route. I was the only one left. The only one getting on or off. I pulled my worn duffel bag from the overhead rack, the worn strap digging into my shoulder. The guilt was there, too, a physical weight that had settled deep in my bones. It felt like I was carrying Leo’s absence in that bag, a heavy, shapeless thing I could never set down.

Stepping off the bus was like stepping into another world. The cold was a physical blow, a thief that stole the air from my lungs and replaced it with shards of glass. The silence rushed in to fill the space the engine had occupied. It was a dense, textured thing, made of falling snow and the immense, indifferent presence of the forest that ringed the town. It wasn't peace. It was a void. The sound of my own heartbeat was a frantic drum against the hush.

The town looked smaller, somehow. Cowed. The single main street was a narrow canyon carved between high banks of plowed snow. The windows of the general store, the post office, the tiny diner—they glowed with a sick, yellow light, like the eyes of a feverish animal. Everything was hunched against the cold. The houses seemed to be sinking into the drifts, their roofs piled high, their porches erased. There were no footprints other than my own. No tire tracks newer than the bus's. It was four in the afternoon, but the sky was already the color of a day-old bruise, the sun a forgotten rumor.

My boots crunched, the sound obscenely loud. I walked past the town hall, its paint peeling under the eaves, a notice for a bake sale last October still tacked to the corkboard, its edges curled and faded. I passed the diner, ‘The Hungry Moose,’ and through the condensation-streaked window, I saw a few figures sitting at the counter, hunched over mugs, their faces illuminated by the eerie glow of the neon sign. No one was talking. They were just staring. Staring into their coffee, or at the wall, or at nothing at all.

This was the silence Mom had talked about. It wasn't just the snow. It was in them. A silence of the spirit. A hollowing out. The whole town felt like it was holding its breath, waiting for something terrible to happen, or maybe waiting for the terrible thing that had already happened to finally be over.

My family's house was at the end of Hemlock Lane, the last one before the woods took over completely. The walk felt longer than I remembered. Each step was an effort, not just against the snow but against the magnetic pull of the past. I saw Leo, age ten, launching himself from that snowbank into a drift, emerging like a powdered ghost, laughing so hard he couldn't stand. I saw him at sixteen, sullen and angry, kicking at the frozen slush on this same sidewalk after our last fight. The fight I’d replayed in my head a million times. The words I’d said, the ones he’d thrown back. The slammed door. The silence that followed, which I mistook for a temporary truce but was, in fact, the beginning of the great, permanent one.

‘It’s just a stupid argument, Leo! You’ll get over it!’ My voice, sharp and dismissive. I was packing my bags for college, for my escape. He’d wanted me to stay. Just for the weekend. For the first ice fishing trip of the season. But I had a party to get to, friends to see, a life to start. A life that didn’t revolve around this suffocating little town.

He hadn’t gotten over it. The ice had been too thin. That’s what they said. A freak accident. But I knew. I knew it was more than that. He’d gone out alone, angry and hurting. And I had put him there.

The house looked like a ghost of itself. The porch light was off. The windows were dark, except for a single, flickering light in the living room that was probably the television. The snow was piled up to the sills, pristine and undisturbed. No path had been shoveled to the door. It was as if the house was trying to disappear, to let the winter swallow it whole. I stood at the end of the walkway, the cold seeping through my jeans, and felt a dread so profound it almost buckled my knees. Coming back here, I realized, wasn't about seeking forgiveness. You can't ask for that from a ghost. It was about serving a sentence.

I took a breath, the air stinging my throat. My duffel bag slipped from my shoulder, landing with a soft thud in the snow. I left it there. One step. Then another. I pushed through the deep drift on the porch, my legs numb, and reached for the familiar brass doorknob. It was icy to the touch, the cold biting through my glove. The house was unlocked. It was always unlocked. In Pine Hollow, people didn't worry about their neighbors. They worried about the woods. They worried about the winter. And now, it seemed, they worried about the silence.

The air inside was thick and stale, smelling of dust and something else. Something like defeat. The flickering light was indeed the television, its blue-gray glow casting long, dancing shadows across the room. My father was in his armchair, the one with the worn-out floral pattern, his back to me. He was just as Mom had described: motionless, a silhouette against the screen. He didn't turn. I wasn't sure he’d even heard me come in.

