Even in Glenfrost, the frost breaks eventually.
By the time the first daffodils pushed up along the school fence line, Noah had a thin white scar at his shoulder he liked to show off as though he’d earned it in battle, which, in a way, he had. He still boxed on Saturdays, though the anger that had once driven his fists had softened into something closer to discipline, and most weeks now he laughed more than he swung.
Damian graduated in a cap and gown that made him look, for one photograph, entirely and ordinarily twenty-two, and told me afterward, quietly, that he’d worn a hundred such gowns before across a hundred such lifetimes, and that this was the first one he’d been glad to have someone in the audience for.
We do not talk, yet, about what it means to love someone who does not age the way I will. There will be a day for that conversation, a harder winter than this one, somewhere further down the road, and when it comes, I already know he will wait for me to be ready the same patient way he has waited for everything else.
For now there is only this: a cottage with the fire lit, a boy asleep down the hall with a scar he wears like a medal, and a man who has had five hundred years to learn how to love someone properly, choosing, every single day, to spend the rest of them on me.
Some winters end in thaw. Mine ended in him.