“Some souls come back to us wearing different faces, but loving us in exactly the same way.”

There are some souls who enter our lives so quietly, so naturally, that we do not at first understand we are standing in the presence of something eternal.

The summer Lassie came into my life, the world still felt enormous and mysterious. I was ten years old, living in the Northwoods of Wisconsin then, in that strange country between childhood innocence and the first shadows of growing older. The days smelled of fresh-cut grass, lake water, and sun-warmed sidewalks. Bikes lay abandoned in yards until dusk. Baseball games stretched endlessly beneath amber evening skies. And somewhere in the middle of that bright and ordinary world, there was Lassie.

She was not a collie like the television dog. She was smaller, softer somehow, with silky ears, intelligent eyes, and a white-and-golden coat that shimmered in sunlight like wheat moving in a summer breeze. But to me she was my Lassie, and that was enough.

From the very beginning, we belonged to one another.

She followed me everywhere—not because she had to, but because she chose to. Down dirt paths. Across schoolyards in summer. Into nearby woods where sunlight filtered green through maple leaves. If I climbed a hill, she climbed it beside me. If I sat quietly beneath a tree nursing the bruises of childhood disappointments, she pressed herself against me without a sound, as though she understood the secret ache that sometimes lives inside lonely boys.

And perhaps she did.

At night, when thunderstorms rolled across Wisconsin skies and rain lashed against the windows, she slept beside my bed. Sometimes I would reach down into darkness just to feel the reassuring softness of her fur. The instant my hand touched her, her tail would thump gently against the floor. I’m here, that sound always said.

Years passed the way years always do—silently at first, then all at once.

The seasons changed. Childhood faded. Friends drifted away like leaves on rivers. The world widened.

But through all of it, Lassie remained.

She was there for first heartbreaks and family sorrows. There for lonely afternoons when I felt misunderstood by nearly everyone else in the world. There during those uncertain teenage years when emotions become storms no one teaches you how to navigate.

She never asked questions.

She simply loved.

And then one autumn morning, when the trees had just begun to burn gold and crimson, she was gone.

There are griefs people speak of politely, almost ceremonially. And then there are griefs that take up residence inside the soul.

Losing Lassie was the first time I understood that love could leave an emptiness behind so vast it echoes.

For weeks afterward, I still listened for the click of her nails against the kitchen floor. I still expected to see her waiting at the door when I came home. Sometimes, half asleep, I could have sworn I felt the weight of her beside the bed.

But life moves relentlessly forward.

Eventually adulthood arrived in full. I moved away from Wisconsin. The lakes and snowfalls of my childhood gave way to the rolling hills and sunlight of California. I built a different life in the San Francisco Bay Area—a life of work, responsibilities, friendships, dinner parties, traffic, deadlines, and all the complicated machinery of growing older.

And yet, every now and then, usually in quiet moments, I would think of her.

Not with sadness anymore.

With longing.

Then came Pina.

Dear friends of mine had adopted a puppy—a tiny thing with bright eyes and feathery ears and enough energy to power the moon. The day I first walked through their door, she came tearing across the room toward me like a bolt of living joy.

Then she stopped.

For one suspended second, the world itself seemed to pause.

She stared directly into my eyes.

Not at me.

Into me.

Her little tail began wagging so hard her entire body twisted sideways. Then she erupted into delighted barking and started running in frantic circles around my legs as though she had been waiting years for me to arrive.

Everyone laughed.

But I couldn’t.

Because somewhere deep inside me, something ancient and wordless had just awakened.

I knelt down slowly.

“Well hello there,” I whispered.

Pina pressed herself against my chest with such fierce affection that it stole the breath from me.

And in that impossible, unreasonable, magical moment, I knew.

Not with logic.

Not with evidence.

With the heart.

Somehow, impossibly, my Lassie had found me again.

Oh, I know how such things sound in the practical daylight of the world. People explain them away. Coincidence. Projection. Emotion. Memory. The human need to reconnect what time has torn apart.

Perhaps.

But there are mysteries in this life that do not fit neatly into language.

Pina and I became inseparable. Whenever I visited, she would explode into joyous chaos the instant she heard my voice. She barked happiness. Spun in circles of pure delight. Climbed into my lap as though no distance or time had ever existed between us.

And always there was that look in her eyes.

Recognition.

As though somewhere behind those dark, shining pupils lived the memory of summer evenings long ago beside lakes and thunderstorms and little boys afraid of growing up.

Then, cruelly, heartbreak returned.

Before she was even a year old, Pina died unexpectedly.

The news struck with the same terrible disbelief as losing Lassie all over again. It seemed impossibly unfair that something so bright, so loving, so filled with joy could vanish so quickly.

For days afterward, I walked through my routines carrying that familiar ache once more.

And yet...

Not entirely grief.

Because by then I understood something I had not understood as a child.

Love does not disappear.

Not really.

It changes shape perhaps. Changes form. Changes seasons.

But certain souls remain woven into us forever.

Years later, when I read A Dog's Purpose, I understood immediately why so many people wept while reading it. The story was fantasy to some readers.

To me, it felt like memory.

Even now, sometimes, I will catch sight of a small golden dog running across a field or hear the happy bark of a puppy somewhere in the distance, and for the briefest instant the years fall away.

I am ten years old again.

The world is still filled with wonder.
​
And somewhere nearby, just beyond the edge of sight, a faithful heart is still running toward me.

~Wylddane

Scene One: The Letter

The bell above the bookstore door didn’t ring so much as sigh.

Jake had meant to fix it weeks ago. Months, maybe. It had once chimed—bright and cheerful—but now it made a tired, metallic whisper that seemed more appropriate somehow.

He stood behind the counter, one hand wrapped around a mug of coffee that had long since gone lukewarm, watching State Street through the wide front window. Outside, November hovered at the edge of something colder. People walked faster now, shoulders tucked in, scarves beginning to appear like quiet declarations of surrender.

“Winter’s thinking about it,” Sam had said that morning.

Jake had laughed. But Sam was often right about things like that.

The bookstore smelled the way it always had—paper, dust, a trace of something woody and old. It wasn’t just a smell. It was a presence. Something that settled into your clothes, your skin. Something that stayed.

Luke said it smelled like memory.

Jake said it smelled like inventory that didn’t move.

They were both right.

The door opened again—another soft sigh—and Luke stepped in, bringing with him a gust of cold air and the faint scent of outside. Real outside. Metal sky and distant snow.

“You’re brooding,” Luke said, not even pausing to take off his coat.

“I’m observing,” Jake replied.

“You’re brooding while observing.”

“That’s just efficient.”

Luke smiled the way he always did when Jake deflected—like he could see the truth and wasn’t in any hurry to drag it into the light. He crossed the store, slow and easy, brushing his fingers along the spines of books as he passed, as if greeting them.

“Coffee?” Jake asked.

“If it’s the same one you’ve been nursing since this morning, I’ll pass.”

Jake glanced at his mug, considered it, then took a sip anyway.

“Still good,” he said.

“Liar.”

“Optimist.”
​
Luke stepped behind the counter, close enough now that Jake could feel the lingering chill of his coat. Without thinking, Jake reached out and brushed a fleck of something—snow? dust?—from Luke’s shoulder

His hand lingered a fraction too long.
Luke noticed.


He always noticed.

Before either of them could say anything about it, the door sighed again.

“God, it smells like a library married a forest in here,” David announced, sweeping inside with theatrical purpose. “And I mean that as both a compliment and a cry for help.”

“Good to see you too,” Jake said.

David dropped his scarf dramatically onto a nearby chair. “I passed three stores on the way here selling candles that smell exactly like this place, except they’re forty dollars and come in minimalist jars.”

“We could pivot,” Jake said. “Turn the place into an overpriced candle boutique.”

“Don’t joke,” David replied. “That’s how these things start.”

The words landed lightly. Too lightly.

Jake turned away before they could settle.

The envelope was still on the counter, half-tucked beneath a stack of invoices. Plain. Official. The kind of paper that didn’t ask for attention because it knew it would get it anyway.

He had opened it an hour ago.

He hadn’t really read it. Not the way something like that needed to be read. He had scanned it, understood it, and then—quietly, efficiently—refused to let it mean anything.

Not yet.

“Okay,” Sam said, appearing as if conjured, his cheeks pink from the cold. “I brought lights.”

He held up a tangled mass of white string lights like a prize.

“Those are aggressively tangled,” Luke said.

“They’re festive,” Sam corrected.

“They’re a cry for help,” David added.

“Everything’s a cry for help with you.”

“That’s because I listen.”

Lisa and Miranda arrived together a few minutes later, bringing with them a shift in the room—a steadiness, a grounding. Coats were shed. Hands were warmed. Someone turned on music low in the background—something soft and familiar.

The bookstore began to fill.

Not with customers. With people.

Jake watched them move through the space—talking, laughing, arguing over where to hang lights, what counted as “too early” for holiday music, whether the place needed a tree or just “a strong suggestion of one.”

This was what the party was supposed to be.

The end-of-season gathering. The we made it through another year moment.

Only this year felt…different.

Smaller, somehow. Thinner.

“Where do you want these?” Sam asked, holding up the lights.

Jake opened his mouth to answer—and that was when David saw it.

The envelope.

He picked it up absently at first, turning it over in his hands. “You getting audited?” he asked lightly.

Jake moved too quickly.

“Hey—don’t—” he started.

Too late.

David had already opened it.

The room didn’t go silent.

But something shifted.

Subtle. Immediate.

Like the moment before snow begins.

David’s expression changed as he read. Not dramatically. Not even obviously. Just enough.

“Jake,” he said, softer now.

Jake forced a smile. “It’s nothing.”

David looked up.

“Doesn’t look like nothing.”

Across the room, Luke had gone still.

Jake felt it then—not the words on the page, not the threat or the timeline or the impossible math of it all.

He felt the room.

The way it had turned toward him without turning.

