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The winter had lasted three years, or so it felt to Aisling. Not the calendar winter, but the one she carried inside—a dense, frozen knot that had taken root the day she buried her mother under a sky the colour of wet slate.

She wanted to argue. She wanted to say that sadness isn't a competition, that grief doesn't hoard all the shadows. But the words turned to mist. They walked home in silence, the wind off the Liffey sharp as a blade. That night, he didn’t stay. The next morning, his toothbrush was gone from her bathroom.

On the shortest day, she walked alone through St. Stephen’s Green. The ducks were gone. The flowers were a memory. But the bare trees were beautiful—their black branches intricate as veins, as neural pathways, as the cracks in the heart that let the light in.

She almost walked on. Instead, she sat on the curb beside him. The concrete was cold. A pigeon landed on her knee. She flinched, then didn’t. For ten minutes, they said nothing. Then he handed her the last crust. She tore it into pieces, and when a bird pecked her palm—sharp, living, real—the knot inside her chest gave a single, creaking crack.

“Then what is it?” she asked, though she already knew. He was a summer person. He loved the endless potential of light, the drunk promise of long days. Autumn, to him, was a slow betrayal. Every falling leaf was a small death. He couldn’t sit in the fading.