I. The Road That Waits

There are roads that carry traffic, and there are roads that carry memory. Stony Hollow Road, on the wooded edge of Burlington, has never been much good at the first and has always excelled at the second.

By daylight, it looks harmless enough. A narrow ribbon of blacktop dips between banks of shale and roots, then bends into a ravine where the trees lean close, gossiping over the pavement in a language of leaves. In October, the place is almost pretty. The hills flame red and gold, and the air smells of damp earth and apples rotting sweetly beneath the brush. In April, water runs down the rocks in shining threads. In July, cicadas scream in the trees until the whole hollow seems to buzz with fever.

But at night, the road changes.

Anyone from Burlington will tell you that, though some will laugh while they say it. They will say it is just a road, just a hollow, just one more place where kids go to scare each other and test the strength of their own nerves. They will say the cold pockets that gather there come from the creek below, and the pale shape glimpsed between the trunks is only moonlight caught in fog. They will say a handprint on a fogged windshield can be made by any prankster with a good sense of timing.

They will say these things in diners, at gas pumps, in the back pews of churches when the sermon goes on too long.

But they will not stop there after midnight.

And if you ask why, they will eventually tell you about Lucinda.

No one agrees on her last name. Some say it was Mayfield. Others insist it was Bell. The old cemetery records hold three Lucindas from the right years, all dead too young, all tucked into the ground under names softened by moss and weather. One died in childbirth. One of fever. One has only a death year and a cracked stone, as if the world remembered her for a moment and then lost interest.

The story, however, has kept her.

She was young in the way people were young in the 1800s, which is to say old enough to work, old enough to obey, old enough to marry if her father nodded and the preacher had a clean collar. She lived near the wooded rim of Burlington, when the town was smaller and darker, before electric lamps pushed the stars back and automobiles came hissing along the roads like iron insects.

She loved a man she was not supposed to love.

That part of the tale never changes.

He may have been a farmhand. He may have been a blacksmith’s apprentice. One version makes him a riverboat gambler with a silver tongue and a coat too fine for honest work. Another says he was a soldier passing through, all brass buttons and promises. Whoever he was, he filled Lucinda’s head with a future bright enough to blind her to the ruts beneath her feet.

They arranged to meet in the hollow.

At dusk, she came alone, wearing her best dress beneath a dark cloak. Maybe she carried a carpetbag. Maybe only a letter tied with ribbon. Maybe nothing at all except the foolish, holy certainty that love, if strong enough, could remake the world.

She waited at the bluff above the ravine, where the road dipped and the trees thinned just enough to show the sky.

The man never came.

That, too, never changes.

Some say her father found the note and stopped him. Some say he lost his nerve. Some say he already had a wife in another town and took the coach road south before supper. There are even those who whisper that he did come after all, but not alone—and that Lucinda saw something between the trees she could not survive seeing.

By midnight, she understood.

By dawn, she was dead at the bottom of the hollow.

That is the shape of the legend, simple and cruel as a nail. A girl waits. A promise fails. A body falls. Grief finds a home and refuses to leave.

Since then, Stony Hollow Road has been said to remember her more faithfully than any man ever did. The ravine keeps her sighs in its damp lungs. The trees keep the rustle of her dress. The stones below the bluff keep the sound she made when she struck them, though no living ear should ever have heard it.

Travelers claim that if you stop in the dark, cut the engine, and call her name, the air goes suddenly cold. Not winter-cold, not the clean cold of snow under stars, but cellar-cold—the kind of cold that belongs to shut places and buried things.

Then, sometimes, she comes.

A pale figure among the trees.

A young woman in a long dress, her hair dark and wet-looking, her face turned not toward the caller but toward the bend in the road, as if still watching for someone who is late. Some say she has no eyes. Some say her eyes are the worst part, because they are clear, human, and full of a patience that has curdled into something else.

Most who claim to have seen her swear she never speaks.

But the ones who do not speak of it—the ones who leave town, or stop driving after dark, or cross themselves when anyone says the name Lucinda—those are the ones people listen to.

Because grief, when left alone too long, can become hungry.

And Stony Hollow Road has been alone a very long time.

II. What the Dark Repeats

The first recorded trouble came in 1911, though “recorded” may be too generous a word. It appeared as three lines in the Burlington Weekly Standard, squeezed between a notice for a church supper and an advertisement for liver tonic.

