I Waited on the Melting Snow While They Sang Her Birthday Song Chapter 09

A few days later, a light snow fell at the foot of the mountain.

Graham, Elliot, and Miles arrived almost at the same time.

The snow was too thin to cover the rocks, but they followed the familiar trail all the way to the pine

tree.

Elliot reached the end first. When he turned around, he saw Graham had stopped halfway along the

trail.

“Come on,” he said.

Graham looked down at the bare path beneath his feet.

“She waited for me right here last year.”

“She waited this year, too.”

After saying that, Elliot couldn’t bring himself to move, either.

Miles handed out the oranges he’d brought, one for each of them. No one peeled theirs.

They stood there for a long time. Snowflakes settled on their shoulders and quickly melted. Graham held out his hand to catch one, leaving his palm wet.

“Do you think she was in a lot of pain?” he asked.

Miles said, “She told me she couldn’t walk the trail. I never asked why.”

Elliot said, “She asked if I’d come. I told her to stop putting pressure on me.”

No one said, “If only we’d known.”

Those words would have been too small to bear the weight of the day I’d spent waiting.

Someone from the Snow Realm asked if I wanted to watch a little longer.

I looked at the three men standing beneath the pine tree. When they were children, I’d saved them

because I’d heard them calling for help in the snow. I could reach them, so I went.

And when they started coming up the mountain with me every year, I really was happy.

Whenever I looked back halfway along the trail, they were always there.

I’d looked back so many times that day, too.

“No,” I said.

The mountain and the three figures reflected in the water slowly faded away.

Graham and the others stopped sending “See you next year” messages to my phone. They packed away my belongings one by one and kept the photographs of me. They never wrote a single word pretending I’d forgiven them.

Every spring after that, Elliot went back to visit the pine tree.

Miles never lent his blue scarf to anyone again. He washed it and put it in a box with the old photographs.

Graham kept the first pair of gloves he’d knitted for me, the ones that had never quite fit. Whenever it snowed, he remembered how I’d said I’d wear them for one more year.

But that year had already passed.