The way everything warm and easy had suddenly become…fragile.

He shrugged, too casually.

“It’s just…paper,” he said.

No one laughed.

Outside, a few tentative flakes of snow began to fall—light, uncertain, like the sky was still deciding.

Inside, surrounded by the people who knew him best, Jake realized something he hadn’t quite let himself admit until that moment:

This wasn’t about the bookstore.

It never had been.



Scene Two: The Party

By the time the party actually began, the bookstore no longer looked like itself.

Lights—despite their earlier resistance—were strung across the shelves in loose, imperfect lines. Someone had draped a length of red fabric over the front window display that may once have been a scarf or a table runner or something from Miranda’s closet that had simply…evolved. A small, lopsided evergreen—Sam’s “strong suggestion of a tree”—stood near the poetry section, decorated with paper ornaments made from torn book pages.

It was, Jake thought, objectively chaotic.

It was also perfect.

“Tell me we’re charging people for this,” David said, stepping back to survey the room. “Because this is at least a twelve-dollar experience.”

“We’re not charging,” Luke replied.

“We could suggest a donation. A sliding scale of emotional support.”

“David.”

“I’m just saying, if the place is going under, we might as well monetize the aesthetic.”

Jake snorted despite himself, adjusting a string of lights that didn’t need adjusting.

People started arriving just after dusk.

Not a crowd—not in the way it used to be—but enough. Familiar faces. A few new ones. Neighbors. A couple of students who always lingered too long in the philosophy section. Someone brought cheap wine. Someone else brought better wine but didn’t announce it.

Music played low—something warm and slightly nostalgic, the kind that didn’t demand attention but rewarded it.

The space filled.

Voices layered over one another. Laughter rose and fell. Coats piled near the door. Someone knocked over a stack of books and immediately pretended it hadn’t happened.

Jake moved through it all like he always did—easy, joking, present but just slightly out of reach. He poured wine, greeted people, made comments just sharp enough to get a laugh without inviting follow-up.

Luke watched him.

Of course he did.

“You’re doing that thing,” Luke said quietly, catching him near the back shelves.

“What thing?”

“The ‘everything’s fine’ thing.”

Jake shrugged. “Everything is fine.”

Luke stepped closer, just enough to be heard over the hum of the room. “You don’t have to perform tonight.”

Jake met his eyes for a moment—long enough for something honest to flicker there.

“Yeah,” he said lightly. “I kind of do.”

Before Luke could answer, Sam appeared, breathless and glowing with purpose.

“Okay,” he said, “we have a situation.”

“That sounds promising,” David called from across the room.

Sam ignored him. “There’s a guy here—he’s asking a lot of questions.”

“That’s generally what people do in bookstores,” Jake said.

“No, like…questions questions. About the space. The layout. The foot traffic.”

Jake felt something tighten in his chest.

“Where?” he asked.

Sam gestured toward the front.

The man stood near the window, looking just slightly too polished for the room. Early thirties, maybe. Well-dressed in a way that tried to appear casual but wasn’t. He held a glass of wine like it was a prop he hadn’t fully committed to.

Evan.

Though Jake didn’t know his name yet.

He approached slowly, aware—suddenly—of everything. The lights. The people. The way the bookstore felt alive in a way it hadn’t in months.

“Hi,” the man said, smiling brightly. “This is an incredible space.”

Jake nodded. “It has its moments.”

“I’m Evan,” he said, extending a hand. “I’m working with a development group in the area. We’re looking at properties that have…character.”

David appeared at Jake’s shoulder like a summoned spirit.

“Oh, it has character,” David said. “It also has emotional baggage and questionable wiring.”

Evan laughed, a little too eagerly.

“I actually think there’s a lot of potential here,” he continued. “With the right vision, this could be transformed into something really—”

“Else,” Jake finished.

There was a small pause.

“Exactly,” Evan said, missing—or choosing to miss—the edge in Jake’s voice.

Behind them, the party continued. Someone turned the music up slightly. Lisa and Miranda were deep in conversation near the register. Sam was trying to untangle something that had never been truly tangled.

Life. Happening.

Right here.

Jake took a sip of his wine.

“You ever notice,” he said, almost conversationally, “how people use words like ‘potential’ when they mean ‘this isn’t enough yet’?”

Evan blinked. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know,” Jake said. “You rarely do.”

Luke stepped in then—not interrupting, just arriving. His presence shifted the air.

“We’re actually in the middle of something tonight,” he said, calm and steady. “A party. You’re welcome to stay. Or not.”

Evan hesitated.

For the first time, he seemed unsure of his footing.

“I didn’t realize,” he said. “I thought this was…open.”

“It is,” Luke replied. “Just not for everything.”

Another pause.

Then, quietly:

“I’m sorry,” Evan said.

And this time, it sounded real.

The night went on.

Because that’s what nights do.

The tension didn’t disappear—it settled into the walls, into the spaces between conversations—but something else rose up alongside it.

Defiance, maybe.

Or love.

Or the stubborn insistence that this mattered.

Jake found himself near the poetry section again, watching as Mark handed someone a drink and said something that made them laugh harder than expected. David was telling a story that had clearly grown in the retelling. Sam had finally succeeded with the lights and looked absurdly proud of it.

Luke found him there.

“Hey,” he said softly.

Jake didn’t look away from the room.

“Hey.”

For a moment, they just stood there.

Close. Not touching. Connected anyway.

“It’s good,” Luke said. “Tonight.”

Jake nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

A beat.

Then, quieter:

“I just don’t know how many more of these there are.”

Luke didn’t answer right away.

When he did, it wasn’t with words.

His hand found Jake’s—briefly, simply, steady.

Not a solution.

Not a promise.

Just…there.

Jake exhaled, something in him loosening despite everything.

Across the room, someone called his name. Someone laughed. Someone opened another bottle of wine.

The lights flickered softly against the shelves, against the books, against the faces of the people who had, somehow, become home.

Outside, the snow had started in earnest now—falling thicker, quieter, covering the city in something clean and uncertain.

Inside, the night held.
​
For now.



Scene Three: The Lakeshore

By the time they stepped outside, the music had softened into memory.

Inside, the radio was now playing holiday jazz which drifted low and smooth through the bookstore—voices intimate, almost conspiratorial, wrapping itself around the room like candlelight. It followed Jake out the door in fragments, fading as it met the cold.

The air hit sharp.

Snow had begun to fall in earnest now, no longer tentative but certain, steady. It gathered in Jake’s hair, along the shoulders of his coat, dissolving slowly against the heat of his skin.

He didn’t stop walking.

“Jake.”

David’s voice behind him—closer than expected.

“Hey,” David said again, catching up, breath visible in short bursts. “You want to maybe not do the dramatic exit thing?”

“I’m not doing a dramatic exit,” Jake said, not slowing. “I’m taking a walk.”

“In the middle of your own party. In a snowstorm.”

“Timing is everything.”

David let out a breath that was half a laugh, half something else. “You could’ve told us.”

Jake stopped then.

Not because he wanted to—but because he couldn’t quite keep moving.

“Told you what?” he asked, turning.

“The letter,” David said, holding it up—not accusing, just…there. “This isn’t nothing.”

Jake looked at it like it belonged to someone else.

“It’s just paperwork.”

“Don’t,” David said softly. “Don’t do that thing where you make everything smaller so it doesn’t hurt as much.”

Jake’s jaw tightened.

“I’m not making it smaller. It’s just—” He gestured vaguely, toward the street, the falling snow, the whole indifferent city. “—what it is.”

David stepped closer, lowering his voice.

“They’re taking your place.”

That landed.

Not loud. Not dramatic.

Just…true.

Jake looked past him, toward where the street opened out toward the lake. The glow of streetlights reflected faintly off the water—or what little of it wasn’t already turning to ice.

“It’s a store,” Jake said.

David shook his head. “No. It’s not.”

They walked the rest of the way in silence.

The lakeshore stretched out before them, dark and wide, the water a heavy gray beneath the falling snow. The wind came off it in slow, cutting waves—not brutal, but persistent. The kind of cold that settled in and stayed.

Jake shoved his hands into his pockets.

“I knew this was coming,” he said finally. “It’s not like it’s a surprise. Rent goes up, sales go down, and suddenly someone wants to sell juice to people who think kale is a personality.”

David huffed a quiet laugh. “Okay, that part’s fair.”

“I just thought…” Jake trailed off.
“What?” David asked.

Jake shook his head.
“That I’d have more time,” he said.

The words hung there.
Simple. Honest.
Cold.

Behind them, footsteps approached—slower, steadier.

Luke.
Of course.

He didn’t say anything at first. Just came to stand beside Jake, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched.

For a moment, none of them spoke.

The lake stretched out. The snow fell. Somewhere in the distance, a car passed, its tires whispering over the road.

“You should’ve told me,” Luke said quietly.
Not angry.
Just…real.

Jake let out a breath.
“I was going to.”

“When?”

Jake didn’t answer.

Luke nodded once, as if that was answer enough.

“This isn’t about the lease,” Luke said after a moment.

Jake gave a small, humorless smile. “It literally is.”

“No,” Luke said gently. “It’s about what happens to you if it’s gone.”

There it was.
The thing Jake hadn’t wanted to name.
He laughed—but it broke halfway through.

“I don’t know,” he said.

And that was it.
No clever line.
No deflection.
No distance.
Just truth.

David looked away, giving them space without leaving.

Luke turned slightly, facing Jake now.
“You’re not losing everything,” he said.

“Aren’t I?”

Jake’s voice was quieter now, but sharper. “Because it kind of feels like that. It feels like I finally figured out where I fit—and now someone’s just…erasing it.”

Luke stepped closer.
“They can’t erase you.”

Jake shook his head. “That’s not what it feels like.”

Snow gathered at their feet, soft and relentless.

Luke reached out then—not dramatic, not hesitant. Just sure.
His hand found the back of Jake’s neck, warm even through the cold.