LOCAL BOYS STARTLED ON HOLLOW ROAD.
CLAIM WOMAN IN WHITE CAUSED TEAM TO BOLT.
NO INJURIES BUT WAGON DAMAGED.

The article made light of the matter, as papers often do when they cannot explain something and have no wish to frighten subscribers. Two brothers, Isaac and Edwin Porter, had been returning from a dance in West Burlington when their horse stopped dead near the ravine and refused to move. The boys heard crying, they said. A woman’s crying, coming from the woods.

Then the horse screamed.

People who have heard a horse scream never forget it. It is too human and not human enough, and it seems to come from a place in the animal that knows about wolves and fire and the long teeth of the dark.

The Porter boys saw a woman standing in the road ahead of them. Her dress hung in tatters. Her hair covered part of her face. She raised one hand—not to wave, not to warn, but to point at the empty seat beside Isaac, as if someone should have been there.

The horse reared, snapped a trace, and drove the wagon into the ditch. The boys walked home in stocking feet, leaving the animal trembling in the road until Isaac’s father came with a lantern and a shotgun.

The woman was gone.

The crying remained, faintly, from somewhere down in the hollow.

In the 1930s, men out of work and full of bad liquor began daring each other to drive out to Stony Hollow after the taverns closed. The ritual formed slowly, the way bad ideas do. Park near the bend. Shut off the engine. Say her name three times.

Lucinda.

Lucinda.

Lucinda.

Then wait.

Most nights nothing happened, or nothing anyone would admit to. A man’s courage swells quickly in the company of other men, but it leaks away just as fast when the motor will not start and the trees seem to lean closer than they did a minute before.

There was a mechanic named Harold Sykes who laughed at the legend until the autumn of 1938. He went with four friends in a Ford coupe, carrying a bottle of rye and a camera he had borrowed from his cousin. Harold was the sort of man who believed a thing could not exist unless he could strike it with a wrench. He called Lucinda by name, but not kindly. He called her darling. He called her sweetheart. He asked if she had finally found a fellow punctual enough to suit her.

The air, according to the others, changed.

The men had been warm from drink and crowded bodies. Suddenly their breath showed white inside the car.

Then something touched the roof.

Not struck. Not scratched. Touched.

A slow, deliberate pressing, as of a hand placed flat against metal.

Harold stopped laughing.

The hand moved down the windshield, though nothing could be seen outside except their own faces reflected in the glass, pale and wide-eyed. Five long smears appeared in the mist forming on the windshield, each the length of a woman’s finger.

Then, in the blank center of the fogged glass, words formed backward from the outside.

HE CAME.

No one spoke. One man began praying in a broken whisper.

Harold fumbled for the starter. The engine coughed, spat, and died. He tried again. Nothing. From somewhere in the trees came a sound like a woman weeping through clenched teeth.

Then the passenger door opened.

It did not swing wide. It only cracked, as if someone standing outside had lifted the handle and wished to peek in.

Harold shoved the door shut with his shoulder and screamed at the others to push. They spilled out of the coupe and ran, drunk and stumbling, until they reached the first farmhouse on the edge of town. Behind them, the car sat on Stony Hollow Road with its headlights burning and its open-mouthed grille pointed toward the bluff.

When Harold returned at noon with a tow truck and an audience of half the town, the car started at the first turn of the key. The windshield was clean. The roof bore one shallow dent in the shape of a hand.

Harold never took the hollow road again. Not in daylight. Not for money. Not even when his own mother lay dying and the doctor said the shorter route might make the difference. Harold took the long way around and arrived after the old woman had passed.

“I seen what grief does when it gets tired of crying,” he told his wife once, years later.

He never said more.

By the time the road was paved, Lucinda had become part of Burlington’s inheritance, like hard winters, church bells, and arguments over property lines. Parents used her to scare children away from the ravine. Children used her to scare one another into going there. Teenagers carved initials into trees and swore they would never become as foolish as the dead girl in the story, which is exactly the sort of promise teenagers make before proving they are made of the same breakable stuff as everyone else.

In 1967, a girl named Mary Ellen Truitt claimed Lucinda saved her life.

Mary Ellen had gone driving with a boy her parents disliked for reasons they could not quite name. He took Stony Hollow Road too fast, laughing when she told him to slow down. Near the bend, the steering wheel jerked from his hands. The car skidded, spun, and stopped inches from the broken guardrail above the ravine.