“Dad?” My voice was a croak.

He didn’t move for a long moment. Then, slowly, his head turned. His face was pale, his eyes sunken and hollow. He looked at me, through me, as if I were just another shadow thrown by the television. “Clara,” he said. His voice was rust. The word held no surprise, no welcome. Just a flat, tired acknowledgment. “Your mother’s upstairs. She’s trying to sleep.”

He turned back to the screen. On it, a nature documentary played without sound. A pack of wolves moved through a snowy landscape, their forms fluid and silent. They were hunting. I stood there in the entryway, the cold air from outside swirling around my ankles, and watched them. A predator that thrived in the cold, that knew how to use the white silence as a weapon. And I had the sudden, chilling certainty that we were the prey.

The next morning, I forced myself out of the house. The bed in my old room, with its faded unicorn comforter that Mom never had the heart to change, had offered no rest. Every creak of the house, every gust of wind against the glass, had felt like a whisper. Leo’s name. My name. An accusation. I’d lain awake, staring at the ceiling, feeling the oppressive weight of the silence, not just from outside, but from within these walls. Mom had barely spoken to me, just a brief, tight hug and a murmur about making up the spare bed. Dad hadn't moved from his chair until long after I'd gone upstairs. The grief in this house was a presence, a third resident that had taken Leo’s place at the table.

I needed air that wasn’t saturated with it. I needed to see other faces, even if they were as haunted as my father’s. The general store was my destination. We were out of milk, bread, everything. A simple, domestic mission that felt like an act of rebellion against the inertia that had claimed my parents.

The cold was even more severe than the day before. The sky was a high, pitiless gray. My breath plumed in thick white clouds. The town was just as still. I saw a face in a window, a pale oval that vanished as soon as I looked. A curtain twitched. People were home. They were just… hiding. From the cold? Or from each other?

The bell above the door to Thomas’s General Store was a cheerful, incongruous jingle. Inside, it was warmer, but the air was just as heavy. The place smelled of sawdust, old paper, and brewing coffee, smells that should have been comforting but weren't. The long aisles were crammed with everything from canned beans to snowshoes, motor oil to mitten warmers. It was a museum of survival. At the back, behind a scarred wooden counter, stood Thomas. He was thinner than I remembered, his kind, round face drawn and etched with lines that hadn’t been there five years ago. His hair had gone almost completely white. He was staring at a small, flickering security monitor, his shoulders hunched.

He looked up as the bell jingled, and for a second, a flicker of something like warmth crossed his face. “Clara. Good lord. I heard you were coming back.”

“Just for a bit,” I said, my voice too loud in the quiet store. I walked towards the counter, my boots leaving wet prints on the worn floorboards. “To see my folks.”

“How are they?” he asked. The question was rote, but his eyes, when they met mine, were filled with a genuine, weary sadness. He knew. Of course, he knew.

“They’re… quiet,” I said, the word wholly inadequate.

“It’s a quiet winter.” He looked away, busying himself by wiping down a section of the counter that was already spotless. “Longest one I can remember.” His hands were raw and chapped. He kept his gaze down, focused on the repetitive motion of the cloth.

I picked up a wire basket and began to walk the aisles, gathering the basics. Milk, bread, eggs, coffee. The silence between us stretched, thick with everything we weren't saying. I remembered Thomas’s wife, Helen. She’d had the brightest laugh in town. She’d passed away from a sudden illness two winters ago. Thomas had never been the same.

“Seems like more than just the weather,” I ventured, trying to keep my tone casual. I stopped at the end of an aisle, holding a can of soup. “The whole town feels… shut down.”

Thomas stopped wiping the counter. He didn't look at me, but his shoulders tightened. “People are keeping to themselves. It’s safer.”

“Safer? From what? The cold?”

He finally looked up, and his eyes were dark with something I couldn’t name. It was more than grief. It was fear. A deep, abiding terror. “From the quiet,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “When it gets too quiet, you start to hear things. Things you’ve tried to forget.”

I froze, the can of soup suddenly cold in my hand. “What do you mean?”

He shook his head, a quick, sharp motion. A dismissal. “Nothing. Just old-timer talk. The dark plays tricks on you.” He forced a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “You find everything you need?”