“You are not that place,” Luke said.
Jake closed his eyes for a second.

“But that place…” he said, softer now, “that’s where I found you.”

That shifted something.
Small. Deep.
Luke’s thumb brushed lightly against his skin, grounding.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Luke said.

Jake opened his eyes.
The snow.
The lake.
David, standing a little distance away, pretending not to listen.
Luke, right here.
Steady.
Real.
He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

“Okay,” he said.

Not fixed.
Not resolved.
But…something.

Behind them, the faintest echo of music slipped out each time the bookstore door opened—Patricia Barber’s voice drifting into the cold before disappearing again.

Inside, the party was still going.
Inside, life was still happening.

Jake glanced back toward the glow of the store, then back at the lake.

“Let’s go finish this,” he said.

David smiled, relief slipping through. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go see if Sam’s burned the place down with those lights.”

They turned together, heading back through the falling snow—toward warmth, toward noise, toward whatever came next.



Scene Four: The Climax

By the time they stepped back inside, the warmth hit like a memory they hadn’t realized they’d left behind.

The bookstore was louder now.

Not chaotic—but full. Alive in that particular way that only happens when a room crosses some invisible threshold from gathering into something closer to celebration. Glasses clinked. Someone had moved the music up just enough so that the notes of soft jazz drifted more clearly now—low and intimate, threading its way between conversations, wrapping the room in something that felt almost like a secret.

Sam looked up first.

“Oh good,” he said, relief immediate. “You didn’t die in the snow.”

“Disappointing, I know,” Jake replied, shrugging off his coat.

David clapped his hands once. “Everyone relax. The protagonist has returned.”

“Was there ever any doubt?” Lisa said dryly from near the counter.

Miranda handed Jake a glass of wine without asking. “Drink,” she said. “You look like you’ve had character development.”

Jake took it, a small smile breaking through despite himself.

“Tragic,” he said. “I was hoping to avoid that.”

For a moment—just a moment—it almost felt normal again.

Then Jake saw him.

Evan stood near the center of the room now, no longer hovering at the edges. Someone had drawn him in—Sam, probably. Or maybe he’d just stayed long enough for the room to soften around him.

He looked…different.
Less polished. Less certain.
More real.

And then David—because of course it was David—stepped forward.

“So,” he said brightly, far too brightly, “fun fact about our new friend Evan.”

Jake closed his eyes briefly.

“David,” Luke warned.

“What?” David said. “We’re all about transparency now, right? Growth? Emotional honesty?”

“David,” Miranda said, sharper this time.

But it was already too late.

“He works for the people buying the building,” David said.

There it was.
Not shouted.
Not dramatized.

Just…placed in the center of the room like something fragile and impossible to ignore.

The music didn’t stop.
But it seemed to pull back.

Evan went still.

“I didn’t—” he started, then stopped. Reset. “I didn’t come here to—”

“To what?” Jake asked.

His voice wasn’t loud.
It didn’t need to be.
The room had already tilted toward him.

“To spy?” David added helpfully.

“I wasn’t spying,” Evan said quickly. “I didn’t even know—this was just—it was listed as an open event, and I thought—”
“You thought what?” Jake said, stepping closer now. “That you’d come check out the space before you helped turn it into something else?”

Evan’s face flushed—not just from the heat of the room now.

“I didn’t know what this place was,” he said. “Not like this.”

Jake laughed softly.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s kind of the problem.”

A beat.

Evan swallowed.

“I’m not the one making the decision,” he said. “I just—”

“Everyone’s ‘just’ something,” David muttered.

“David,” Luke said quietly.

But Jake didn’t stop.

“Do you know how many people say that?” he asked. “How many people stand right where you’re standing and say, ‘It’s not really me, I’m just doing my job’?”

Evan didn’t answer.
Because there wasn’t one.
The room had gone still now.
Not uncomfortable—worse than that.
Honest.

Jake felt it building—the anger, yes, but beneath it something else. Something sharper. Something closer to fear.

He exhaled, long and slow, and for a second it seemed like he might let it go.

But then--
“I don’t have anywhere else,” he said.

And that changed everything.

The words slipped out, unplanned. Unpolished.

True.

“This place—” Jake gestured around him, at the shelves, the lights, the people. “—this isn’t just a store. It’s where everything…clicked. Where I figured out who I was supposed to be. Where I met—”

He stopped himself.
Too late.
Luke’s gaze held his—not pushing, not rescuing. Just there.
Jake shook his head slightly, like he’d said too much.

“I know it probably looks like nothing to you,” he said, quieter now. “Like…square footage. Potential. Whatever word you want to use.”

Evan’s voice, when it came, was different now.

“I don’t think it’s nothing.”

Jake met his eyes.

For the first time, Evan didn’t look away.

“I think I just didn’t understand,” he said. “And I’m starting to.”

Silence.
Then Mark stepped forward.

He hadn’t said much all night—hovering at the edges, watching, the way he did when something mattered more than he was ready to admit.

“Okay,” he said.
Not loudly.
But enough.
Everyone turned.

“This is the part where we all pretend we have a solution,” he continued. “We don’t.”

A small, crooked smile.

“But I have something.”
Jake frowned slightly. “Mark—”

Mark reached into his coat pocket, pulling out an envelope—creased, worn at the edges.

“Don’t freak out,” he said immediately.

“That’s never reassuring,” David muttered.

“It’s not a fix,” Mark went on, looking at Jake now. “It’s not even close. It’s just…time.”

He held out the envelope.
Jake didn’t take it.
“What is it?” he asked.

“My savings,” Mark said simply. “Or…a chunk of them. Enough to maybe buy you a few months. Figure something out. Or don’t. But at least you’re not getting kicked out tomorrow.”

The room held its breath.

“Mark,” Jake said quietly, “you don’t have to—”

“I know,” Mark interrupted. “That’s kind of the point.”

A beat.

“I said I was done chasing things that don’t work,” he added. “I didn’t say I was done showing up for the ones that do.”

That landed.
Deep.

Jake stared at him for a long moment.

“This isn’t just about me,” he said.

“I know,” Mark replied. “It’s about all of us.”

Jake glanced around the room then.

Sam, still clutching the end of a string of lights like it might anchor him.

Lisa and Miranda, steady and unflinching.

David, for once without a comment.

Luke—always Luke.

And even Evan.

Standing there, uncertain but present.

Jake let out a slow breath.

“Okay,” he said.

Not acceptance.
Not refusal.

Just…acknowledgment.

“Okay,” Mark echoed, as if that was enough.

And somehow--
It was.

The music swelled slightly then, as if on cue.

Glasses were lifted again.

Someone laughed—tentative at first, then real.

The room exhaled.

Nothing was solved.

Everything was still uncertain.

But something had shifted.

Not the future.
The people.
And sometimes--
that was where everything began.



Scene Five: The Rooftop

It was Lisa who suggested the roof.

“Before we all get too sentimental,” she said, shrugging into her coat, “we should at least commit to being cold about it.”

“Nothing says emotional clarity like mild hypothermia,” David added.

“Exactly.”

They went up in small, uneven clusters—through the narrow back stairwell that always smelled faintly of dust and something metallic, past the door that stuck unless you lifted it just right.

Sam went first, because of course he did.

“Careful,” he called back. “It’s slippery.”

“Everything about tonight is slippery,” David replied, following anyway.

When Jake stepped out onto the roof, the cold wrapped around him immediately—but not harshly. Not the biting kind. Something quieter. A stillness.

Madison stretched out before them.

Lights scattered across the city like something deliberate. State Street glowing faintly below. The lake—dark, wide, and beginning to hold its breath for winter—caught what little light there was and gave it back in soft, broken reflections.

Snow fell.
Not heavy now.
Just enough.
The kind that doesn’t demand attention but changes everything anyway.

Someone—Miranda, maybe—produced a bottle of wine. Not the good one. Not the terrible one either. The middle ground where most real moments seem to live.

Plastic cups made an appearance. Or maybe mismatched mugs someone had carried up without thinking.
They gathered loosely, not in a circle, not in any formation that could be named. Just…together.

David raised his cup.
“To questionable decisions,” he said.
“To bad wiring,” Sam added.
“To aggressive candle potential,” Lisa said.
“To not being replaced by a smoothie bar,” Miranda finished.

A small pause.
Then Jake lifted his cup.
“To…time,” he said.

It was enough.
They drank.

Conversations broke apart and reformed in quiet currents.

Mark leaned against the low wall, talking softly with Lisa. Sam tried—unsuccessfully—to catch snowflakes on his tongue. David was halfway through a story that no longer had a clear beginning but refused to end.

Evan stood a little apart at first.
Not excluded.
Just…uncertain.

Miranda eventually drifted over, said something to him that made him laugh—really laugh, not the careful version—and just like that, he was no longer standing at the edge.

That’s how it worked here.
No announcements.
No permission required.

Jake stood near the far side of the roof, hands wrapped around his cup, watching the city without really seeing it.

Luke found him.
Of course.

“You okay?” Luke asked.

Jake considered the question.

“I think so,” he said.

A beat.

“I don’t know what happens next.”

Luke nodded. “Yeah.”

Another pause.

“I hate that part,” Jake added.

Luke smiled faintly. “The not knowing?”

“The waiting. The…in-between.”

Luke stepped closer, resting his arms on the ledge beside him. Their shoulders brushed—light, familiar, grounding.

“Maybe this is it,” Luke said.
Jake glanced at him. “This is what?”

“The part we’re always trying to get past,” Luke said. “The part where nothing’s decided yet. Where it’s all still…open.”

Jake let that sit.

Snow gathered lightly along the edge of the roof. Somewhere below, a car passed, its tires whispering over the street. The city didn’t stop. It never did.

“Feels unfinished,” Jake said.

Luke shrugged gently. “Maybe that’s not a bad thing.”

Jake huffed a quiet laugh. “You’re very zen about this.”

“I’m cold,” Luke replied. “It’s making me philosophical.”

