Snowfall

Snow fell in thick, silent flakes over the quiet suburb outside Richmond, Virginia, blanketing rooftops and muffling the world beneath a hush of white. Streetlamps glowed like old-fashioned lanterns, casting golden pools on the fresh powder. Inside one modest brick house, a Christmas tree twinkled in the window—its lights reflecting off ornaments collected over a lonely lifetime. At precisely 11:47 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Ethan Hayes stood at that window, watching the snow settle on the lawn that separated his home from the one next door. He held a cup of cooling cocoa forgotten in his hand. Seventeen years of searching had brought him here, to this unremarkable street, to this ordinary night. He did not yet know that the promise made beside a 19th-century river was only minutes away from being kept. Across the narrow driveway, in the warm kitchen of the neighboring house, Emily Ross pulled a final tray of gingerbread from the oven. Cinnamon and molasses scented the air. She hummed an old hymn her grandmother had taught her, one she could never quite place though it felt like home. Around her neck, hidden beneath her sweater, rested a silver locket older than anyone in her family could fully trace—an heirloom engraved with the initials A.R. She had worn it every day since her mother fastened it there on her sixteenth birthday. Neither Ethan nor Emily knew the other's story. Not yet. But the snow kept falling, soft and deliberate, as if the sky itself were turning back the pages of time. Two souls, separated by war, death, and more than a century and a half, were about to remember. Outside, the clock tower in the town square began to chime midnight. Christmas Day had arrived.