Chapter 5 : When the Light Flickers
1145 Words
The days that followed felt quieter somehow gentler, but heavier too.
Arielle and Lance had slipped into a rhythm: quiet mornings, shared laughter during breaks, afternoons spent in the art room where time seemed to pause.
Everyone at St. Claire had begun to notice.
“Are you two dating?” one classmate asked once.
Arielle just smiled, neither confirming nor denying.
Because how could she explain something that didn’t have a name yet?
They weren’t officially together. But the way Lance waited for her after every class, the way she found new sketches of herself in his notebook, the way her heart reacted when he smiled those things felt real enough.
It was a Thursday when things began to change.
Lance hadn’t come to school again.
At first, Arielle didn’t think much of it maybe he was painting, maybe he was just tired. But when he didn’t answer her messages all day, something inside her started to twist.
That evening, she walked to Bell Street. The acacia tree looked darker under the cloudy sky. She knocked, and after a moment, the door opened not to Lance, but to a woman she’d never seen before.
“Um, I’m Arielle,” she said softly. “Lance’s friend.”
The woman’s face softened with recognition. “Oh, you’re the one he talks about.”
“he talks about me?”
“All the time,” the woman said with a tired smile. “He’s at the hospital right now. His mother…” She paused. “It got worse today.”
Arielle felt the words like a weight in her chest. “Which hospital?”
She found him in the waiting area hours later, sitting alone on a cold bench, hoodie pulled up, eyes fixed on the floor.
He looked smaller somehow.
Like the world had taken something from him.
When he saw her, he didn’t say anything he just stood up, and she went to him, wrapping her arms around him without a word.
For a moment, he didn’t move. Then slowly, he held her back, his fingers clutching her jacket as though he was afraid she might disappear too.
“She’s not waking up,” he whispered against her shoulder. “They said she’s tired.”
Arielle closed her eyes. “Then let her rest. You don’t have to carry it alone.”
“But I promised her,” he said, voice breaking. “I told her I’d finish the painting When the Storm Ends. She said she wanted to see it. I can’t”
She pulled back, cupping his face in her hands. “Then finish it. For her. For you.”
He nodded weakly, tears glimmering in his eyes but never falling.
That night, Arielle stayed with him in the hospital’s small chapel. The world was silent except for the soft hum of machines and rain against the windows.
He pulled out his sketchbook creased, nearly full and turned to the last blank page.
“Help me finish this,” he said.
Together, they drew. Her hand guided his when it shook too much.
The lantern. The wings. The storm fading into light.
By the time they stopped, dawn had touched the sky with pale gold.
Lance looked at the drawing and whispered, “She’d like this.”
A nurse entered quietly a few minutes later.
Her expression said everything.
Lance didn’t cry. He just stared at the floor, silent, motionless.
Arielle took his hand, her own heart breaking in the stillness.
The funeral came days later, under a sky that couldn’t decide whether to rain or not.
Arielle stood beside him, fingers intertwined with his, as he placed a small folded paper on the coffin. She caught a glimpse of the words before he closed it.
“When the storm ends, I’ll still be painting. Love, Lance.”
When the ceremony ended, he didn’t say goodbye he just walked away, down the path lined with white lilies. Arielle followed quietly, until he stopped beneath a tree and finally let the tears come.
She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. She just stood beside him, holding his hand, feeling the way his pain trembled through his fingers.
“I hate endings,” he said finally, voice hoarse.
“Then make this one mean something,” she whispered.
He turned to her, eyes red, and for the first time since it all happened, a faint smile broke through. “You always know what to say.”
“No,” she said softly. “You just always need to hear it.”
Weeks passed. Life at school resumed, but something had shifted in both of them.
Lance came back quieter, older somehow, like he’d left a part of himself in that hospital room. But he painted again. Not storms this time.
Light. Fields. Faces smiling through the rain.
One afternoon, he found Arielle by the window their window and dropped a folded paper on her desk.
She opened it. A sketch.
A boy and girl standing beneath an acacia tree, holding hands under a clear sky.
At the bottom:
“When the storm ends, you were my light.”
She looked up at him, eyes shimmering. “You finished it.”
He nodded. “It’s for her.” He paused. “And for you.”
She smiled, tears blurring the world around her. “I think she’d be proud.”
“I think she’d thank you,” he said. “Because you kept me standing when I didn’t know how.”
That night, she wrote in her journal:
Some people walk into your life like rain unexpected, soft, and impossible to forget.
Some storms leave behind clearer skies.
And sometimes, love doesn’t need forever. It just needs to be real.
She closed the notebook, looked at her phone, and saw a message from Lance.
Lance: Thank you for sitting by the window that day.
And she smiled. Because that was where everything had begun and where every ending somehow turned into another kind of beginning.
- Writer