Jake smiled—really smiled this time.

They stood there for a while, not talking.

Not needing to.

Below them, the bookstore glowed—soft light spilling out onto the street. Inside, the music still played faintly, drifting upward each time the door opened. The Girl from Ipanema—low, warm, familiar now.

Jake watched the light for a long moment.

“That place,” he said quietly, “it gave me something I didn’t know I was looking for.”

Luke didn’t ask what.
He already knew.

Jake exhaled slowly, his breath visible in the cold.
“And now I don’t know how to hold onto it.”

Luke turned toward him then—not dramatic, not urgent. Just present.
“You don’t have to hold onto it,” he said.

Jake frowned slightly. “Then what?”

Luke’s voice softened.

“You let it change you,” he said. “And then you take that with you…wherever you go next.”

Jake looked at him.

Snow caught in Luke’s hair, melting slowly. The city behind him blurred into light and shadow.

“You make it sound simple.”

“It’s not,” Luke said. “But it’s real.”

A long pause.
Then--
Jake leaned into him, just slightly. Enough.
Luke shifted, just enough to meet him.
No one made a big thing of it.
No one needed to.

Across the roof, laughter rose again—something David had said, no doubt. Sam nearly slipped and was caught mid-fall by Mark. Lisa shook her head, smiling. Miranda took a sip of wine and watched it all like she was cataloging something important.

Chosen family.
Not perfect.
Not permanent.
But real.

Jake closed his eyes for a moment, letting it settle.

The cold.
The quiet.
The people.
The not knowing.

When he opened them again, the snow had thickened just a little—softening edges, blurring lines, making the whole city feel…gentler.

“Hey,” Sam called out suddenly. “We should do this again next year.”

David snorted. “Bold of you to assume we survive this one.”

“We will,” Sam said, with the kind of certainty that didn’t ask permission.

Jake looked around.

At all of them.
Then back at Luke.
“Yeah,” he said.
​
Not because he knew it was true.
But because, in that moment--
it felt possible.

And the night held them there a little while longer--
between what had been
and what might come next.
Not finished.
Not fixed.
But full.
And sometimes--
that was more than enough. 🌙✨

~Wylddane

“We are, all of us, loved imperfectly—and loved truly all the same.”  ~Northwoods Proverb

The morning of May third arrived without ceremony.

No wind. No birdsong worth noting. Just a pale, suspended stillness over Stillwater Gleam, as though the lake itself had chosen to hold its breath.

Elias Whitaker stood in his garden with a pair of pruning shears hanging loosely from his hand.

The white rose had not yet opened.

It never did—not before this day. Not after. Always on this day.

Five years now.

Five years since the world had narrowed to a hospital room in a city too far from Lone Pine, where the machines had spoken in soft, indifferent rhythms, and where—he had always believed—his Margaret had slipped away alone.

He reached down and brushed his fingers against the outer petals.

Still closed.

“Stubborn thing,” he murmured.

Behind him, a soft crunch of gravel.

Elias did not turn immediately. People in Lone Pine understood quiet. They did not intrude on a man in his garden on May third. Maren and Lucy at the Bean & Birch always sent coffee in the morning, strong and black, with a note folded beneath the cup sleeve. Tom always left a bundle of split birch near the shed. Erica sometimes tucked a loaf of lemon bread into the mailbox. No one knocked. No one called out.

But this footstep hesitated.

Unfamiliar.

He turned.

A young woman stood at the low wooden gate, her hand resting lightly on the latch, as though unsure whether she had the right to touch it.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you Elias Whitaker?”

There are moments in a man’s life when the past does not return gently.

It arrives standing at the gate.

Elias studied her. She was maybe thirty-five, maybe younger, with wind-tangled brown hair and eyes that looked as though they had not slept kindly in several nights. In one hand she held a worn leather satchel. In the other, an envelope.

“I am,” he said.

“My name is Sarah Quinn.” Her voice trembled, but she held herself firmly. “My mother was Helen Quinn.”

The name meant nothing to him.

He waited.

Sarah swallowed. “She was with your wife when she died.”

The shears slipped from Elias’s hand and fell into the damp soil.

Across the garden, a raven gave one low, questioning croak from the old cedar.

Elias did not move.

Sarah looked stricken. “I’m sorry. I thought you knew.”

“I was told she was alone.”

“My mother was a volunteer at the hospital. She sat with people when family couldn’t get there in time.” Sarah looked down at the envelope. “Your wife asked her not to leave.”

Stillwater Gleam glittered beyond the garden, silver-blue in the May light. Somewhere down the lane, a dog barked once, then stopped.

Elias bent slowly and picked up the shears. His hands were steady. That surprised him.

“She asked her not to leave,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“And your mother waited five years to tell me?”

Sarah flinched, but did not retreat. “My mother died last month. I found this among her things. There was a note attached. She wanted me to bring it to you today.”

“Today.”

Sarah nodded. “May third.”

The rosebush stood between them, green and thorned and full of unopened white buds.

Elias looked at the envelope. Margaret’s name was written nowhere on it. His was.

Elias Whitaker.

Her handwriting.

His wife’s handwriting.

For a moment the garden tilted. The cedar, the lake, the pale porch, the blue coffee mug cooling on the stone bench—all of it seemed to draw away from him, as though the world had stepped backward to make room for something terrible.

He did not take the letter.

“What does it say?” he asked.

Sarah’s eyes filled. “I don’t know. I didn’t read it.”

“Then perhaps it can remain unread.”

“I promised my mother.”

“And I promised my wife I would love her until death parted us. Death has done that.”

“No,” Sarah said softly. “It hasn’t.”

The words struck him harder than he expected.

From the lane came the familiar sound of claws on gravel. Bear, Ethan’s great husky, appeared first, followed by Ethan himself with Isabel tucked comfortably into the front pack against his chest. Ragnhilde the raven flapped down from the cedar to the fence post, fixing Sarah with one bright black eye.

Ethan stopped at once.

He looked from Elias to Sarah, then to the envelope.

“Bad time,” Ethan said quietly.

“Yes,” Elias replied.

Ethan gave the smallest nod. “Coffee’s on your porch. From Maren.”

Then, as gently as he had arrived, he turned and walked away, Bear glancing back once, Isabel’s orange-and-white face peering over the edge of the pack like a small queen judging human sorrow.

Sarah watched them go.

“You have people,” she said.

“I have neighbors.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“In Lone Pine,” Elias said, “it often is.”

For the first time, Sarah almost smiled.

Then she held out the letter again.

Elias looked at it as if it were a blade.

“My mother said your wife was kind,” Sarah said. “Frightened, but kind. She talked about this garden. About the white rose. She said it bloomed every year on the day she first saw this house.”

Elias closed his eyes.

That was true.

Margaret had stood right there, beside the empty bed where the rosebush now grew, and said, “Elias, if you buy me this house, I’ll make the garden forgive you for the plumbing.”

He had bought it before sunset.

Sarah took one step closer. “She also said she had loved you.”

Elias opened his eyes.

Sarah’s face changed then, as though she already knew what the next words would cost him.

“But she said there was something she had never known how to forgive herself for.”

The morning seemed to darken, though the sun still shone.

Elias lifted a hand. “Enough.”

Sarah went silent.

“I know what people hide,” he said, and his voice had become colder than he intended. “I am an old man, not a fool.”

“I don’t think she wanted to hurt you.”

“People rarely do when they leave the knife.”

Sarah’s expression hardened, grief sharpening into anger.

“My mother carried that letter for five years because she thought honoring a dying woman mattered. She was sick herself by then. She forgot things. Names. Dates. But she did not forget this.” Sarah shook the envelope once, fiercely. “She remembered you. She remembered your wife. She remembered this garden. So you may refuse it, Mr. Whitaker, but don’t pretend that refusing pain is the same thing as preserving love.”

The raven croaked.

Elias turned away.

His chest hurt.

Not with illness. Not with age.

With memory.

Margaret laughing in the kitchen with flour on her cheek.

Margaret angry at the deer for eating her lilies.

Margaret walking beside Stillwater Gleam in October, her hand tucked into the crook of his elbow.

Margaret asleep in the chair, one book open on her lap, another fallen to the floor.

Margaret, who had once looked at him across the breakfast table and said, “You are such a good man, Elias,” in a tone he had mistaken for happiness.

Such a good man.

Not my love.

Not my darling.

Such a good man.

The white rosebush trembled.

There was no wind.

Elias saw it happen.

One closed bud at the center of the bush loosened, petal by petal, as though some invisible hand had touched it with mercy. White opened into white. Not bright. Not pure. Something softer than purity. Something that had endured rain, frost, waiting, and still chosen to bloom.

Sarah saw it too.

Neither of them spoke.

At last Elias held out his hand.

Sarah placed the envelope in it.

He sat on the stone bench beside the rosebush. The envelope felt impossibly light. He opened it carefully, almost tenderly, and unfolded the pages inside.

Margaret’s handwriting leaned slightly to the right, as it always had.

He began to read.

And there she was.

Not the ghost he had polished with grief.

Not the saint he had made of her.

Margaret.

His Margaret.

Frightened. Honest. Flawed. Human.

She wrote of a young man she had loved before Elias ever knew her. A boy from another town, another life, a summer love that had burned through her like lightning and left behind a scar she mistook for destiny. She had loved him wholly, foolishly, with the desperate certainty of youth. He had not loved her back—not enough, not bravely, not forever. He had chosen someone else, and Margaret had spent years pretending the wound had healed because no one wished to hear a heart still aching over what had never truly been.

Then came Elias.

Steady Elias.

Kind Elias.

Elias who built shelves without being asked. Elias who remembered how she liked her coffee. Elias who stood beside her in storms, funerals, winters, and ordinary Tuesdays.

She had loved him.

She wrote that plainly.

But she had carried shame because some hidden, unreachable corner of her heart still belonged to an old grief. Not to the man anymore, perhaps. Not really. But to the dream of being chosen first, fiercely, without hesitation.

