Page 100 of Where Light Cannot Follow

He looks hopeful, then angry. Awed, then devastated. He shakes his head and pulls back from my hands.

"But you sold your soul. Do you understand what that means? I'll have to live forever with the knowledge that I caused your fate."

"You won't." He looks up at me, earnest and stricken. I try to suppress a smile and fail. "We'll be dead in a relatively short amount of time, remember. You won't have to live with anything for very long."

"This isn't a time for jesting.”

I laugh and step closer again. Offer my hand, palm up.

He glances at it but doesn't move for the longest moment.

"Please, Virgil. Let me give us this. It's Christmas, after all. A time for gifts freely given."

He looks up at me, eyes glistening. "You want to be with me?”

"Where you go, I go. I told you I'd find you in the light. But if the light won't have you, then I shall find you in the shadows instead."

Another tear slips down his cheek.

"You have no idea how much life we can live in forty years," I continue. "We'll gather every memory we can hold. I'll read you every book you've ever wanted to hear aloud. We can travel. Volunteer. Create. Experience things neither of us ever made time for. We start today." I pause, considering, remembering how he’d light up when I described food, flavors he could only imagine, textures he’d never known. Until now. “Many places are closed for Christmas, but—have you ever eaten labneh?"

Virgil is quiet for a long moment. He stands before me rumpled and uncertain, tear-stained and soft-faced. Beautiful in a way I never could have appreciated when I first arrived in hell, marching my endless roads.

He sighs. "Dante. You know, of course, I have not."

"Then we'll start with that for lunch." My hand still hovers between us, patient and empty and stubborn. "Will you grant me this, Virgil? Will you let me give you this gift? It's all I have to offer.” His eyes brighten at the words we once both said to each other in a far different place. “And when we return to the shadows, we'll face them together."

He sets the pastry box down carefully on the side table, sliding it so the half-crushed cardboard rests neatly aligned with the wood grain. A small gesture. A familiar one. The careful attention of a man who notices beauty in order.

Then he turns to me and places his hand against mine.

His fingers are softer than I expected. Long and nimble. Callused in exactly the places I'd imagined.

I curl my fingers around his hand and feel the warmth. The strength. The impossible reality of him.

"Forty years," he says quietly.

"Forty years," I confirm. "And then eternity. But we'll have these memories to carry with us. Enough light to survive any darkness."

He looks down at our joined hands. When he looks back up, there's something new in his expression. Something I've never seen there before.

Hope, perhaps. Or the beginning of belief.

"Well then," he says, and the corner of his mouth curves upward—just slightly, just enough. "I suppose you'd better show me where you've hidden the icebox."

I laugh, and the sound surprises me. It's been so long since laughter came so easily.

I don't let go of his hand as I lead him toward the kitchen. Outside the windows, Manhattan glitters in the winter sun, and somewhere far below, the city is waking to Christmas morning.

We have forty years.

We have today.

Outside, a rare Christmas snow begins falling faintly through Manhattan. It drifts against the windows, transforms the city into something Virgil has never seen—and something I'm seeing the way Virgil taught me: with wonder.

His hand warm in mine. His shoulder brushing mine as we step out onto the balcony and watch the world soften, brighten, become possible.

The snow falls upon the living. It falls upon us. Upon this moment. Upon forty years waiting to be lived.

It catches in Virgil's golden curls and he laughs when the cold flakes kiss his skin.

We are blessed, the two of us. Damned and blessed in equal measure.

It's enough.

It's everything.