It was darker than it should have been.
And colder.
Not the sharp kind of cold that shocks you awake, but the slow, creeping kind, the kind you don't notice until it's already settled into your bones. Evelyn pulled her arms closer to herself and wondered when it had started to feel this way. Yesterday hadn't been this cold. Or maybe it had, and she'd only just begun to feel it.
She hadn't eaten properly in days. Time had lost its edges, stretching and folding in on itself until she couldn't tell how long she'd been here, only that it didn't feel like it was ending anytime soon. Her body was tired in a way that sleep wouldn't fix. A quiet exhaustion. A waiting.
People say that when you were close to death, your life flashes before your eyes.
If that were true, then she had been dying for days.
It wasn't flashes. It wasn't fragments. It was slow. Almost cruel in its clarity. Memory after memory unfolding with time enough not just to see them, but to sit inside them. To examine them. To understand them.
There had been so much pain. So much suffering. So much struggle that, for a long time, she had thought that was all there was, until survival had become instinct rather than decision.
But threaded through it, stubborn and impossible to ignore, was love. And strength. The kind you don't recognize while you're surviving, only when you finally stop running long enough to look back.
The strangest realization came quietly.
She didn't have to be here.
There had been choices. So many of them. Moments where one step to the side, one different word, one refusal would have changed everything. This wasn't fate. This wasn't destiny. This was her life, and she had walked herself into this ending.
No one else.
She was sorry for the sliver of a future that would never have the chance to grow beyond her. And yet, when she followed that thought to its conclusion, there was no regret waiting for her there.
If she were given the chance to choose again, knowing everything she knew now, she would still walk the same path.
Tragic, maybe. But so many beautiful stories were.
Her chest tightened, and for a moment she thought she might cry. Not from sadness, not really, but from something warmer. Gratitude, perhaps. For having lived fully enough that the loss hurt this much. For having loved deeply enough that absence ached.
She had met two men who had shaped her life. Loved them in different ways. Lost them in different ways, and the pain of not having them here now pressed heavy against her ribs.
They would survive.
That thought steadied her more than she expected. If this was where it ended, they wouldn't be alone. Lying there on the cold floor, she didn't feel alone either.
The cold crept higher.
Her thoughts slowed.
And that was the last thing she remembered, not fear, not regret, but the quiet understanding of how it had all begunThat's where her thoughts went at last , there were so many moments yet her mind took her to a specific day… Before the darkness finally took her.