The boy cursed. Mary Ellen cried.

Then they saw her.

A woman stood in the headlights, one hand raised, palm outward. Her dress was old-fashioned and torn at the hem. Her face was pale and stern.

“Go home,” she said.

Mary Ellen insisted, until her own death at eighty-two, that those were the words. Not whispered. Not moaned. Spoken plainly.

Go home.

She did.

The boy left town the following spring after being arrested for something ugly involving another girl and a hunting knife. Mary Ellen married a dentist, had four children, sang in the Methodist choir, and every Christmas sent a small wreath to the edge of Stony Hollow Road, where the guardrail shone new and silver in the winter light.

So the question remained, as questions do in towns where everyone knows too much and not enough:

Was Lucinda warning them?

Or waiting?

Was she a sorrowful echo, repeating the last pain of her life?

Or had the hollow shaped that pain into something with intention?

There are places that seem to absorb what happens in them. A room where someone died badly may feel colder forever. A battlefield may still taste of iron after rain. A house where children were afraid may groan at night long after they have grown old and moved away.

Stony Hollow had swallowed Lucinda’s last breath, her betrayal, her terror of falling, and perhaps the terrible instant after, when she understood that the world had not ended with her. It had gone on. Birds had sung. Wagons had passed. The man—whoever he was—had continued breathing somewhere under the same sky.

Maybe that was the insult no ghost could forgive.

III. The Calling

On the last Friday in September, many years after Mary Ellen Truitt first told her story and long after Harold Sykes had gone into the ground beside the mother he had been too late to see, four college students came to Burlington with phones in their pockets and laughter in their mouths.

They were not bad kids. That should be said. The world has enough villains without making monsters of the merely foolish. They were young, and youth is a kind of temporary haunting. It fills the body with voices saying go on, go faster, nothing can touch you, the dead are only stories.

There was Ben, who had grown up in Burlington and believed local legends were best used to impress people who had not. There was Kara, who liked abandoned places and true-crime podcasts and wore black nail polish chipped at the tips. There was Luis, who carried a camera and wanted to make short films that looked expensive even though they were not. And there was Emma, who had almost stayed behind.

Emma had read about Stony Hollow Road online that afternoon while the others bought beer and batteries. The comments under the article were the usual mixture of jokes, lies, and warnings. But one stood out.

Don’t call her unless you mean it.

No username. No little picture. Just those words.

“Mean what?” Kara had said when Emma showed her.

Ben grinned. “Mean you’re not chicken.”

So they went.

The night was clear when they left town, but the stars seemed to vanish as soon as they turned onto Stony Hollow Road. Trees rose on both sides, crowding the shoulders. Ben drove with one hand on the wheel, the other drumming against his thigh. The car’s headlights tunneled through the dark, catching leaves, trunks, the sudden jeweled eyes of something small that darted into the brush.

“This is it?” Kara said. “Looks like every road where somebody gets murdered in a movie.”

“That’s the idea,” Luis said, lifting his camera.

Emma sat in the back and said nothing. The farther they descended into the hollow, the more she felt something pressing at her ears. Not sound. The absence of it. The crickets had stopped. The engine seemed muffled, as if wrapped in cloth.

Ben pulled over near the bend.

The road ahead curved out of sight. To the right, beyond a rusted guardrail, the land dropped sharply into the ravine. The trees below were so thick they looked like one black mass. Somewhere down there, water moved over stone with a low, secretive mutter.

Ben killed the engine.

Silence rushed in.

“Okay,” Luis whispered, though no one had told him to whisper. “Lights?”

Ben switched them off.

The dark became complete.

Kara laughed once, too loudly. “Well, this is cozy.”

Luis turned on the camera’s night mode. Its small screen painted the car interior in sickly green. Ben looked excited. Kara looked amused. Emma looked at the window beside her and saw only her own reflection staring back.

“Do it,” Kara said.

Ben lowered his window. Damp air slid in, smelling of leaves and stone.

“Lucinda,” he called.

Nothing happened.

“Lucinda,” Kara called, leaning forward between the seats.

Luis held the camera toward the windshield. “One more.”

Emma felt a sudden and irrational urge to stop them. Her mouth went dry. She thought of the online comment.

Don’t call her unless you mean it.

“Guys,” she said.

