Chapter Text
The snow came down in heavy sheets, caught in the glare of the headlights like static on a broken screen. Shauna leaned forward against the wheel, the leather pressed tight beneath her fingers, shoulders locked with the kind of tension that had long since become second nature. The wipers dragged back and forth across the windshield, squealing as they fought to keep a slim strip of glass clear, but the fog swallowed the road faster than the car could cut through it.
On the seat beside her lay the letter. Creased from being folded and unfolded, read and reread, until the edges had softened into fray. Jackie’s handwriting — careful, almost girlish, but steady in a way Shauna had never been. She didn’t need to look at it anymore. The words had burned themselves into her skull.
I’ll be waiting at our special place.
Shauna mouthed them without meaning to, the sound catching in her throat like a prayer. She shut her eyes for a heartbeat too long, forcing air into her lungs, and when she opened them again the snow seemed thicker, the road narrower, as though something more sinister than the wilderness itself was leaning closer, listening; Listening to Shauna’s never resting thoughts.
She told herself she didn’t believe in ghosts. But what else could this be? Jackie had been gone for years. Shauna had buried her grief the way she buried everything else: under silence, under the routines of life she pretended to keep living. And yet here was Jackie’s voice, bleeding through the paper as if she had written it yesterday.
Her eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror. For an instant, she thought she saw the shape of someone seated there — knees drawn close, a head bowed, as if asleep. She blinked and the shape collapsed back into shadow, bundled blankets that shifted with the car’s movement. Still, the sight twisted in her gut, and she dragged her eyes back to the road.
The heater hissed, but the cold pressed in anyway, a damp weight that reached deep into her bones. Shauna rubbed at her wedding band with her thumb, the motion more nervous tic than comfort, before she caught herself and curled her fist against the wheel.
Snow thickened. The world beyond the headlights shrank until it was nothing but pale blur and the hiss of tires on half-frozen asphalt. Shauna’s lips parted, words rising unbidden into the quiet.
“I shouldn’t be here.”
But then she heard it again — not in her own voice, not in her thoughts. Jackie’s voice. Soft, familiar, impossibly close.
I’ll be waiting at our special place…
Shauna’s throat closed, tears stinging hot in the corner of her eyes. She pressed harder on the gas pedal, as if speed alone could carry her back into the warmth of that voice, back into the life she lost.
The fog closed around the car, white and endless, until it felt like she was no longer driving on any real road at all.
And still she drove.
The car finally slowed as the road widened into a lookout, a half-forgotten strip of asphalt carved into the mountainside. The fog had softened into thick curtains of white, and beyond them Shauna could just make out the outline of the lake below. Toluca Lake — though tonight it was nothing but a void, black water hidden beneath the ice and snow.
Shauna cut the engine. The silence was immediate and suffocating, as though the world had been holding its breath, waiting for her to arrive. She sat there for a long moment, her hands locked against the wheel, staring forward as the windshield began to frost over in slow, creeping veins.
Finally, she forced herself to move. The door groaned open and the night pressed in — bitter air, sharp enough to sting her teeth when she inhaled. She stepped out, boots crunching against hard-packed snow, and the cold wrapped around her like a shroud.
For a few seconds, Shauna simply stood there, her breath spilling into the air in ragged clouds. Her eyes roamed over the overlook: the worn wooden rail, the faded tourist map half-buried under frost, the skeletal trees that bent beneath the weight of ice, the lake so big and white it burned Shauna’s eyes somehow. A place that once might have been ordinary, even beautiful. Now it looked like the edge of the world.
She drew her coat tighter around her and cursed under her breath.
She hated snow.
Always had.
But now, the sight of it was unbearable. It dragged her back, whether she wanted it or not — to nineteen months of it, endless and merciless. She remembered the way it crusted her eyelashes until they stuck together, the way her fingers cracked and bled, the way hunger had gnawed through her until her bones felt hollow inside her skin. Snow was the crunch of footsteps when someone didn’t come back. Snow was the taste of smoke and flesh. Snow was Jackie’s face flushed red from the cold, lips trembling, eyes burning with accusation.
Even now, she could almost hear the wind howling through the pines, could almost see the fire’s glow across snow-packed ground, could almost feel the heat of Jackie’s stare as if she were still standing there.
Shauna shut her eyes tight, but the memories wouldn’t let her go.
When she opened them, the overlook seemed even emptier, as though the fog had thickened in her absence. Her gaze slid to the railing. She stepped closer, hands brushing the ice as she leaned forward. The fog clung to the lake like flesh to bone, and beneath it — though she couldn’t see it — she knew the water stretched on forever, black and waiting.
“This is insane,” she muttered. The words barely left her lips before dissolving into the air.
Her voice sounded small, like a stranger’s.
Shauna turned her face away from the lake. Her eyes flicked once, unwillingly, to the car. Its windows were fogged, shadows pooling inside. She knew what lay hidden beneath those blankets, what weight she had carried with her all this way. She couldn’t bear to look too long.
Instead, she fixed her eyes on the narrow trail at the edge of the overlook — a path that sloped downward into the fog, a path that led into a place Shauna never knew of its existence before this.
The thought of snow pressed in on her again. The thought of hunger, of grief, of Jackie’s absence carved sharp against her ribs.
And yet her feet began to move.
Step by step, crunching into the white, Shauna left the safety of the overlook behind. The fog swallowed her whole.