Healing/Redemption10 min read
Snow, Handprints, and the Choice
ButterPicks8 views
I open the book because the night smells of candles and old paper.
"Do you think the dead hold grudges?" I ask the page as if it will answer.
A shadow knocks my head with a cool fingertip. "Are you still reading at this hour, Imani?" Griffin Lindstrom teases like he used to, like the world hasn't split itself into before-and-after.
I slap away his hand. "It's late," I say, though my voice trembles a little. "You should—"
He laughs. "You would say that even if I were a ghost."
The carved mirror shows only me in the dim room; I feel for Griffin's shoulder and find nothing but cold air. Then I turn, and there he is—pale, impossibly thin, a scar mapping his face like a dark river.
"Griffin?" I whisper.
He presses his forehead to mine, his touch like frost. "Imani, are you all right?"
I pull back. "You were dead," I say. "They told me you were gone."
"I promised," he says, half a smile, half a sob. "I promised I'd come back even if I had to crawl from the underworld."
"You promised a lot of things," I answer sharply. That was the old Griffin—the boy who rode with too much pride and too few plans. "You promised you'd come back alive."
He coughs blood into his palm and laughs like it's the only joke left in the world. "I came back," he says. "Isn't that enough?"
Cecelia Albert appears in the doorway with a candle and a face like a struck bell. "Miss, are you well? I thought you asleep."
"I am well," I lie, tucking my wrist under my sleeve. There, pressed dark and ugly—five long finger-marks like someone took iron tongs to my skin. The print will not rub away. It sits there like accusation.
Cecelia gasps. "Your wrist—"
"Don't let my brother see this," I cut off her words. "Promise me you won't tell him."
Cecelia's eyes search mine. "Miss—"
"Promise," I repeat.
She closes her mouth like a woman holding a secret because I asked her to.
"Why would I hide it?" she whispers when the door shuts. "You were asleep all evening."
"I dreamed of a man who smiled and cried at once," I say. "He kissed me like it was the only thing he could do."
Cecelia shakes her head. "You shouldn't let yourself be frightened by dreams, Miss."
"Dreams are the only proof I have of what happened," I tell her.
Days go by in a haze. The town breathes under a winter sky, and I measure my breath against the ghost that won't leave my shoulder. I can see him in daylight sometimes—shrunken, like a child, when the sun is high. At dusk he towers again, all soldier and scar.
"Why did you come?" I ask one evening when he stands in the doorway like a statue. "If you were free in death, why come to me?"
"Because you are the center of my story," Griffin says. "Because I am incompetent at endings."
He used to joke like that. He used to be all swagger and safe cruelty. Now there is a rawness in his voice that hurts me more than his hands on my skin.
"You told me, before you left, that you'd die for me without thinking twice," I remind him.
"Yes." Griffin presses his knuckles against his mouth. "And I did. I did it badly."
"You said you'd never leave me for another," I say.
He doesn't answer at once. "There was a woman," he says later, because he thinks I have a right to the truth, and because he needs to empty himself of it. "Her name was Constance. She found me on a hill of blood and mud. She held my hand."
I feel the floor tilt. "Constance?" I ask. The name rings new and ugly. He explains—she was a woman who once saved him, a stranger who stepped into a wound. "He told me she waited, and that his heart learned to lean where it had been supported," I say in my head, but out loud I am steadier than I feel. "He told me he had moved."
Griffin looks at me like a man who has only just noticed the shape of his own hands. "I tried to keep my oath," he says. "I tried to be what I promised. But I failed."
"You died to your failure," I say, and the words are softer than I expect. "And then you came back to accuse me."
He reaches for me, and I do something I haven't done since he died—I slap him.
"How could you?" I shout. "How could you trade me for a stranger? For a chance to be 'saved'?"
"You don't understand," he says. "I thought I could mend things by coming back. I thought being near would make me better. But being near only keeps me from letting you go."
I turn my face away. "Let me go," I say. "Please. Let me live."
The first public moment comes at an afternoon reception where the town has gathered for a ceremony. I did not plan to bring this storm into public, but news runs like wildfire and grief is a gossiping thing.
"She'll be here," someone whispers as I walk into the square with Evan Hall at my side. He is steady like a harbor and burns in my chest like a kept promise.
"Evan," I say, low, because public eyes make everything vulnerable. "I am sorry you had to hear."
He tightens his arm around me without looking flustered. "You owe no apologies," he says. "Not to them. Not to me."
"Why are you here?" a rusted voice asks from the crowd. Griffin stands on the low platform, a dark smear in daylight. He looks fragile and calm and dangerously honest.
"I came for her," he says plainly. "I came because I thought I could fix whatever I had broken."
"How noble," someone snorts. Others laugh. One woman—older, with eyes like chipped glass—calls out, "Fix her? You mean take her back?"