The conversation was over. He was building a wall, and I was on the other side of it. I brought my items to the counter and he rang them up with a mechanical efficiency, his gaze fixed on the cash register. I wanted to ask more. I wanted to tell him about my dad, about the emptiness in my own house. But the look on his face, a mixture of fear and stubborn denial, stopped me. He didn't want to talk. He was afraid to.

As he handed me my change, his fingers brushed mine. They were cold as ice. “You be careful, Clara,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “Especially at night. Don’t… don’t sit in the dark.”

I left the store with his strange warning echoing in my ears. Don’t sit in the dark. It sounded like something you’d tell a child who was afraid of monsters under the bed. But Thomas was not a child, and the fear in his eyes was not imaginary. Outside, the gray sky was deepening. The streetlights flickered on, casting pools of weak, lonely light on the snow. Each house, with its glowing window, was an island in a sea of encroaching darkness. And I felt a growing certainty that something was hunting in that sea.

My search for answers, or even for a name for the fear I felt, led me to Marianne. Her house was set back from the main road, tucked into a grove of ancient birch trees, a thin curl of smoke rising from its stone chimney. Marianne was one of the town’s elders, her family having lived on this land for generations, long before Pine Hollow was a name on a map. She kept to herself mostly, but people went to her for remedies, for advice, for the stories she carried. Mom used to say that Marianne’s memory was longer than the river.

The path to her door was the only one in town that seemed well-trod. I knocked on the heavy oak door, and after a moment, it swung open. Marianne stood there, a small, bird-like woman with a face like a beautiful, intricate map of a long life. Her eyes, dark and sharp, seemed to see more than just the girl shivering on her doorstep.

“I was wondering when you’d come,” she said, her voice like the rustle of dry leaves. She stepped back, holding the door open. “The wind carries the scent of old sorrows home. Come in. The tea is hot.”

The inside of her cottage was one small, warm room that smelled of cedar, drying herbs, and woodsmoke. A fire crackled in the hearth. Books were stacked everywhere, and bundles of plants hung from the rafters. It felt like a sanctuary, a pocket of warmth and life carved out of the dead of winter. She gestured for me to sit at a small wooden table, and placed a steaming mug of dark tea in front of me. It smelled of pine needles and mint.

She sat opposite me, her hands wrapped around her own mug, and watched me over the rim. She didn't ask why I was there. She waited. Her patience was as vast and deep as the forest outside.

“People are afraid,” I said, finally breaking the comfortable silence. “Thomas at the store… my dad… It’s more than just winter blues. Something is wrong.”

Marianne nodded slowly. “The long dark has a long memory,” she said, her voice soft. “And this year, it is hungry.”

“Hungry for what?”

“For what we keep hidden,” she said, her dark eyes holding mine. “For the grief we nurse in secret. The guilt we feed in the quiet hours. The town is full of these ghosts, Clara. Little pockets of pain, locked away in every house. A feast, waiting to be eaten.”

A chill that had nothing to do with the cold outside washed over me. “Eaten? What are you talking about?”

“There is a name for it, in the old tongue. It does not translate well. But it means something like ‘The Sorrow-Eater.’ Or ‘The Grief-Feeder.’ It is not a creature of tooth and claw. It is a thing of stillness and silence. It is drawn to solitary pain, the way a wolf is drawn to the scent of a wounded deer. Winter is its hunting ground. The longer the night, the stronger it grows.”

I stared at her, my mind racing, trying to dismiss it as folklore, as the ramblings of an old woman. But the image of my father in his chair, of Thomas staring at the empty counter, of the haunted faces in the diner—it all clicked into place with a horrifying logic. “What does it do?” I whispered.

“It finds you when you are alone with your loss,” she explained, her voice steady and calm, as if she were describing the habits of a winter bird. “It settles over you, a cold weight. And it makes you remember. Not the good memories. Not the warmth. It finds the sharpest edge of your grief and makes you live it, again and again. The last words you said in anger. The moment you heard the news. The image you can’t get out of your head. It feasts on that pain, on that raw, helpless emotion. And the more it feeds, the weaker you become. You stop eating. You stop sleeping. You just sit, lost in the worst moment of your life, until there is nothing left of you but an empty vessel. A ghost before you are even in the ground.”

I thought of Mom’s words. *The nights are too long. He isn’t sleeping.* I thought of Thomas’s warning. *Don’t sit in the dark.* It wasn’t a metaphor. It was a literal instruction for survival.