Ben smiled into the dark. “Lucinda.”

The temperature dropped so fast the windows fogged at the edges.

Kara stopped smiling.

“Okay,” Luis said softly. “That’s… that’s something.”

Ben tried to laugh, but it came out wrong. “Cold front.”

“In the car?” Emma asked.

No one answered.

A sound came from the trees.

At first Emma thought it was the creek, but the rhythm was wrong. It rose and fell, hitched, caught, then rose again.

Crying.

A woman crying in a way that made Emma think not of sadness but of exhaustion. The sound of someone who had been crying for so long she had worn grooves into sorrow and could not climb out.

Luis aimed the camera toward the trees. “I’m getting audio.”

“Shut up,” Kara whispered.

The crying stopped.

In the sudden silence, three soft knocks sounded on the roof of the car.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

No one moved.

Then a fourth knock came, harder.

Ben grabbed for the keys and missed. They fell to the floor with a bright little jingle that seemed obscenely cheerful. He bent down, swearing under his breath.

The windshield began to fog.

Not from the edges inward, but from the center out, a white circle blooming on the glass. Lines appeared in it. Five lines, long and narrow, dragging downward.

A handprint.

Kara made a small sound. Luis kept filming, though his hands shook so badly the camera clicked against the window.

“Ben,” Emma said.

“I’ve got them, I’ve got them.”

He shoved the key into the ignition and turned it. The engine cranked but did not catch.

Outside, something pale moved between the trees.

Emma saw it first. A vertical whiteness where no whiteness should be. It stood beyond the guardrail, half hidden by trunks, facing the road.

“Drive,” she said.

“I’m trying!”

The engine cranked again. Nothing.

The pale figure stepped forward.

Now they all saw it.

A woman emerged from the trees with the slow, careful gait of someone walking through deep water. Her dress clung to her body in dark patches. Her hair hung loose around her face. She did not look transparent. That was the worst of it. She looked solid enough to touch. Solid enough to bleed. Solid enough to be hurt.

She came to the guardrail and stopped.

The cold inside the car deepened until Emma’s teeth chattered. Frost feathered the corners of the windshield.

Ben turned the key again. The engine coughed and died.

Kara began to cry.

The woman raised her head.

Emma could not see her face clearly, and yet she felt seen. Not looked at. Seen through. Every small betrayal she had ever committed seemed suddenly alive inside her: ignored calls, broken promises, kindness withheld because it had been inconvenient. She thought of a boy in high school she had let everyone laugh at though he had once been her friend. She thought of her mother asking if she was happy and Emma saying yes because the truth would take too long.

The woman’s hand lifted.

One finger pointed toward the passenger seat.

Toward Kara.

“No,” Kara whispered. “No, no, no.”

“What?” Ben said. “What does she want?”

The locks clicked.

All four doors unlocked at once.

Luis dropped the camera.

The passenger door opened an inch.

Kara screamed and threw her weight against it. Ben lunged across the console to help her. The door resisted them with calm, steady pressure from outside. Not yanking. Not forcing. Simply opening, as inevitable as dawn.

Emma did not think. Later, if anyone had asked her, she would not have been able to explain why she did what she did.

She rolled down her window and shouted into the dark, “He’s not coming!”

Everything stopped.

The pressure on the door vanished. Kara slammed it shut and hit the lock with the heel of her hand.

The pale woman turned.

Emma leaned halfway out the window, though the cold hurt her lungs. “He’s not coming,” she said again, and now her voice broke. “I’m sorry. He’s not coming back.”

The words seemed to fall into the hollow and keep falling.

For a moment there was no sound at all.

Then Lucinda moved.

She did not walk toward Emma. She seemed simply closer, appearing beside the rear window as if the dark had folded her there. Emma saw her face.

It was young.

That was what nearly broke her. Not the pallor, not the dark lips, not the wet hair plastered to her cheeks. The youth. Lucinda looked no older than Emma, perhaps younger. Her eyes were wide and gray and filled not with rage, but with a terrible, bottomless confusion.

As if every night she woke again to the same missing footstep.

As if every night the road offered her hope and then took it away.

Lucinda placed one hand against Emma’s window frame. Her fingers were white, the nails dark with soil.

“He promised,” she said.

The voice was soft, close, and old with disuse.

Emma wept then. She could not help it.

“I know,” she said.

Behind her, Ben kept twisting the key, but the engine would not start.

