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"The Light?" I whisper.

No answer. But the warmth lingers, patient, the way it always is. It’s like The Light has more time than I could ever hope to have again.

"Please," I say again, my voice breaking. "Help him."

He must choose.

The words are barely more than a breath, and I hate them the same way I hated them the first time I heard them. Back at the creek. In the moment I first understood that I wasn’t going back.

“Then help him choose right.”

I cannot choose for him. Neither can you.

“I’m not asking you to choose for him. “I’m asking you to give him a reason.”

He already has one.

I open my eyes.

Sam's fingers tighten around the keys. The truck rumbles to life. For one impossible heartbeat, he turns toward the highway that leads home.

Hope catches in my chest.

Then, at the end of the block, his blinker clicks. He turns the truck toward the liquor store instead.

The warmth fades, leaving only the familiar ache in its place.

I watch him walk back to the truck with another bottle tucked inside a brown paper bag.

He twists the cap off before he backs out of the parking space.

The first swallow is quick. The second lasts longer. He drinks not because he likes the taste or because he wants to forget. It’s because the silence is louder when he’s sober.

When the bottle’s empty, he drives.

The miles blur together.

The names on the signs change.

The grief never does.

An hour later, another liquor store waits just off the highway.

He turns in without thinking.

I don’t follow him inside. Instead, I stay in the truck staring at the empty seat where I used to sit and let myself wonder, not for the first time, whether The Light was right to let me stay tethered to this at all, or whether watching Samuel choose wrong, over and over, is its own kind of punishment neither of us agreed to.

Samuel

For a few seconds, I forget she's dead. It's the cruelest part of waking up. Those first quiet heartbeats before memory catches up, when the world still feels right and I can almost convince myself she's in the kitchen making coffee or in the bathroom drying her hair.

The reality crashes over me all at once, heavy enough to steal the air from my lungs, and I’m left watching a crack stretch across the stained ceiling in whatever motel I stayed in last night.

The bottle is still standing on the nightstand, which feels like an accomplishment considering I can't remember getting undressed, turning on the television, or deciding that sleeping diagonally across the mattress with one boot still on was a good idea.

Morning light slips through the gap in the curtains, pale and unforgiving. I turn away from it and immediately regret moving.

My head throbs behind my eyes.