I Waited on the Melting Snow While They Sang Her Birthday Song Chapter 08

The water in the Snow Realm was perfectly still.

I could see Graham and the others, but I couldn’t touch anything in the human world. For the first few days, I kept finding myself looking into the water. I knew they wouldn’t look up, but I stil wanted to know whether they’d walk that trail when they finally returned to the mountain.

On the third day, Graham went up the mountain alone.

He brought no flowers or food. All he carried was the old pair of gloves I’d left at home.

The snow had completely melted from the trail. The ground beneath the pine tree was muddy Graham walked to the stone steps where I’d last sat, crouched down, and laid the gloves across his

knees.

“Nora, I’m here.”

He waited a long time, but no one answered.

After coming down the mountain, he found Elliot and Miles. He gathered the security footage and

my final messages and handed everything over to the investigators still working the case. He

answered their questions over and over, never once trying to excuse himself by saying I’d been

throwing a fit.

Elliot held out his phone.

It contained photos I’d sent him from our trips up the mountain since we were children. Every year, I’d taken a picture of the same pine tree. Once, when he hadn’t made it up the mountain yet, we’d

exchanged messages.

Me: [Where are you?]

Elliot replied: [Don’t worry. I’m running.]

Elliot stared at the word “running.”

“She asked me where I was this year, too.”

That day, he’d been at the beach, three hours away from the mountain. He hadn’t run.

Miles went to my house and canceled the pending Apple Cash payment. He took a bag of oranges up the mountain but didn’t set them down on the stone steps.

“She’d already bought oranges that day,” he said. “Who am I trying to impress by bringing these

now?”

After that, they stopped discussing what they should bring when they came to see me.

Lily came over from campus and returned the blue scarf to Miles. She asked if she could visit my house, and Miles said yes.

Standing beside the table, she saw the four bus tickets and the photo album filled with pictures of the four of us growing up together.

“I said I wanted to see the ocean that day,” she said quietly. “I thought you could go with her another time. She asked me if I could let you go back, and I never brought it up again.”

Graham shook his head. “She asked us to come back. We’re the ones who didn’t.”

Lily nodded, her eyes red. She carefully folded the scarf and put it back where it had been.

When the three of them took Lily to see the ocean, they’d all thought there would be plenty more years. I’d believed that, too. That was why I’d left the old gloves at home, certain there would be another day for Graham to come by and pick them up.