I built my wife’s coffin with my own hands.
That was fourteen years ago. I haven’t touched a living woman since. I haven’t wanted to. The dead are simpler — they don’t leave, don’t bleed out, don’t take pieces of you when they go.
Then she came up the hill.
A hospice nurse with quiet hands and a smile that doesn’t ask anything of me. She walks into my workshop like she belongs there. She asks me about the wood. She tells me what’s beautiful.
My wolf has been silent for fourteen years.
He woke up the day I met her.
I’m forty-six. She’s twenty-eight. I live with the dead. She fights for the living. There is no good reason a man like me should want a woman like her.
But she’s the first thing in fourteen years that has felt like staying.
What happens when the undertaker falls?