You deserved a heart without ghosts, she had written.

Elias stopped reading.

The garden blurred.

Sarah sat beside him, not touching him, but near.

He read on.

I loved you the best way I knew how. I know now that I mistook the first fire for the truest flame. What you gave me was not lightning. It was hearthlight. It warmed the life I actually lived.

His hands began to shake.

Forgive me, if forgiveness is needed. But more than that, Elias, live. Do not spend the rest of your days keeping company only with what is gone. Give the rose away when it blooms. Give something of me forward.

Elias lowered the letter.

For a long while, he said nothing.

The lake moved again. A small ripple. Then another.

Sarah wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand. “I’m sorry.”

Elias looked at the rose.

“No,” he said. His voice was rough. “Don’t be.”

He folded the letter carefully and held it against his chest.

“I thought I knew every room in her heart.”

Sarah looked at him.

He gave a sad, breathless laugh. “Turns out I was only ever invited into the ones with good furniture.”

Sarah laughed then, though it broke halfway through.

Elias reached toward the rosebush. With the pruning shears, he cut the first white bloom of May third.

For a moment he held it.

Then he handed it to Sarah.

“My wife,” he said, “made terrible coffee. Burned toast. Sang off-key when she weeded. Hated being called Maggie. Loved thunderstorms, but only if I pretended not to notice she was scared.”

Sarah held the rose as if it were fragile fire.

“My mother said she talked about you,” she whispered.

Elias nodded.

“I’m glad,” he said.

And he meant it.

By late afternoon, the Bean & Birch gang began arriving one by one, not intruding, never quite asking. Maren brought a pie. Lucy brought coffee. Ethan came back with Bear and Isabel. Ragnhilde settled in the cedar like a dark punctuation mark. Erica and Tom stood near the gate, speaking softly with Sarah as though she had always belonged to the edge of that garden.

Elias watched them from the bench.

For five years he had tended the roses as if grief were a duty.

Now, for the first time, he wondered whether love might be something else.

Not possession.

Not perfect knowing.

Not even the comfort of being first.

Perhaps love was this: an old man reading a painful letter beneath a blooming rose and discovering that the truth had not destroyed what he had cherished.

It had made it mortal.

And therefore dearer.

As evening settled over Stillwater Gleam, the white rosebush opened bud after bud, until the garden seemed full of small moons.

Elias looked toward the lake, where the sky had begun to turn lavender and gold.

Then he reached for the coffee Maren had brought, took a slow sip, and winced.

“Too strong,” he said.

From somewhere in the cedar, Ragnhilde croaked.
​
And for the first time on May third in five years, Elias laughed.

~Wylddane



​

“Where love has once lived, it never truly leaves—
it only learns new ways to be heard.”
​
The morning had come softly to Lone Pine, the kind of early light that did not so much arrive as unfold. A pale gold rested on Stillwater Gleam, and a thin veil of mist hovered just above the surface, as though the lake itself were still dreaming.

Inside Bean & Birch, the coffee gang had gathered in their usual way—unhurried, familiar, stitched together by ritual and warmth. Maren stood behind the counter, polishing a mug that did not need polishing. Lucy was arranging pastries. Erica and Tom sat near the window. Sam leaned back in his chair, hands wrapped around his cup as though it held more than coffee.

It was the sound that brought the quiet.

A low, hollow cooing drifted in through the open door.

Everyone paused.

“Doves,” Martha said softly.

They listened.

The call came again—gentle, rhythmic, carrying something deeper than sound. Something that seemed to settle not in the ears, but in the chest.

Sam set his cup down.

“My grandmother used to say,” he began, “that mourning doves don’t just sing. They remember.”

No one interrupted. They knew that tone in his voice.

“They say,” he continued, “that when you hear them, it’s because something—or someone—still loves you enough to return.”

He looked out the window toward the trees beyond the street.

“This is a story she told me. Or maybe… it’s one she lived.”

Years Before, in Another Time…There had been a small house with a garden, and beside it, a hand-built pond—stones carefully placed, water clear enough to mirror the sky. Goldfish flickered beneath the surface like living embers.

And there had been a little girl.

Her name, in the telling, was Lila.

She had golden hair that caught the sun and eyes that seemed to notice things others passed by—small movements, soft sounds, the quiet presence of life.

She was not strong, not in the way the world measures strength. Her heart had come into the world differently, and even then, the doctors spoke in careful tones, using words like hope and time as though they were fragile things.

But Lila did not seem afraid of time.

She spent her days by the pond.

And the birds came.

Not once. Not by chance. But again and again—mourning doves, soft grey, their wings whispering as they settled near her. They gathered along the stones, along the branches, sometimes so close they seemed part of her quiet world.

She would speak to them.

Not in nonsense, not in play, but in a way that made her mother pause in the doorway and listen.

“What do you hear, sweetheart?” her mother once asked.

Lila tilted her head, listening to a dove’s low coo.

“They’re telling me about where they go,” she said simply.

“And where is that?”

Lila smiled—a small, knowing thing.

“Somewhere peaceful.”

The days moved as they do—too quickly for those who are counting them, too slowly for those who fear what comes next.

Her parents tried everything.

Doctors. Specialists. Prayers whispered into the quiet hours of the night.

Love, poured out in every possible form.

But love, though powerful, cannot always alter the course of a body.

One afternoon—December had already laid its quiet hand upon the world—Lila sat beside her mother, her small fingers curled into her sleeve.

“I’m going away soon,” she said.

Her mother felt the words before she understood them.

“Where are you going, sweetheart?”

Lila looked at her with a calm that did not belong to a child.

“Somewhere you and Daddy can’t come yet.”

The room held its breath.
Her mother gathered her close, pressing her cheek into Lila’s hair, as though she might anchor her there.
But some journeys are not meant to be stopped.

It happened on a quiet December afternoon.
Snow had not yet fallen, but the air carried its promise.
And then—
She was gone.

Grief does not arrive all at once.

It comes in waves, in silences, in moments when the world continues as though nothing has changed.
For her parents, the house became both sanctuary and echo.

They could not speak her name without breaking.

They could not look at the pond without remembering.

And yet—
They could not stay away.

It was there, by the water, that it began again.

The doves returned.

One. Then two. Then many.

They gathered along the stones, just as they had before. They cooed softly, their song low and steady, like a heartbeat carried on the air.

At first, it deepened the grief.

“How can they still come?” her father asked one morning, his voice edged with something close to anger. “Don’t they know she’s gone?”

But her mother stood very still, listening.

“No,” she said quietly. “I think… they do know.”

Time did not erase the sorrow.

It softened it. Changed its edges.

The pond remained. The seasons turned.

And every year, as December returned, so too did the ache—the memory of that day, that moment when everything had shifted.

But also—
The doves.
Always the doves.

Years passed.

The world moved forward, as it insists on doing.

And then, one spring, a child was placed in her mother’s arms—a granddaughter, blue-eyed and bright, her laughter like sunlight on water.

Something shifted.

Not the loss—that remained, a thread woven into everything.

But alongside it, something gentler began to grow.

Hope, perhaps.
Or grace.

Back at the pond, on a warm afternoon, the little girl toddled toward the water’s edge.

Her mother called out, but her grandmother only watched.

The child stopped, very still.
And then—
The doves came.

One by one, they gathered, just as they had long ago.

The child laughed, reaching out with small, unafraid hands.
And in that moment, the past and present seemed to fold into one another—not replacing, not erasing, but continuing.

Back at Bean & Birch
The café was quiet.
Even the clink of cups had stilled.

Sam looked down at his hands, then back out the window where, as if summoned by the telling, a pair of mourning doves had settled on the fence just beyond the door.

“They never stopped missing her,” he said. “Not ever. But they learned… that missing someone isn’t the same as losing them completely.”

Maren exhaled softly.

Erica reached for Tom’s hand.

“And the doves?” Lucy asked.

Sam smiled, just a little.
“They still come.”

Outside, the doves cooed again—low, steady, timeless.
A sound of love.
A sound of memory.
A sound that, once heard, is never truly gone.

* * * * * * * * * *

This morning, as the light gently finds its way through the trees and the world awakens in quiet grace, I sit with my cup of coffee and think of small, sacred things.

Of ponds and birds.
Of voices carried not in words, but in presence.
Of love that does not end.

We are taught, in so many ways, that letting go means releasing, moving on, closing a door.

But perhaps that is not quite true.

Perhaps letting go is not about forgetting.

Perhaps it is about allowing what we have loved to change form—to become something that walks beside us instead of something we try to hold.

A memory.
A whisper.
A soft cooing in the morning air.

Grief does not disappear.

It becomes part of the landscape of who we are.

But so too does love.

And love—like the mourning dove—has a way of returning, again and again, in the most unexpected moments, reminding us that the bonds we form are not so easily broken.

They endure.
They echo.
They sing.
​
So if, today, you hear that soft, hollow call of a dove…
Pause.
Listen.
And remember—
You are loved more than time can measure.

~Wylddane

“The lake remembers what the land forgets.”  ~Northwoods Proverb

The call came just before dawn.
At first, no one at Bean & Birch spoke of it. They only paused—mid-sip, mid-sentence—as if something unseen had brushed past them, trailing a note of sorrow across the room.
Ethan was the first to name it.
“A loon,” he said quietly, staring into the steam of his coffee. “But… not just any call.”
Bear, at his feet, lifted his head as if he, too, remembered.
Maren set down the pot. “Stillwater Gleam hasn’t had loons this early in years.”
From the corner, old Tom—who knew the lakes the way some men knew scripture—shook his head. “That wasn’t just a wail,” he said. “That was a yodel.”
A silence settled in.
Because in Lone Pine, people knew things like that.
And a loon’s yodel… that was something else entirely.

