This is a re-drafted version of an old story I wrote. I’ve made some improvements, so decided to post it up here to get some feedback. The old draft is still up, so feel free to read that too. Thanks.

Prologue

He was waiting for me. I had knelt there, at my mother’s grave, for longer than I could remember, one hand on the granite and the other coiled around a bouquet of roses. My fingers were numb with cold as the snow swirled around me, the delicate whiteness marking out the curves and twists of the wind. I knew he was worried at the time I was taking. I could feel it in his stare, even from behind the black wrought iron fence of the graveyard. He was watching, expecting me to fall apart.

What a bleak figure I must have appeared to him, kneeling in the midst of a storm in the dead of night. None of it mattered. I felt no self-consciousness kneeling there, because I had too much to say, and I was yet to find my voice.

The first time I had visited this place a deep chasm had been dug into the earth, just long and wide enough for a coffin. I hadn’t known what to say then, either. In that way and that way only I was the same person. Everything else had changed.

That July I had been a completely different girl. And with that girl is where my story starts.