Lucinda’s eyes shifted to him.

“He promised,” she repeated.

Ben shook his head. “I didn’t—I don’t know you.”

The ghost’s expression changed. Not much. Only a tightening around the mouth. But the hollow seemed to change with it. The trees bent inward. The ravine exhaled a smell of wet stone and something sweetly rotten.

“Say you’re sorry,” Emma whispered.

Ben stared at her.

“Say it!”

Ben turned toward the window, toward the dead girl watching from the edge of the road. His face had gone bloodless.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry he didn’t come.”

Lucinda did not blink.

Kara, sobbing, said, “I’m sorry.”

Luis, from the floor where he had crouched after dropping the camera, whispered, “I’m sorry.”

Emma said it last.

“I’m sorry, Lucinda.”

The name seemed different now. Not a dare. Not a spell. A name belonging to someone who had once warmed her hands by a stove, brushed her hair, dreamed foolish dreams, and waited in the dark for love to prove itself true.

Lucinda stepped back.

The frost on the windshield began to melt.

From somewhere far down in the ravine came a sound like a stone dropped into water.

Ben turned the key.

The engine roared to life.

No one cheered. No one spoke. Ben threw the car into drive and pulled away so fast the tires shrieked on the pavement. In the rear window, Stony Hollow Road curved back into darkness.

Emma looked once.

Lucinda stood in the center of the road, pale beneath the trees, one hand lifted—not waving, not warning, but waiting.

Then the bend took her.

IV. The Mark Left Behind

They did not become famous.

That is important, too. Stories like this sometimes end with news crews and book deals, with blurry footage dissected online until the mystery is killed by attention. But the footage Luis captured showed almost nothing. Darkness. Shaking. A patch of fogged glass. Kara screaming. Ben swearing. Emma’s voice shouting He’s not coming with such naked terror that she refused to listen to it twice.

For three seconds, near the end, the camera caught the passenger window.

There was a shape beyond it.

A face, perhaps.

Or a trick of condensation and fear.

Luis deleted the file after a week. Then he smashed the memory card with a hammer and dropped the pieces into three different trash cans across campus. He said it was because the audio had gotten corrupted.

That was not true.

On the recording, beneath Emma’s apology, another voice could be heard. A man’s voice, faint and far away, speaking as if from the bottom of a well.

Wait for me.

None of them went back to Stony Hollow Road together.

Ben stopped telling the legend at parties. He stopped taking the shortcut through the ravine, even at noon, even with other people in the car. Years later, when he married, he cried during his vows so hard that his bride laughed and touched his cheek. He never missed an anniversary. He never said he would call unless he intended to call. When his children were young and asked why promises mattered so much, he told them promises were doors, and some doors should never be left open.

Kara changed in quieter ways. She still wore black, still liked old cemeteries and horror movies, but she no longer confused sadness with entertainment. She became a counselor for girls who had been hurt by people who claimed to love them. In her office she kept a small framed print of a wooded road in autumn. No one knew why, and she did not explain.

Luis never made horror films. He made documentaries instead—small, patient films about people forgotten by history. Mill workers. Immigrants. Women whose names appeared only in courthouse margins and family Bibles. He said the dead deserved better lighting.

As for Emma, she returned to Burlington once a year.

Not at midnight. Not as a dare. She came in daylight, usually in late September, when the trees had just begun to turn. She parked before the bend and stood by the guardrail with flowers in her hands. At first she brought roses, because that seemed right. Later she brought wild asters and Queen Anne’s lace, things that might have grown in Lucinda’s time.

She never called the name aloud.

She only laid the flowers down and listened to the creek moving over stone.

On her third visit, she noticed the old bluff path half hidden by brush. It led upward from the road, steep and narrow, to a place where the trees opened and the hollow could be seen below. Emma climbed carefully, pushing branches from her face, her shoes slipping on damp leaves.

At the top, she found the place where Lucinda must have waited.

There was no marker. No carved heart in a tree. No sign to tell tourists where tragedy had made its bed. Just a flat shelf of stone overlooking the ravine and the road’s dark curve below.

Emma stood there a long time.

The wind moved through the branches. A crow called once, then again. Far off, a truck passed on a different road, its engine growling like weather.