Three nights earlier, Daniel Kessler had vanished.
A quiet man. Kept mostly to himself. Rented the old cabin on the eastern shore of Stillwater Gleam.
The sheriff’s office had already heard from one person—a visiting angler who claimed he’d spoken to Kessler the night he disappeared.
“He told me he was heading out to Blackwater Lake,” the man insisted. “Said he needed quiet water. No birds. No noise.”
“No loons?” Sam had asked when the story made its way to Bean & Birch.
“Especially no loons.”
That had seemed… odd.
But now, with Tom’s words hanging in the air, it felt like something else entirely.

It was Ragnhilde who woke Ethan.
Not with a cry—but with stillness.
Perched at the edge of the bed, the raven watched him with an intensity that meant listen.
And there it was.
A long, mournful wail drifting through the open window.
Not across the lake…
But from within the mist itself.
Ethan checked the clock.
3:00 AM.
Again.
The third night in a row.

By the fourth morning, Ethan, Bear, Isabel tucked warm inside his coat, and Ragnhilde overhead, were moving quietly along the shoreline.
The mist clung low, silver-gray, turning the lake into something ancient and unknowable.
Then—
The sound.
A tremolo—wild, laughing, almost unhinged.
And beneath it… something else.
A yodel.
Tom had been right.
Not just any loon.
A specific one.
Ethan had heard it before—last summer, late evenings, out near the northern cove. A territorial male. Distinct. Unmistakable once you knew it.
Which meant…
The angler had lied.
There were loons here.
And Kessler had never left.

The wail came again—longer now, insistent.
Bear moved first, pulling toward a narrow inlet choked with reeds.
A place no one visited.
The mist thickened as they entered, muffling the world.
And then—
The water shifted.
Just beneath the surface, something shimmered.
A dull, metallic glint.
The loon surfaced nearby.
Close.
Too close.
Its red eyes caught the pale light—startling, ancient, watching.
Then it gave a soft, almost human cry.
Not wild.
Not manic.
But… guiding.

It took time. And cold hands. And a long branch.
But eventually, Ethan drew it up.
A metal box.
Old. Rusted. Heavy.
Inside—
A journal.
Pages warped but legible.
Entries spanning decades.
And one name, repeated again and again.
Daniel Kessler.
But not recent entries.
No.
These were old.
Thirty years old.

Back at Bean & Birch, the fire burned low as the story unfolded.
Kessler hadn’t come to Lone Pine by chance.
He had returned.
As a young man, he had been part of something—something buried, something hidden in that very cove.
The journal told of a night.
Of an accident.
Or perhaps not an accident.
Of someone who had gone into the water…
…and never come back.
The box had been sunk.
The truth… silenced.
Until now.

That night, the loon called again.
But differently.
The wail was softer.
The tremolo no longer wild.
And the yodel—clear, unmistakable—rang once across the water, then faded.
As if something had been acknowledged.
Or released.

They never found Kessler.
Not in the way they expected.
But a week later, when the last of the ice loosened its grip along the shaded edges of the cove, something disturbed the surface.
At first, it was only a ripple—subtle, uncertain, as if the lake itself had drawn a breath.
Then, just for a moment…
A hand.
Bone-white.
Rising slowly from the dark water, fingers half-curled as though reaching—or remembering how to.
It lingered there, no more than a heartbeat.
And then it slipped beneath the surface once more.
Gone.
The water closed over it without a sound.
And the loon—
was silent.
​
There are voices in this world that do not speak in words, and yet carry truths we cannot ignore.
The call of the loon is one of them.
It is laughter and grief, madness and memory, all woven into a single note that drifts across water and time. It reminds us that some things do not stay buried—not forever.
And perhaps… not by accident.
For even in silence, the world listens.
And sometimes…
it answers.

~Wylddane

“What once was is never gone--
it simply becomes the music we carry within us.”

​There was a time--
and I say that now the way one speaks of a season long gone--
when Friday nights had a rhythm as dependable as a heartbeat.

We called ourselves, half in jest and half in pride, The Friday Night Social Club.

Renegades was where it all happened.

A rustic bar tucked along Stockton Street, not quite a dive, not quite polished—just right. The kind of place where the lights were always a little dim, the wood a little worn, and the laughter just a little louder than it needed to be.

Bob and I would arrive straight from work, the week still clinging to us like static. He worked in another department, but we had become friends the way people sometimes do—without effort, without reason, just recognition.

Behind the bar was Eric, who knew our drinks before we spoke them and our moods before we admitted them.

And then there were the others.

Charlie, older than the rest of us, with hands that looked like they had built half of California and a laugh that could fill the whole room.

Greg, sharp and easygoing, always with a story from San Jose.

A handsome man from HP and his partner, a chef who spoke about food the way poets speak about love.
​
And others—faces now softened by time, names that drift just out of reach but remain somehow present.

We were never fewer than a dozen. Sometimes more.
We drank.
We laughed.
We told stories that grew better each week.
We celebrated birthdays, promotions, and the simple miracle of having made it through another workweek.

For a while, it felt like that rhythm might go on forever.

But time, as it does, had other plans.
At first, it was subtle.
Someone missing a Friday.
Then two Fridays.

Then a quiet explanation offered over a drink, voice lowered, eyes avoiding the truth even as it was spoken.

AIDS.

The word settled into our lives like a shadow we could not quite name, though we all felt it.

Bob was among the first.
​
I remember the day he told me—not as a declaration, but as something quietly placed between us, like a fragile glass we both knew not to break.

And still, for a while, we kept meeting at Renegades.
Because what else do you do when the world begins to shift beneath your feet?

Eventually, the nights changed.
The laughter softened.
The group grew smaller.
There was one week—God, I remember it clearly—when there were three funerals.
Three.
After that, nothing was ever quite the same.

Bob moved to San Francisco as his illness progressed.
By then, the rhythm of my life had changed too.
Work.
Then his flat.
Groceries.
Meals.
Cleaning.
Quiet conversations that sometimes made sense and sometimes didn’t.
Caretaking.

It became its own kind of ritual—one built not on laughter, but friendship. On showing up. On not looking away.
And afterward, before heading home, I would stop at a small bar on 18th Street—Uncle Bert’s.
​
Just one or two drinks.
Just enough to let the weight ease its grip.
That’s where I met Miranda.
She understood without explanation. She was caring for someone too. We never needed to say much—just enough to know we were not alone in what we were carrying.
Friendship, born not of celebration, but of endurance.

In the end, Bob’s world grew smaller.
Confusion came.
Then silence.
He wouldn’t give me his doctor’s name, even when I knew I needed it. But I found it anyway. Arrangements were made. Quietly. Carefully.
The day it happened, he had locked the door.
I remember the panic.
Police.
Ambulance.
The breaking in—not just of a door, but of the last illusion that things might somehow right themselves.
At the hospital, I stayed.
Friends came.
They spoke to him.
I spoke to him.
Always as if he could hear.
Because I believed he could.
Because true friendship does not stop at the edge of consciousness.

The last night, I said goodbye.
Just as I always did.
And as I turned to leave, he lifted his hand—just slightly—and waved.
A small, impossible gesture.
But it was enough.
It told me everything I needed to know.

After Bob, the others followed, one by one.
The Friday Night Social Club—once a dozen strong—became fewer, then fewer still, until there were only three of us left.
Charlie.
Greg.
And me.

Years passed.
Life moved, as it always does.
Charlie retired and went to Las Vegas. Greg stayed in San Jose. I found my own path northward, into quieter places.
And then, one day, the three of us decided to meet again.
One last time.
At Renegades.

It looked the same.
That was the strange part.
The same worn wood.
The same dim light.
The same bar where we had once leaned into laughter as if it would never end.
But Eric was gone.
And so were the others.
We hugged.
We ordered drinks.
And then…
We sat.
Quietly.
Because the truth was, the room was full.
Not with people—but with memory.
With voices just beyond hearing.
With laughter that seemed to echo if you listened too closely.
Charlie looked around, took a slow sip of his drink, and then said, softly:
“There are too many ghosts in here.”

We didn’t argue.
We didn’t need to.
We finished our drinks.
We hugged again.
And that night, we said goodbye—not just to Renegades, but to something much larger.
To a time.
To a life.
To the Friday Night Social Club.

Now, years later, it is mostly memory.
Charlie is gone.
Greg and I still reach out from time to time—texts, cards, small threads connecting what remains.
And me…
I find myself thinking of those nights more often now.
Not with sadness alone.
But with gratitude.
Because once--
for a handful of years that now feel both distant and impossibly close--
we had something rare.
We had each other.
We had laughter.
We had music.
We had Friday nights that felt like forever.

And sometimes, if I close my eyes just right,
I can still hear it--
The clink of glasses.
Eric calling out an order.
​Greg making a dry observation.
Charlie laughing.
Bob yakking away to someone.
All of us together.
Once upon a time…
that once was.

~Wylddane

The first thunderstorm of April did not arrive like a guest.
It arrived like something remembering how to breathe.

Elliot Vance had been waiting for it.

From the narrow second-story room he rented on the edge of Lone Pine, he watched the radar bloom in violent colors across his monitors—reds too deep, greens too luminous, a pulsing smear of yellow that seemed almost… deliberate.

He leaned closer, adjusting the gain.
“This isn’t right,” he whispered.

The system had formed too quickly. Warm air surged up from the south, colliding with a stubborn cold mass still clinging to the northwoods. It should have been unstable, yes—but not organized. Not like this.

Not… focused.
Outside, the world held its breath.

The last of the lake ice on Stillwater Gleam had only broken three days ago. Winter hadn’t fully let go yet. The trees were still bare, their branches like ink scratches against a dimming sky.
​
And yet the air—
The air smelled alive.
Ozone. Wet soil. Something electric and ancient.
Elliot pushed back from his desk and crossed to the window. The screen trembled faintly in its frame, though the wind had not yet arrived.
“First storm of the season,” he murmured.
He had always loved this moment. The shift. The breaking open of the year.
But tonight…
Tonight felt different.