“My brother,” I said, the words catching in my throat. “Leo.” I hadn’t said his name to a stranger in years. But Marianne wasn’t a stranger. Not really.

She reached across the table and her hand, warm and dry, covered mine. Her touch was a steady anchor in the sudden, terrifying storm in my mind. “I know,” she said softly. “It can smell your sorrow, child. It has been waiting for you.”

The realization landed like a block of ice in my stomach. I wasn’t just an observer here. I wasn’t a rescuer, swooping in to save my family. I was on the menu. My guilt, my five years of silent, self-inflicted punishment over Leo—it was a beacon in the dark. A signal fire for the monster that haunted this town.

“Why is it so bad this year?” I asked, my voice shaking.

“Because the town has forgotten how to talk to each other,” she said, her gaze sweeping towards the window, towards the scattered, isolated houses beyond the trees. “There have always been sorrows in Pine Hollow. Loss is the price of living. But people used to share the weight. They gathered. They told stories. They sat with each other in their grief, and their combined warmth was a fire that kept the darkness at bay. They made their pain a shared thing, a community burden. But now… now everyone locks their doors. They believe their pain is their own, a private shame. They isolate themselves. And in doing so, they set a table in the dark and invite the hunter to feast.”

I looked down at our hands on the table. Her wrinkled, knowing hand covering my trembling one. A connection. A shared warmth. And in that simple gesture, I understood what she was saying. Isolation was the poison. Connection was the antidote.

“The solstice,” I said, the idea blooming in my mind, fragile and terrifying. “The longest night of the year. It will be at its strongest then.”

“Yes,” Marianne said. “It will be a night of great hunger.”

“Then we have to be stronger,” I said, a spark of defiance kindling in my chest. It was a wild, desperate thought, born of fear and a sudden, fierce love for this broken town and its haunted people. “We have to build a fire it can’t extinguish.”

Marianne watched me, her ancient eyes searching my face. A small, sad smile touched her lips. “The wood is damp, Clara. The kindling is scattered. It is not so easy to light a fire in a storm.”

Leaving Marianne’s cabin was like stepping out of a warm, firelit story and back into the cold, hard fact of the world. Her words followed me, clinging to me like the scent of woodsmoke on my coat. *The wood is damp. The kindling is scattered.* The image was perfect. Each person in Pine Hollow was a single, damp log, smoldering with their own private grief, incapable of generating enough heat to survive. My father, lost in the memory of his son. Thomas, consumed by the absence of his wife. And me, haunted by a ghost I had helped create.

Over the next few days, I walked the town with new eyes. I was no longer just seeing a community hunkered down for winter; I was seeing a hunting ground. I made a point of going into the diner, forcing myself to sit at the counter instead of taking a booth. The few other patrons—a couple of old loggers, the woman who ran the post office—barely acknowledged me. They nursed their coffee, their gazes distant. I tried to make conversation.

“Cold enough for you?” I asked the man beside me, a wiry fellow named Bill whose hands, I noticed, had a slight tremor.

He grunted, not looking away from the salt shaker he was staring at. “It’ll get colder.”

“Solstice is next week,” I pushed gently.

He flinched. A tiny, almost imperceptible motion, but I saw it. His knuckles went white where he gripped his mug. “Long night,” he muttered into his coffee, and that was the end of it. The wall went up.

It was the same everywhere. I went to the post office to mail a letter I didn't need to send. Sarah, the postmistress, had always been a cheerful gossip. Now, she moved with a leaden slowness, her eyes puffy and ringed with gray. I asked after her husband, who’d had a bad fall at the sawmill last year.

“He’s… resting,” she said, her voice flat as she stamped my envelope with unnecessary force. “Likes his own company these days.” The words were a deflection, a polite ‘do not enter’ sign hung on the door of her pain. But I saw the way her gaze kept drifting to the window, to the gray, empty street, as if she were expecting to see something dreadful materialize out of the falling snow. She was watching for it. They all were.

I began to connect the whispers and the shadows to the names. Bill, the logger at the diner, had lost his brother in a boating accident on the lake a few years back. Sarah’s husband hadn’t just had a fall; he’d lost two fingers and could never work the saws again—a different kind of death, a death of purpose. Old Mr. Henderson, who I’d see shuffling down the street like a ghost, his face unshaven, had been a widower for less than a year. The list went on. Every closed-off face, every averted gaze, was a story of loss. The town was a graveyard of unspoken sorrows.

