Lea tucks her daughter in, pulling the bedcover to the little girl’s chin. She sings her mother's bedtime song, the one she learned when she was a little girl. It never sounds quite right, but Lea has always listened to her mother.
She clicks off the nightlight, ignoring the troubled look burning in Aura’s eyes. Yet as she walks past the painting, she is troubled as well. It's been a long time since she was that girl, leaping into the summer sun, radiating bliss. It was Father's last painting. He never got to watch that girl turn into the bitter woman she is today.
In this pocket of the world, night has settled in. Darkness has fallen across the rickety old house, staining it black. Lea stumbles several times on her way to the front door. She knows this house well, but every year seems to bring a new hazard; an uneven floorboard here, a loose nail there.
Lea is quick to find the coat hook, her slippers, and unlock the bolts and latches. The door makes a mysterious creaking noise as it closes behind her; another thing to fix. She trembles as she relocks every bolt and latch, buffeted by a rustling October wind that moans through one ear and shrieks out the other. Lea sighs and zips up her thin jacket, walking briskly into the surrounding forest.
She never wanted to move Aura to this dark place. Here, hedged in by this army of spindly black trees, here is not the place for a little girl to grow up. Her childhood didn't hold greater memories than sharp black things and a glaring mother, but she wants it to be different for Aura, her precious daughter.
The fingers of her imagination stretch and pull the sounds around her; in every rustle of the branches, someone dangerous is following her, someone who knows her secret. Every cry of an owl is the cry of her daughter, asking why her mother is gone from the house, gone without a trace. A new horror births from every unidentifiable sound she hears.
Shivers crawl down her spine. Ever since she was Aura’s age, Lea has been terrified of the dark. Of course, she thinks to herself, darkness is only the absence of light. There is never complete darkness. She doesn’t manage to convince herself not to be afraid, even though she is right. There is light in the gleam of moonlight in her eyes, though of course she cannot see it. There is light in the mysteries twinkling above her, though Lea chooses to see the only the night instead of the stars.
Consequently, she is surrounded by an inky blackness, melting away her common sense. She makes quite a sight: stumbling through the underbrush with an apparent loss of direction. But in her heart, Lea knows the path and she knows that she will not stray.
Lea has backtracked and sidetracked all over the place, but in the end, she is where she wants to be. She is deep in the heart of the forest, far from home, bathed in silence. She tilts her head towards the stars and closes her eyes, breathing in the night. It really is a beautiful thing: serene, calm, a time of rest. But it holds so many painful memories, so many fears; it has been stained black by Lea's own darkness.
Her slippers crunch on a carpet of twigs and dead leaves as she enters the clearing. By the barest glow of moonlight, she finds the stone. It’s a common rock, really: old, grey, and if it were alive, crotchety. It means so much more though.
It marks ten years of trust and respect. Ten years of loving somebody. Ten years of beauty. Ten years of a union, by death parted. Lea sinks to the ground, tears spilling before she can contain them.
This is her secret. She didn’t mean for it to happen. They’d been together for ten years, ten years to finally have a fight. A real fight, brewing with foolish, angry words and frustrated tirades. She’d thrown a pot at his head and told him never to come back. He’d yelled something equally rude at her and stormed off.
Nevertheless, she had regretted it as soon as she and baby Aura started crying, Aura’s wails unheeded in the deep dark night. It had been a deep dark night, hadn’t it? A night like this one, where the darkness seemed to pour into your very being...
She had followed him into the night, by pure instinct. She hadn't caught him in time, though: he'd disappeared without a trace. It was here that she'd marked something like a gravestone, pretending he was dead. It was so much easier to think of him as dead. Though in truth, he'd most likely disappeared into civilization: blending into a nice little neighbourhood, quickly shifting into a mundane life apart from her.
Yet she could not bear to hate him. When she was with him, he’d given her wings and they had flown together. When he died, she’d realized those kind of wings are only ever borrowed. She plummeted through the clouds, down to Earth with shocking pain.
It takes hours for Lea to bury the past and compose herself. She runs through the forest, allowing the thorny branches to slash her skin. The pain is good. The pain is distracting. A chorus of breaking branches and birds cawing angrily swells in her ears. As she slows to a halt, so does the chorus, fading out until all that's left is a single twig snapping. Lea freezes, a deer caught in headlights. She can't shake the eerie feeling that someone is watching, someone is following. Just in case, she retraces her steps, sprinting away from the house and doing several loops until there is only pure, sweet silence following her loud and clumsy footsteps.
Uneasily, she makes her way home, following a trail of mashed and broken undergrowth she assumes she's made.
The darkness is heavy, but shows signs of relenting when Lea finally returns to the rickety old house. The door is unlocked: she swings it open easily, sighing at the loud creaking noise. She hangs up her jacket, abandons her ruined slippers, and makes her way up to Aura’s room. The poor girl is—
Wait. She had locked the door.
Lea’s heart jackknifes, her eyes widening as she races up the flight of stairs. She can barely make out a shadowed silhouette, touching Aura's shoulder gently. He turns, and she is once again a deer caught in headlights. In three quick strides, he is facing her, close enough to touch. Lea can see him clearly by the glow of moonlight trickling from Aura’s window.
She dies a million times staring into those blue eyes.
"He's gone," Lea whispers. She's played that phrase over in her mind so many times, but it has never escaped her lips until now.
“He's—”
He stops her with a kiss. She fights so hard, but there’s something familiar: the way he leans into it, the way he makes their foreheads touch.
Lea wants to believe so badly...
“You have to believe me,” he mutters in a rich, throaty voice. “I lost everything that night.”
He shuts the door to Aura’s room carefully. Both are silent as he takes Lea's hand and leads her to the stairs.
"I haven't lived since then. Everything in the city reminded me of you, but I couldn't go back. I was too afraid you wouldn't accept me. But Lea, I just can't be without you anymore." His voice shakes. "I’ve made a lot of mistakes. This is the biggest, and the one I regret the most.”
Lea eyes him warily. He hurt her so badly; she didn't know how to breathe. The pain has hammered a hole through her heart, one it will take years to replace. She doesn't want to trust, but she knows that he means it. After all, they've shared ten years together. Ten years of trust and respect, ten years of loving somebody...
Lea flies into his arms.
She flies with borrowed wings.