The first thunder did not crack.
It rolled.
Low. Deep. Not just heard—but felt.
It passed through him like a second heartbeat, rattling somewhere behind his ribs.
Elliot froze.
Another rumble followed—longer this time, almost… sustained.
He turned slowly back to his desk.
The radio was on.
He didn’t remember turning it on.

At first, it was just static.
A soft, whispering hiss.
He frowned and reached for the dial.
Then the static changed.
It pulsed.
Not randomly—but rhythmically. Like breath. Like waves against a shore.
Like something trying to speak.
Elliot’s hand hovered over the knob.
“…hello?” he said, half-laughing at himself.
The static surged.
And beneath it—
A sound.
A shape of sound.
Not quite a word.
Not quite.
But close.

The lightning came then.
Not white.
Not blue.
Green.
A deep, saturated green that filled the room for a fraction of a second, casting every shadow in impossible directions.
Elliot stumbled back.
“That’s not—” he began.
Thunder followed instantly.
Not a crack.
A roar.
The house shuddered.
And from the radio—
Clearer now—
A voice.

“…Ell…i…ot…”

He went still.
Every rational part of his mind rose up at once.
Atmospheric interference. Signal bleed. Audio pareidolia.
But the voice came again.
Stronger.
Closer.
“…Elliot…”

“No,” he said aloud. “No, that’s not happening.”
He reached forward and switched the radio off.
The room fell silent.
For one breath.
Two.

Then the tapping began.
At the window.

Soft at first.
Almost polite.
Rain, he told himself.
Just rain.
But the rhythm was wrong.
Too deliberate.
Too… patient.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap-tap.

He turned.
The glass was black, reflecting only the pale, strained version of himself.
And behind that—
For just a moment—
Movement.
As if something vast had passed beneath the surface of the lake beyond the trees.

The power flickered.
The monitors blinked.
And then—
Every screen filled with the same image.
Radar.
But no longer of the sky.
Of the lake.

Elliot stepped closer.
“No,” he whispered.
The storm wasn’t above Lone Pine anymore.
It was centered—perfectly—over Stillwater Gleam.
A spiral.
Tight.
Intentional.
Like an eye.

The voice returned.
Not from the radio now.
From everywhere.
From the walls.
From the floor.
From the air itself.

“…open…”

The smell of ozone thickened.
Wet earth.
Lake water.
Cold.
So cold.

Elliot staggered back as the temperature in the room dropped.
His breath fogged.
The window rattled harder now.
The tapping growing louder.
Insistent.
Hungry.

“…open the window…”

“I’m not opening anything,” he said, his voice breaking.
His chest tightened.
The thunder rolled again—longer, deeper, shaking something loose inside him.
Not fear.
Recognition.

He turned to his desk, hands shaking, and began typing.
Old records.
Local archives.
Anything.
And there it was.
Buried in a scanned newspaper from 1893.

“The first storm of April brings with it the stirring of the lake. Old fishermen warn: do not answer the storm when it calls, for what wakes beneath the ice remembers the warmth of breath—and seeks it.”

Elliot stared at the words.
The tapping became pounding.
The glass bowed inward.

“…Elliot…”

This time, it was right behind him.
Warm.
Close.
Almost gentle.

“…open the door…”

He turned.
Slowly.

The hallway beyond his room was dark.
But not empty.
Something stood there.
Not fully seen.
Not needing to be.

Lightning flashed again.
Green.
Blinding.
And in that instant—
He saw it.
Not a shape.
Not a creature.
But a presence.
Vast.
Wet.
Ancient.
As if the lake itself had risen and learned how to stand.

The thunder that followed did not sound like the sky.
It sounded like something laughing.

The door handle turned.
Slowly.
From the other side.

Elliot did not remember moving.
But he found himself standing in front of it.
Hand raised.
Breath shallow.
Heart no longer entirely his own.

“…just open…”

The tapping at the window stopped.
The storm held its breath.
The world narrowed to the space between his fingers…
…and the handle.

Outside, Stillwater Gleam churned beneath the first storm of April.
And something beneath its surface waited—
patiently—
to be let in.

~Wylddane

​

The rain had come softly in the night.

By morning, Lone Pine wore that particular hush that follows April rain—the kind that does not silence the world, but deepens it. The roads were damp, the pines fragrant, and along the edges of Stillwater Gleam, the last stubborn patches of snow had surrendered into rivulets of silver.
​
Inside Bean & Birch, the windows were fogged just enough to blur the world into watercolor.

Maren set mugs before the morning circle—Ethan, Bear at his side; Isabel tucked half into his jacket; Ragnhilde perched with quiet authority near the window; Liam and Mabel just shaking off the damp outside; Erica, Tom, Sam, Toby, and Martha settling into their familiar rhythm.

It was Martha who noticed them first.

“They’re back,” she said softly, nodding toward the window.

Just beyond the glass, along the edge of the road where the earth dipped toward a narrow stream, stood a cluster of slender branches—each tipped with soft, silvery buds.

Pussy willows.

Small. Quiet. Almost unassuming.

And yet, impossible to ignore.

Lucy smiled as she followed Martha’s gaze.

“My grandmother used to say those weren’t just buds,” she said. “She said they were a memory.”

That was enough.
​
Coffee was gathered. Coats were shrugged back on. Even Bear gave a low, approving huff as they stepped out into the gentle April morning.
The air held that scent—earth awakening, water moving, something old becoming new again.

They walked the short distance to the stream, where the willows leaned slightly over the water, their branches trembling with the faintest breeze.

Martha reached out, brushing one of the buds with her fingertips.

“So soft,” she whispered.
“Like fur,” said Toby.
Lucy nodded.
“Like kittens,” she said.

And then, as though the morning itself had been waiting, she began...

“There was once a mother cat,” Lucy said, her voice settling into that quiet storytelling cadence that belonged to firesides and remembered things.

“Her name was Kasha.”

The group stilled.

Even the stream seemed to listen.
​
“She lived along a river much like this one—early spring, just like now. The snow had begun to melt, the river ran high and fast, and her kittens… well, they were full of wonder.”

Mabel’s ears perked. Isabel, from her warm perch, blinked slowly.

“They chased everything,” Lucy continued. “Leaves, shadows, each other… and one day, a butterfly.”

“The smallest of them followed it too close to the water’s edge. And then another. And then—”

Lucy paused.

“They slipped.”

A soft intake of breath moved through the group.
​
“The river was cold. Fast. Too fast. Kasha ran along the bank, crying out, but she could not reach them. She could not swim to them. She could only watch as the current carried them farther and farther away.”

Even Bear lowered his head.

“And the willows,” Lucy said, turning her gaze to the slender branches before them, “they heard her.”

The breeze stirred.

“The willows felt her sorrow—the kind that lives deeper than sound. And so they did what trees are not meant to do.”

Lucy’s voice softened.

“They reached.”

The group stood silent, watching the branches sway.
​
“They bent themselves low over the river. Lower than they ever had before. Their branches dipped into the rushing water, brushing against the tiny, struggling bodies of the kittens.”

Martha’s hand hovered near one of the buds.

“And the kittens,” Lucy said, “clung.”

“To the branches?”

Lucy smiled.

“To hope.”

The stream murmured beside them.

“The willows held fast. They pulled the kittens from the current, lifting them from the cold, carrying them back to the shore. And Kasha… Kasha gathered them close, one by one, her cries turning to something softer. Something whole again.”

Silence lingered.

“But the willows remembered,” Lucy said gently. “They remembered what it meant to reach. To help. To hold life when it was slipping away.”

She reached out, touching one of the soft buds.
​
“And so, each spring, they grow these.”

Tiny, gray, velvet-soft catkins shimmered in the light.

“Little reminders,” Lucy said. “Of the kittens they saved.”

* * * * * * * * * *

For a long moment, no one spoke.

The world felt… fuller somehow.

Richer.

As though the air itself held the story now.

Mabel stepped forward and sniffed at a branch, tail wagging gently. Ragnhilde let out a soft, knowing click. Isabel stretched within Ethan’s jacket, utterly unconcerned, as though she had always known this to be true.

Ethan reached out, brushing one of the buds.

Warm.
Soft.
Alive.

“Imagine that,” Sam murmured. “A tree remembering.”

Martha smiled.

“Maybe everything remembers,” she said.


They lingered there a while longer, beside the stream, beneath the quiet watch of the willows.
​
Then, slowly, they turned back toward Bean & Birch, toward coffee and warmth and the easy companionship of the morning.

But something had shifted.
Just slightly.
As April does.

* * * * * * * * * *

​And from that day forward, whenever the soft buds of the pussy willow appeared along the edges of Lone Pine, the people of the village did not simply see the coming of spring.

They saw kindness.
They saw reaching.
They saw the quiet miracle of being held when the current is too strong.

And if you stand very still beside the willows in early April, when the river runs high and the air is full of awakening…
You might just feel it too.

A softness.
A memory.
A promise.
​
~Wylddane
​

In the village of Lone Pine, where the lake called Stillwater Gleam held the sky like a second memory, there was a quiet understanding among the regulars at Bean & Birch:

Mornings were for coffee.

But somewhere between the second cup and the last crumb of pastry…
they were also for wonder.

Martha rarely spoke first.

She would arrive wrapped in her soft gray coat, her fuchsia-streaked hair catching the light like a secret she hadn’t yet decided to tell. She would take her usual seat by the window—the one that looked out toward the street, though sometimes it seemed she was looking somewhere far beyond it.

“Mornin’, Martha,” Maren would say.

And Martha would smile.

But that morning—the one that began like any other, with steam curling from mugs and the low murmur of friendship—something was different.

Martha had brought a box.

Not large. Not ornate. Just a small wooden thing, worn smooth at the edges, as though it had been held often and with care.

“You ever notice,” she said softly, as the others settled—Erica, Sam, Toby, Tom, Lucy leaning in from behind the counter—“how people drift away from their daydreams?”