Marianne was right. They were a feast. A buffet of isolated anguish, laid out for a silent predator.

My own grief was a constant, cold companion. The Sorrow-Eater was testing me, probing my defenses. At night, in the quiet of my childhood bedroom, the memories of Leo would come, sharper and more vivid than they had been in years. I wouldn't just remember our last fight; I would be in it. I could feel the rough texture of the sweater I was wearing, smell the pine-scented cleaner Mom had used on the floors that morning. I could hear the exact pitch of Leo’s voice, cracking with a hurt that I had been too selfish to acknowledge.

One night, I woke up, my heart pounding, the ghost of his shouting still ringing in my ears. I was cold, so cold, despite the pile of blankets. A profound sense of despair washed over me, a feeling of utter hopelessness. It felt good, in a strange, terrible way. It felt right. I deserved this pain. It was my penance. I could just lie here, let it consume me, and pay the price for my failures.

The thought was seductive. To just give in. To stop fighting. To let the memory play on a loop until I faded away. I could feel it, the presence Marianne had described, settling in the corners of the room. A weight in the air. A deepening of the shadows. It wasn't a monster I could see; it was a feeling. A pressure. A cold that seeped into my very soul.

But then, another image broke through. Marianne’s hand covering mine. The warmth. The connection. *The wood is damp.* A flicker of anger, hot and clean, cut through the despair. I would not be another damp log. I would not let this thing win. I threw off the blankets, my teeth chattering, and went to the window. I scraped the frost away with my fingernail and looked out at the sleeping town. The scattered lights in the houses weren't just lights. They were lives. They were people, just like me, drowning in their own private darkness, convinced they were alone.

They weren't alone. They just didn't know it. We were all being haunted by the same ghost. We were all being hunted by the same predator. And our only chance was to stop fighting it alone.

The idea that had sparked in Marianne’s cabin now hardened into a plan. A desperate, crazy plan. The solstice was in three days. The longest night. It was the deadline. I had to convince them. I had to break through the walls they had built around themselves, and the wall I had built around myself. I had to make them see that the only way to banish the shadows was to create a bigger light.

My first stop had to be Thomas. If I could convince him, the unofficial heart of the town’s commerce and information, others might follow. He was respected. And his grief was one of the deepest.

I found him late the next afternoon, locking up the store. The wind was picking up, driving the snow in horizontal sheets. It was a vicious, biting wind that promised a brutal night.

“Thomas,” I called out, hurrying towards him.

He turned, startled, pulling his collar up around his neck. “Clara. You should be inside. It’s getting bad out.”

“I need to talk to you,” I said, my words nearly snatched away by the wind. “It’s important.”

He hesitated, his hand on the locked door. I could see the refusal in his eyes. He wanted to go home, to lock his own door, to retreat into the silence he both feared and cultivated. “It can wait till morning.”

“No,” I said, my voice firmer than I expected. “It can’t.” I looked him straight in the eye. “It’s about Helen.”

His face went rigid. The name hung in the air between us, a sacred, painful thing. He stared at me for a long moment, his expression a mixture of anger and anguish. Then, with a sigh that seemed to drain all the fight out of him, he unlocked the door. “Inside,” he said, his voice rough.

He didn’t turn on the main lights, just a single, small lamp on the counter. It cast long, distorted shadows down the aisles. The store felt like a cavern, a tomb. He didn’t offer me coffee. He just stood behind the counter, his arms crossed, waiting.

“What about Helen?” he asked, his tone daring me to profane her memory with whatever foolishness I’d brought to his door.

I took a deep breath. My heart was hammering. This was it. “I remember the Winter Carnival the year before she got sick,” I began, my voice quiet. “She organized the whole thing. She’d made a huge pot of chili for everyone. And she was wearing that ridiculous hat, the one with the fake antlers. She spent the entire day making sure every single kid got a chance to go on the sleigh ride. She was… she was the warmest person I ever knew. Even in the middle of winter, she felt like sunshine.”

Thomas’s rigid posture softened. His eyes glistened in the dim light. He looked down at the counter, at the spot his hands had wiped a thousand times.

