Chapter 1: The Griever's Bargain

Chapter 1: The Griever's Bargain

The air in the community hall basement was thick with the trinity of cheap comforts: stale coffee, digestive biscuits, and professionally managed sympathy. Sara stared at the swirling brown liquid in her paper cup, the dregs mirroring the sludge in her own soul. It had been six months since her father’s death, and each week she dragged herself to this circle of folding chairs and grieving strangers, hoping to find an anchor. Instead, she just found more water to drown in.

Around her, the sad stories flowed. A widow spoke of her husband’s love for gardening, her voice cracking on the word ‘roses’. A young man, his face a blotchy mask of red, recounted his sister’s last days. Sara listened, but the words were just noise, a dull hum beneath the roaring silence her father had left behind. She felt a fraud, her own grief too vast and jagged to be neatly packaged into a two-minute anecdote for the group. It was a private monster, and it was eating her alive from the inside out.

Her eyes drifted across the circle and landed on him. Mr. Milton. He was a fixture here, a man who seemed assembled from mismatched parts. A slight paunch strained against a cheap, tightly buttoned shirt, yet his limbs were bony and frail. Thinning grey hair was combed meticulously over a pale scalp, and thick-rimmed glasses couldn't quite hide the cold, watchful quality in his eyes. He always wore thin, grey leather gloves, a strange affectation in the stuffy, overheated room.

When it was his turn to speak, his voice was soft, almost apologetic. He spoke of his wife, Liv. He never cried. He’d describe a perfect memory—a walk on the beach, the way she’d laughed at one of his terrible jokes—and his smile would be gentle, practiced. But it never, ever reached his eyes. Those eyes were like chips of ice, and tonight, Sara felt their chill settle on her. He was looking right at her, his story about Liv’s favorite brand of tea aimed at her like a precisely thrown dart. A shiver, completely unrelated to the room’s temperature, traced a path down her spine.

As soon as the group moderator uttered the closing platitudes, Sara was on her feet. She mumbled a generic goodbye to the woman on her left and made for the stairs, the need to escape suddenly overwhelming. The stale air, the shared sorrow, Milton’s unnerving stare—it was all a cage, and the walls were closing in.

She pushed through the heavy fire door into the cool, damp air of the evening. The car park was mostly empty, a vast expanse of cracked asphalt under the lonely buzz of a single, flickering streetlamp. Her car, a ten-year-old hatchback that had been her father’s, was parked at the far end, an isolated island of familiarity. She fumbled in her oversized coat pocket for her keys, her fingers clumsy with a nervous tremor.

“It doesn’t get easier, does it?”

The voice was quiet, right behind her. Sara flinched, her keys clattering to the ground. She spun around. It was Mr. Milton. He stood a few feet away, his hands clasped in front of him, the grey gloves looking ghostly in the dim light. The gentle, sympathetic smile was fixed on his face, but under the sputtering orange glow of the streetlamp, his eyes looked dark and predatory.

“You startled me,” Sara said, her voice thin. She bent to retrieve her keys, her body feeling heavy and slow.

“My apologies,” he said, not moving to help. “I just… I see the way you sit in there. You’re not like the others. They’re trying to move on. You’re not. You’re trying to move back.”

His words struck her with the force of a physical blow. It was the truest thing anyone had said to her in months. She wasn’t healing. She was stagnating, trapped in an endless loop of the day she got the call, the sterile smell of the hospital, the horrifying finality of the sheet being pulled over her father’s face.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she lied, clutching her keys so tightly the teeth bit into her palm.

“Oh, I think you do,” Milton said, taking a step closer. The air grew colder. She could see the faint tremble in his gloved hands. “They talk about acceptance. About letting go. What a waste of time. Grief isn’t a wound to be healed. It’s a problem to be solved. A mistake to be corrected.”

Sara’s heart hammered against her ribs. This wasn’t the language of the support group. This was something else entirely. Something sharp and dangerous. “I have to go. My mother is waiting.” Another lie. Her mother was at home, probably staring at the television without seeing it, cocooned in her own impenetrable sphere of sorrow. Since Dad was gone, they were just two anchors, pulling each other deeper.

“What if you could see him again?” Milton’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Just for a little while. Not in a memory. Not in a dream. What if you could have one more conversation? One more afternoon?”

A hysterical bubble of laughter threatened to burst from her lips. Was this some cruel joke? A new, twisted form of ambulance chasing? “That’s not funny.”

“It’s not meant to be.” He took another step. He was too close now, invading her space, his scent a strange mix of mothballs and something metallic, like old pennies. “The universe is full of… loopholes. Little cracks in the rules. For people desperate enough to find them.”

His gloved hand slipped into the pocket of his ill-fitting trousers and emerged with something small. He uncurled his fingers. Lying in his palm was a pebble. No, not a pebble. It was a piece of metal, dark and smooth like obsidian, but it seemed to drink the weak light from the streetlamp rather than reflect it. It was shaped like a small, flattened stone, no bigger than her thumb.

“What is that?” she breathed, her fear warring with a sudden, insane spike of curiosity.

“A second chance,” he said simply. His cold eyes held hers, and for the first time, she saw a flicker of something raw in them—a manic, obsessive fire. “It’s very simple. You hold it. You think of the moment you want to return to. The clearer the memory, the better. And it takes you there.”

Sara stared at the object, then back at his face. He was mad. A lonely, grieving man who’d lost his mind and was now peddling fantasies in a dark car park. She should run. She should get in her car, lock the doors, and drive away as fast as she could.

But she didn’t.

Because what if he wasn’t?

The thought was a spark in the vast darkness of her grief. A tiny, impossible, venomous little spark of hope. The hope she’d been warned against, the hope that kept her wounds from scabbing over. The hope that was her greatest weakness. To see her father’s smile again. To hear his terrible jokes. To warn him. Don’t get in the car. Check the tires. Please, just stay home today.

“Why?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper. “Why are you giving this to me?”

Milton’s smile tightened. “Let’s just say I’m a philanthropist of lost time. And you seem like… a worthy recipient. A test case.” He extended his hand. “Go on. A gift. No strings attached.”

Her hand, as if with a will of its own, reached out. Her fingers were shaking so violently she could barely control them. She was terrified of him, of the madness in his eyes, of the sheer impossibility of what he was offering. But the desperation, the six months of relentless, soul-crushing agony, was a stronger force. It propelled her forward, a tidal wave of want.

The moment her skin brushed against the metal, a jolt, cold and electric, shot up her arm. The object was heavier than it looked, its surface unnaturally smooth. As her fingers closed around it, she pictured it. Not the hospital, not the funeral. A good day. A perfect day. Last summer. The annual family barbecue. Her father at the grill, wearing his ridiculous ‘Kiss the Cook’ apron, laughing as he flipped a burger onto the grass. The sun was warm, her mother was bringing out a pitcher of lemonade, and for that one perfect moment, everything was right.

The world broke.

It didn't fade or dissolve. It shattered. The low buzz of the streetlamp didn’t just stop; it stretched, the sound elongating into a single, piercing, eternal note that vibrated in her bones. The light, which had been flickering, froze mid-flicker, casting half the car park in static orange and the other half in an absolute, ink-blot black. A pigeon that had been taking flight from a nearby rooftop hung suspended in the air, its wings locked in an impossible still-life.

The very sensation of air moving against her skin ceased. The world hadn't just stopped. It had seized, like the gears of a cosmic clock grinding to a final, horrifying halt. And in the center of the silent, frozen tableau, there was only the cold, heavy weight of the metal in her hand and the terrifying, triumphant glint in Mr. Milton's eyes.