There was a pause.

Toby chuckled lightly. “Only when the coffee’s bad.”

“It’s never bad,” Lucy said, mock-indignant.

But Martha shook her head gently.

“I mean the real ones. The ones that used to visit you when you were younger. The ones that felt like… home.”
​
Something in her voice stilled the room.

She opened the box.

Inside, nestled in soft cloth, lay a handful of small, curious objects: an old pocket watch, its glass slightly fogged… a bent copper thimble… a fragment of blue glass that shimmered even in the dim morning light.

“They’re not just things,” Martha said. “They’re… catchers.”

Sam leaned forward. “Catchers of what?”

Martha hesitated only a moment.

“Daydreams.”

No one laughed.

Perhaps it was the way the light shifted just then—how a thin beam of morning sun slipped through the window and seemed to gather itself around the objects in the box. Or perhaps it was because, deep down, each of them recognized the truth of what she was saying.

“They drift off people,” Martha continued. “Like dandelion seeds. Little threads of color… gold, blue, green… sometimes even silver. Most people don’t notice when they lose them.”

“And you do?” Erica asked.

Martha nodded.

“I always have.”

She lifted the pocket watch carefully.

“This one… I found a few weeks ago. It was caught on the fence by the park. Rusted shut. I almost left it there.”

Her fingers traced the edge of the watch, gentle, reverent.

“But something inside it was still… alive.”

She clicked it open.

Inside, where there should have been gears, there was instead a faint shimmer—a thread of color unlike anything they had ever seen.
​
It was violet.

Not bright, not loud—but deep, iridescent… like twilight remembering something it had lost.

“It’s different,” Martha whispered. “Most daydreams are about wanting something. Travel. Love. Success. But this one…”

She looked up.

“This one is about belonging.”

The room had gone very still.

“Who does it belong to?” Tom asked.

Martha’s gaze drifted toward the window.

“Arthur.”

They all knew him.

Not well—but enough.

Arthur was the man who passed by each morning just after nine. Always alone. Always with the same measured steps. He never came inside Bean & Birch. Never lingered. Never looked up.

“I’ve been watching him,” Martha said quietly. “He hasn’t daydreamed in years. Maybe decades.”

“And you’re going to… what?” Toby asked. “Give it back to him?”

Martha closed the watch.
“I’m going to return it.”

* * * * * * * * * *
It was raining by the time she found him.

A soft, steady rain—the kind that didn’t fall so much as settle gently over the world, like a memory you couldn’t quite place.

Arthur sat on a park bench, just as she had expected.
​
Head slightly bowed. Hands folded. A man shaped by routine.

Martha approached slowly.

“Excuse me,” she said.

He looked up, surprised—not by her presence, perhaps, but by the softness in her voice.

“I believe this belongs to you.”

She held out the pocket watch.

He frowned slightly. “I don’t think—”

But before he could finish, the watch slipped open in her hand.

And the violet thread—so delicate, so quietly luminous—rose into the air.

For a moment, it hovered between them.

Then it drifted… gently… toward him.

Arthur didn’t move.

But when the thread touched his chest—
everything changed.

Not the world.

No, the world remained as it was: the rain still falling, the trees still bare, the sky still a pale and quiet gray.
But something within him… opened.

The rain carried a scent now—lavender, faint but unmistakable.

The distant hum of traffic softened… reshaped itself into something warmer… something like a melody.

And then—
a memory.
A song.
​
His mother’s voice, humming low in the kitchen of a house long gone.
A place where he had once felt—completely, undeniably—at home.

Arthur inhaled sharply.

His eyes filled.

Not with sorrow.

But with something fuller. Something deeper.

He looked at Martha.

And for the first time in a very long while…
he smiled.

* * * * * * * * * *
That evening, back at Bean & Birch, the box sat open once more.

But the pocket watch was gone.

“And?” Lucy asked gently.

Martha wrapped her hands around her mug, the warmth rising into her palms.

“He remembered,” she said simply.

“And you?” Erica asked.

Martha considered this.

For a long moment, she said nothing.

Then she glanced around the room—at the faces she knew, the laughter beginning to stir again, the quiet glow of lamplight against wood and glass and gathered lives.

“I think…” she said softly, “I did too.”

Outside, the rain had stopped.
​
And in its wake, the world felt—just slightly, but unmistakably—rewoven.
Not changed.
But seen.

* * * * * * * * * *
And in the days that followed, if you happened to pass by Bean & Birch in the early morning light, you might notice something curious:

Now and then, just for a moment, the air near the window would shimmer—

as though a thread of something unseen had caught the light…

and was waiting, patiently,
​
to be found again.

~Wylddane

“Did that really happen…or did we just glimpse something?”

The fire had burned down to a thoughtful glow.

Not gone—never quite gone—but settled into itself, as if it too were listening.

Ethan nudged one of the logs with his boot, sending a brief spiral of sparks upward. They drifted into the cold March night and vanished into a sky that still belonged more to winter than spring. Across the lake, Stillwater Gleam lay divided—shoreline locked in snow and ice, the center opened into a wide, black mirror that moved as if it were breathing.

“Spring’s trying,” Maren said softly.

“Winter’s not done,” Toby replied.

No one argued.

They all knew better.

The group had gathered at the lakeside firepit just beyond Ethan’s cottage—Maren and Lucy, Toby, Sam, Erica and Tom, Martha, and Liam—drawn by that restless feeling that comes in March, when the world is neither one thing nor another.

Bear lay curled near the fire, though one ear twitched now and then. Isabel peered out from Ethan’s jacket, golden-eyed and watchful. Above them, unseen but present, Ragnhilde shifted in the pine boughs.

The night held them.

And then—

“Yeeeeep…”

The sound slipped across the lake.

Thin. High.

Wrong.

The conversation died instantly.

Sam blinked. “Okay…what was that?”
​
No one answered.

The sound came again—longer this time, stretching across the open water like something searching.

“Yeeeeep…?”

Lucy moved closer to Maren. “That didn’t sound like anything I know.”

“It sounded like something trying to be something,” Martha said quietly.

The fire popped once, sharp as a snapped twig.

Then silence.
Not ordinary silence.
The kind that listens back.

From the woods behind them came a single, hollow knock—thunk…thunk…thunk—a pileated woodpecker striking deep into a dead pine. The sound echoed, then vanished.

Even that felt like a warning.
Bear lifted his head.
Slowly.

His nose turned toward Stillwater Gleam. His lips parted slightly, and a low, breath-like murmur slipped from him—not alarm, not aggression…recognition.

“He’s got something,” Ethan whispered.

“Yeah,” Toby muttered. “So do I. It’s called dread.”

The ice along the shoreline shifted.

A deep, resonant crack rolled outward, echoing beneath their feet. The black water beyond it rippled—not with wind, but with something heavier. Something deliberate.

And then—

“Yeeeeep!”
​
Closer now.

And beneath it—
Something else.

Not a sound.
A presence.

Maren leaned forward slightly. “Do you feel that?”

No one wanted to answer.
Because they did.

Across the lake, where the dark water met the jagged edge of ice, the night seemed to thicken. The shadows there were not still—they moved, just slightly, like breath in cold air.

Then one of them stepped forward.

Not fully into sight.

But enough.

A shape.

Large.
​
Silent.

A wolf.

Except—
It was too pale.

Not white like snow, but something softer…like frost, or moonlight caught in fur. Its edges seemed to blur, as if it did not fully belong to the world it stood in.

“Tell me I’m not the only one seeing that,” Sam whispered.

“You’re not,” Liam said, voice barely audible.

Another shape emerged.
Then another.

A line of them now, moving along the far edge of Stillwater Gleam.

A pack.

Each one quiet. Measured.

Unhurried.

Their eyes—if they had eyes—did not reflect like normal animals. Instead, there was a faint glow, like distant stars seen through thin cloud.

Bear stood.
Not tense.
Not afraid.

He stepped forward to the very edge of the firelight and raised his head.

And then, softly—
He answered.
Not a howl.
Not quite.

A low, flowing sound that seemed to travel across the lake like breath over glass.

The lead wolf paused.

Lifted its head.

“Yeeeeeep…”

But now the sound was different.

Not eerie.
Not wrong.
Ancient.
​
Behind it, the others joined—layered voices rising and falling in a strange, haunting chorus that filled the night without breaking it.

The trees did not move.
The water did not stir.

Even the dripping melt from the pines seemed to pause.

“They’re not hunting,” Martha whispered.

“No,” Ethan said. “They’re…passing through.”

“Through what?” Toby asked.

No one answered.

Because there was no good answer.

The pack moved as one, gliding along the far shoreline where ice and water met. For a moment—just a moment—the lead wolf turned its head.

Toward them.
Toward the fire.
Toward Bear.

And though no one could say why, every single person there felt it—
They had been seen.
Not as prey.
Not as intruders.
Simply…noticed.

Then, as quietly as they had come, the wolves faded.

Not vanished.
Not exactly.
But thinned.

Their shapes dissolving into the shadows of the trees, into the low mist rising from the open water, into something that might have been memory—or might have been something older still.

The last sound drifted back across Stillwater Gleam.
​
“Yip…”

Soft.
Fading.
Gone.

The fire cracked.

The world returned.

Drip.
Drip.

A distant wind.

Toby let out a long breath. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to need someone to explain that.”

“No, you’re not,” Lucy said gently.

He paused.

“…yeah,” he admitted. “You’re right. I’m not.”

Bear lowered himself back beside the fire, calm as ever.

Isabel blinked once and tucked her head back into warmth.
​
Above them, Ragnhilde let out a quiet, knowing croak.

“They’ve always been here,” Liam said after a while.

“Maybe not always like that,” Sam replied.

Liam shrugged. “Maybe we just don’t always see them.”

No one argued.

Because out across the lake, where the ice cracked and the dark water breathed, the night still held its secrets.
​
And now—
So did they.

~Wylddane