Griffin flinches as if struck. I can see the collapse that lives in him. "I will do what it takes," he murmurs.
"Do you remember words?" Evan's voice is the quiet before a winter storm. He steps forward and every whisper wilts. "Do you remember the vow you made in light and in laughter?"
Griffin nods. "I remember," he says.
"Then remember this." Evan draws himself up high, his voice steady as rock. "A hundred promises are worthless if a single life is treated like choice. I will not let her be toyed with. Not now, not ever."
"They were not toys," Griffin says. "We were children when we said things."
"Then be a child no more," Evan spits. "Be a man."
There is a shift in the crowd; a teacher frowns; a merchant clutches his coat. Someone pushes forward and sneers, "So the general becomes a ghost to feign repentance?" Laughter breaks like brittle glass.
Griffin looks at me as if I'll answer for him. "She is free to choose," I say. "But you—"
"Evan," I whisper. "Don't make this spectacle."
He lets the challenge hang in the clean cold air. "Do you love her now?" he asks Griffin, and it is a simple question with a heavy edge.
Griffin's hands tremble. "I loved her," he says. "I love her. I loved you. I do not know how to hold these things without stabbing them."
"Then speak with honesty," Evan says. "Tell the town the truth."
So Griffin speaks. He tells them in halting breath how a woman named Constance saved him on a winter night, how clay and blood did what words could not. He tells them how he learned to stay behind because love can be a habit, not a duty. He admits his failure and the crowd sways between pity and disgust.
"Are you saying you left her for Constance?" a man shouts.
"I am saying I failed both of you," Griffin answers. He looks small as a bird. "I am sorry."
That should finish it—repentance, hush, forgiveness or not. But the rules of this world demand demonstration. The elder among us, a man who once taught men how to die, strolls forward and says in a voice like gravel, "Then take the blade and finish the proof."
Griffin's eyes widen. "What—"
"Finish it," the elder says. "If you cannot keep a promise alive with life, then keep the promise with death."
The world tilts. Two children start crying in the square. People move closer as if to watch a performance. I feel sick.
"No," I say. "No one must die for promises. Not today."
"She speaks for him," someone says, pointing with a shaking hand. "Let her decide."
Evan's jaw tightens; his knuckles white where they hold me. "Imani, stand aside." He doesn't say it to be cruel, but he steps forward as if he is a blade between performance and pity.
Griffin's fingers fumble; a knife appears and disappears in his hand like a secret. He looks around at faces that range from curiosity to hunger. "I will not play this game," he whispers. "I will do it my way."
He stabs himself in the chest.
The sound is terrible and sudden and forever. Blood blooms on his tunic like a dark flower. The people roar—some in horror, some in applause to the spectacle of drama satisfied. A child begins to vomit. A woman faints. Men shout curses and prayers together. Constance cries out and covers her mouth. Evan moves like someone unplugging a wound—faster than I can follow. He grabs Griffin by the shoulders and shakes him as if he were a dog that had broken a dish.
"You fool!" Evan screams. "You coward!"
Griffin's face is a study in collapse. He goes from proud to confused to defiant to pleading in seconds. "I wanted—" he gasps. "I wanted to be punished. I wanted to do what I could not bear to ask of living to be done for me."
"You took a life to ease your own soul," Evan says. "Look at what you did."
Around us, the crowd's voices split: "Shame!" "Mercy!" "Monster!" "Hero!" Constance runs forward and lifts Griffin's head. "Griffin, don't—" she cries. "No!"
"Stop!" I hear myself scream. "Stop! He will not be a spectacle!"
Those words do something to the people. The elder's face turns red with shame as if someone set his conscience alight. The man who suggested the blade steps back, trembling.
Evan, who is usually the quiet harbor, now uncovers something I have never seen: ruthless clarity. He picks Griffin up by the elbows and carries him to the small temple steps. "You will answer," he says. "You will stand before them and tell every lie and truth and face what your choices cost."
Griffin's bravado evaporates. He looks at the crowd and changes like weather. "I loved her," he says to Constance, and his voice breaks. "I loved Imani. I am the kind of man who made promises for the warmth of them and not for the weight."
"So you confess," someone hisses.
"Confess," Evan says. He does not scream; he is cruel with the precision of grief. "Tell them how you left a living heart to rot in place to chase another hearth's warmth. Tell them how you will pay."
Griffin's face twists. "Pay? I have already cut myself open," he says. "Do you want me to die again before you, Evan Hall? Do you want my remorse to be your justice?"
"No." Evan's hand is on Griffin's shoulder like an iron clamp. "I want you to not be allowed to climb back into life and claim you were the only betrayed. I want you to be seen like you were then."
The crowd leans in; tongues wag as if the air were a dish to be consumed. "Shame him," someone suggests. "Tell the truth."