She imagined Lucinda there in her best dress, listening for wheels, hoofbeats, footsteps—any sound that meant the future had not abandoned her. She imagined the sky darkening, the insects growing louder, the first prickle of fear at the back of her neck. She imagined anger, then humiliation, then the awful collapse of hope.

Had Lucinda jumped?

Had she slipped?

Had someone pushed her?

The legend said heartbroken, she threw herself from the bluff. Legends like simple endings. They smooth the edges from messy things. They turn girls into warnings and men into shadows. They make grief picturesque.

Emma looked down at the road below and wondered.

Behind her, leaves rustled.

She turned.

For a moment, she thought she saw a young woman standing among the trees. Not wet. Not ruined. Just a girl in an old dress, watching with solemn eyes.

Emma did not move.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

The wind passed between them.

The figure, if it had been a figure, was gone.

That evening, back at her motel, Emma found a mark on her car.

It was on the rear passenger door: a pale handprint pressed into the dust. Small. Slender. The fingers angled downward, as if someone had touched the car in passing.

Emma stared at it until the parking lot lights flickered on.

Then, because she did not know what else to do, she placed her own hand over it.

The metal was cold.

Not cool from evening air. Cold.

Cellar-cold.

Buried-cold.

Emma left her hand there and felt, through the door, a faint vibration. It might have been traffic. It might have been her own pulse. It might have been the memory of knocking from inside some room that had never opened.

That night she dreamed of the hollow.

In the dream, she stood on Stony Hollow Road under a sky without stars. The trees were full of whispers. Lucinda waited at the bend, but she was not looking at Emma. She was looking past her.

Emma turned.

A man stood in the road behind them.

She could not see his face. He wore a dark coat, old-fashioned, travel-stained. In one hand he held a hat. In the other, a folded letter spotted with rain.

Lucinda took one step toward him.

The man took one step back.

Then Emma woke with tears drying on her face and the certainty that some apologies arrive too late for language.

The next morning, the handprint on her car was gone.

But beneath it, scratched lightly into the paint, were two words:

HE CAME.

Emma did not tell the others. She did not tell anyone for a long time.

Because the words did not feel like comfort.

They felt like a correction.

Years passed, and the legend of Lucinda continued to grow in the way legends do. The details shifted. Teenagers added flourishes. Online lists called Stony Hollow one of the most haunted roads in Iowa. Amateur ghost hunters arrived with recorders and infrared cameras. Most found nothing but mosquitoes and their own nervous laughter. A few left early. Fewer still refused to say why.

Sometimes a car parked by the bend would not start until someone apologized.

Sometimes a handprint appeared on glass.

Sometimes, if the night was moonless and the person calling her name had cruelty in their heart, a passenger door would open by itself.

And sometimes travelers saw two figures among the trees: a pale young woman standing near the guardrail, and a dark-coated man farther back in the woods, always turned away, always just beyond reach.

Locals argued over what it meant.

Some said Lucinda’s lover had finally returned in death, doomed to stand forever near the place where his cowardice—or crime—had ended her life. Some said he had been there all along, hiding in the story as guilty men often hide, behind the sorrow of the women they harm. Others believed the road itself had made him, shaping shadow into the form Lucinda needed most and hated most.

Emma had her own thought, though she rarely spoke it.

She believed Stony Hollow Road did not simply haunt people.

It asked them a question.

What have you promised?

Whom have you left waiting?

What door did you fail to open, and who stood in the dark because of you?

Most people do not care for such questions. They prefer ghosts that rattle chains, moan in attics, drift prettily over graveyards. They prefer the dead to be dead and the past to be past.

But the past is not past on Stony Hollow Road.

It bends there, through the lonely ravine, under trees that lean close to hear every engine slow, every dare whispered, every name called into the dark. It waits in the cold places where the air suddenly changes. It lingers in the fogged glass and the dust on car doors. It listens for laughter and apology, for lies and promises, for the tremble in a voice when a person realizes the story was never only a story.

So if you find yourself on the wooded edge of Burlington after midnight, and the road dips beneath the branches, and your headlights catch the silver flash of the guardrail above the ravine, keep driving.

Do not stop.

Do not call her name unless you mean it.

And if your engine dies, and the cold enters your car like water filling a grave, and a pale hand appears on the window beside you, remember this:

Lucinda has been waiting a very long time.

She knows the sound of a broken promise.

And she knows, better than anyone, that some roads do not lead away from grief.

They lead straight back to it.