Chapter 1

Joseph

The silence I have paid for is absolute. It is a tangible presence in the rented sedan, pressing in on me as I navigate the final turn onto a gravel road that is more suggestion than fact. Here, in the dying light of a New England December, the world is rendered in charcoal and bone. The trees are skeletal, a fine black lace of dormant branches against a bruised-purple sky. Their limbs reach for one another, but never touch. I understand the impulse.

Solitude. A word that sounds like a balm but feels like a blade.

The cabin is precisely as the listing promised: isolated. It is a simple, dark-wooded structure that appears to have surrendered to the encroaching forest. It does not look cozy. It looks final. Good. I park the car, the crunch of gravel under the tires and obscenity in the quiet. For a long moment, I just sit, my hands resting on the cold steering wheel. The engine ticks as it cools, a mechanical death rattle. This is what I wanted. A place where the world ends, so that something new, something true, might begin on the page.

Inside, the air is thick with the scent of cold stone and something else, something like the ghosts of old books. Dust motes dance in the single beam of anemic light slanting through a tall window. I do not bother with the overhead lights. I prefer the gloom. My movements are economical, devoid of wasted energy. I place my single suitcase on the spartan bed, my laptop bag on the heavy wooden table that will serve as my desk. There is a fireplace, a black mouth full of ash. I have no intention of lighting it. Warmth feels like a lie my body is not prepared to accept.

I unpack. Three gray sweaters, identical. Four black shirts. Jeans. The necessities. I place my leather-bound journal and a single fountain pen beside the laptop. The tools of the trade. Or, in my case, the instruments of torture.

The screen of the laptop glows, a sterile, unforgiving white. Untitled Document 1. It is a judgment. A pristine, empty field of snow where I am expected to build a cathedral to my mother’s memory, and I have arrived with no tools, no blueprint, only the hollow echo of her laughter in my head.

I open the journal first. My handwriting is a tight, black script. The silence is a pressure, not an absence. A good first line, perhaps. For a different book. Not for hers. My mother was never silent. She was a symphony, a cacophony, a whirlwind of color and sound and the scent of cinnamon. She was everything this place is not.

I turn to the laptop. My fingers hover over the keys. I type.

Eleanor Tierney was a proponent of relentless optimism.

The sentence lies there, clinically dead. It is a coroner’s report. It is the truth, but it holds no life. I delete it. The backspace key is a small, precise execution.

I try again.

Her capacity for joy was a phenomenon, inexplicable to those who prefer the quiet dignity of melancholy.

Pretentious. Academic. The sentence of a man describing a rare species of bird, not the sentence of a son remembering his mother. I am a cartographer of sorrow, and I am being asked to map the sun. The geography is alien to me.

My hand lifts, my fingers finding the tense cords in my neck. I knead the muscle there, a familiar, useless ritual. The frustration is a physical thing, a tightening in my jaw, a hollowness that expands behind my ribs until it feels as though my own chest is a vacant room. The silence I craved now amplifies the roaring emptiness of the page. It is the disappointing sound of my own failure.

I stand and walk to the window, peering through the wavering, old glass. The sky has deepened to indigo. The skeletal trees are now just black cutouts against it. My gaze drifts to the only other sign of human life: another cabin, perhaps a hundred yards away through the woods. It is smaller than mine, and as I watch, it commits an act of profound violence against the encroaching night.

It lights up.

Not with a single, welcoming porch light, but with a sudden, garish explosion of color. Red, green, blue, yellow. A string of lights blinks with a frantic, idiotic rhythm along the eaves of the roof. A glowing, inflatable snowman materializes on the lawn, its plastic smile an insult. It is a grotesque festival of forced cheer, a commercialized sacrilege against the solemn beauty of the winter landscape. It is an affront. A personal, deliberate affront to everything I am, to the grief I am nursing in this hermetically sealed box of quiet.

Who would do this? Who would come to a place like this only to infect it with such… saccharine nonsense?

My breath fogs the cold glass. The blinking lights pulse, a frantic, artificial heartbeat in the profound stillness. They seem to mock the darkness, mock the silence. Mock me. A low growl builds in my throat, an animal sound of pure irritation. This will not do. This will not do at all. I need the purity of the gloom. I need the honest melancholy of the landscape. I do not need this… this circus of manufactured joy winking at me through the trees.

I turn away from the window, the phantom colors still pulsing behind my eyelids. The empty white screen of my laptop seems to have absorbed the glare, and now it, too, feels mocking.

A sound.

It is so alien in the oppressive quiet that for a moment, I cannot place it. It is not the groan of the cabin settling or the whisper of the wind. It is sharp, percussive, electric.

The doorbell.

Someone is ringing the doorbell.

The sound slices through the silence, a clean, brutal violation of the sanctuary I have built. It rings again, a cheerful, two-note chime that is somehow even more offensive than the first. No one should be here. I have told no one my location. This place was chosen for its impenetrable solitude.

Yet, someone is standing on my doorstep, demanding entry into my fortress of grief. And the only thing I can think is that they have brought the noise of the world with them.