So they tell. Old friends, old rivals, every passerby who remembers how he walked with arrogance, now narrate small cruelties: the letter he didn't reply, the day he laughed too loud when she cried, the times he promised to send for her and did not. Each anecdote is a nail. Griffin moves through them like a man through cold water—surprised at the accumulation of his own neglect.
When they finish, the punishment is not only his bleeding chest. It is the unfastening of his honor. The magistrate strips him of rank in a public edict—letter pinned to the temple door—a humiliating reduction. A boy with a basket of bread throws a crust at Griffin's boots. Girls whisper as they pass. The patrons of the inn refuse him ale. Constance, who loved him, signs a paper that unbinds her name from his house and walks away in quiet dignity that makes the crowd shiver.
Griffin crumbles. He goes through stages—pride, shock, denial, pleading, then a raw animal grief. He tries to apologize to me in words that fumble like newborn things. "Imani, forgive me," he says over and over, collapsing into a posture of someone begging for a form of death.
The crowd records everything in the currency of shame and spectacle. Evan watches with an expression I cannot read. "You wanted punishment?" he says slowly. "There it is. Sit in it."
Griffin's reaction is almost worse than their judgment. Once smugness fades, he flails in humiliation. He cries like a child—then he tries to laugh it off, then his body convulses with sobs. He collapses to the stone and the people sigh as if a storm has finally broken.
The scene lasts what feels like an eternity. People clap, then hush. A few move closer and try to help, then recoil. A scribe draws his ink. "Record it," someone says. "Let it be a lesson."
It is a lesson—and not the lesson Griffin thought it would be. What is punished is not only infidelity but the arrogance of thinking one can trade a heart's time for cheap absolution. The crowd disperses slowly, leaving a circle of witnesses. I stand with Evan and watch Griffin shrink into a man who cannot reclaim his place.
After the storm, things are quieter in different ways. Griffin is left with a name that no longer opens doors. He wanders the edges of my life like a shadow I let be. He still appears at night; he still presses that cold forehead to mine and tells me how sorry he is. But he is chastened. I feel no joy at his abasement. I feel only the grave weight of a life lost and the slow unwrapping of my heart from old bindings.
Weeks later, Evan and I stand beneath an ancient apricot tree where moonlight writes patterns across the snow. He looks down at me like an answer.
"Will you marry me?" he asks in a voice that trembles.
I am stunned by the simplicity of it. "Why would you ask?" I whisper.
"Because you asked to be happy," he says, "and because I think I can be with you without the worry that you will slip away chasing what is not for you."
"You will wait?" I tease softly.
"I have been waiting all my life," he replies, and I see the truth in his eyes, a pledge he does not need to scratch into wood.
We marry. Friends come; strangers watch; the snow holds our footprints. Griffin watches from the edge of the ceremony, a small figure in the pale distance. He does not interrupt. At night afterward he grows smaller—childlike, then a toddler, then a shape that fades.
One last scene binds the story together: the black handprint on my wrist slowly lightens until it's just a shadow of itself. It becomes a memory I can touch without pain.
"Are you happy?" Griffin asks me the last time he appears.
"I am," I say. "I loved you, once. But I have learned that love is not a chain to hold someone back or a leash to drag them home. It is a steady hand you either accept or release."
He bows to me like a soldier at attention, a smile like snow melting. "Then go," he says gently. "Live. I will not stay to slow you."
"Goodbye, Griffin," I tell him. Tears fall, but they are not only grief. They are relief, and the peculiar tenderness of someone who loved a faulted human well enough to let go.
In the end, the punishment was public; the reckoning was dramatic. But punishment did not mean vengeance alone. It was truth, exposed and learned from. Griffin's public fall made space for my marriage to Evan to be honest, to be free from the weight of promises made and broken.
"Remember the handprint," Evan whispers when I reach for his fingers on that first night we are alone as husband and wife. "Remember how we chose each other with eyes open."
I look down at my wrist. The dark mark is faint. I press my hand to his chest and feel the steady beat there—warm, living. "I will," I promise.
The last time I see Griffin, a small white fox sits beside him, watching. The fox looks at me, then at Griffin, and then at the sky. The creature's eyes hold a knowing older than any of us.
"Tell them," I say without looking away. "Tell them that some promises are meant to be kept, and some kept to be released."
Griffin smiles, a faint red at the corner of his lips. "I kept the part I could," he tells me. "I will learn to forgive myself."
"Do not stay to harm your memory," I say. "Remember warmth, not shame."
He fades into the morning like breath. The black print on my wrist goes soft as a ghost. The apricot tree shakes its white branches. I feel Evan's hand tighten on mine, and I know we will have children who will never ask who was wrong and who was right. They will only ask why snow tastes like salt.
"Once," I say quietly, "he said he'd crawl from hell for me."
"And he crawled," Evan answers.
"He crawled and he learned," I say. "That's enough."
The End
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