“She loved that stupid hat,” he whispered.

“When I think of her, that’s what I remember,” I continued. “But I bet that’s not what you think about. Not anymore.”

He looked up, his face a mask of pain. “What are you getting at, Clara?”

“This… thing,” I said, struggling for the words. “This feeling in the town. The fear. The silence. Marianne calls it the Sorrow-Eater. It feeds on grief. On isolated grief. It takes our worst memories and plays them back to us, over and over, until there’s nothing left. It’s what’s happening to my dad. It’s what’s happening to you, isn’t it? You’re not remembering the chili and the silly hat. You’re remembering the hospital. You’re remembering the last moments. It’s cornered you with your own pain.”

He stared at me, his mouth a thin, hard line. But he didn't deny it. I saw the truth of it in the hollows of his eyes.

“I carry it too,” I said, my voice cracking. “For my brother, Leo. Every night, I have the same fight with him. The last one we ever had. I feel it… this thing… trying to pull me under. It wants me to believe I’m alone in my guilt. Just like it wants you to believe you’re alone in your grief.”

I leaned forward, my hands flat on the counter. “But we’re not. That’s the lie. That’s the trick. Bill at the diner, Sarah at the post office, my parents, you, me… we’re all being haunted. It’s picking us off, one by one, because we’re hiding from each other. Because we’ve forgotten how to share the weight.”

Thomas was shaking his head, a slow, tired motion. “You can’t share this kind of weight, Clara. It’s not possible.”

“We have to,” I insisted, my desperation making me bold. “The solstice is the night after tomorrow. The longest night. It’s going to be the worst. But what if… what if we met it with something else? Not silence. Not darkness. What if we all came together? In the old town hall. Everyone. And we just… talked? What if we told the stories? Not just the bad ones. The good ones, too. What if you stood up and told everyone about Helen’s silly hat? What if I told them about the time Leo caught his first fish and was so proud he carried it around all day?”

I was rambling, the idea taking shape as I spoke it. “We could bring candles. Everyone brings a light. We tell the stories, we say their names out loud, and we make a light of our own. We make a warmth. A noise. We create a fire out of our shared sorrow, our shared memories. A fire so big and so bright that the cold and the dark and the silence can’t touch it. We show this… this thing… that we are not alone. That our grief doesn't belong to it. It belongs to us. All of us.”

He looked at me as if I were insane. Maybe I was. But I could see it. I could feel it. A flicker of hope in the suffocating darkness.

“People won’t come,” he said, his voice heavy with the certainty of defeat. “They’re too scared. Too locked in.”

“They’ll come if you ask them,” I said, my voice pleading. “They trust you, Thomas. If you open your doors, if you’re the first one to be brave enough to speak, others will follow. We just need one person to light the first candle.”

I let the silence hang there, filled with the howl of the wind outside. He was the damp wood Marianne had spoken of. But I had to believe there was still a spark in him somewhere. He looked past me, down the dark aisles of his store, at the shelves packed with goods meant to sustain a body through the winter. But what good was a full pantry if the soul was starving?

He looked back at me, his eyes filled with a terrible, warring mixture of fear and a fragile, nascent hope. He didn’t say yes. But he didn’t say no. He just stood there, a man caught between the ghost he lived with and the terrifying possibility of letting her go.

I left the store and stepped back out into the storm. The wind whipped my hair across my face and stole my breath, but I barely felt the cold. My own fire, my own small spark of hope, was burning too brightly. I walked to the center of the deserted street and stopped, turning in a slow circle. The snow swirled around me, a dizzying vortex of white. The houses, with their few, faint lights, seemed so fragile, so vulnerable against the vast, oppressive weight of the forest and the night sky.

It was a gamble. A crazy, desperate prayer whispered into the teeth of a blizzard. I had offered my own grief, laid my own heart bare, and now there was nothing to do but wait and see if anyone, starting with Thomas, was willing to do the same. I looked up at the thick, churning clouds that hid the stars, and I thought of all the unspoken stories trapped behind those frosted windows. The grief was a physical thing here, a presence in the air as real as the ice crystals that glittered under the failing streetlights. But for the first time since I’d arrived, I felt something else alongside it. A tiny, fragile, and ferociously stubborn seed of light. The solstice was coming, and with it, the longest night. But a night, no matter how long, is still followed by the dawn.