Until Spring

Maren Larkin disappeared in the mountains. Her body was never found. For Grant, grief has been shaped by that absence: the loss of a person without the certainty of a final answer. The mountain holds the part of the story he cannot reach, leaving him with a life organised around what is missing and what he has never been able to know.

Then Maren returns. The impossible becomes immediate, and the longing behind grief is offered something it was never supposed to receive. A person lost can apparently be present again. What should have remained a wish becomes a second chance, close enough to demand a response before its meaning can be understood. Grant has to meet the return with the same love that made the absence unbearable.

Relief does not settle every question. What has come back from the mountain, and what does its return mean? Wanting Maren to be there cannot establish the terms on which she is present. The reunion places hope beside uncertainty, asking Grant to distinguish the person he has missed from the extraordinary circumstances in which he is now being given another chance to see her.

Winter surrounds that chance with a further question. Its end is approaching, and spring may mean more than a change in weather. Grant must confront the possibility that the return has limits, even while he is trying to understand it. The passage of time, once part of living with loss, becomes inseparable from the fear of what might happen when the season changes.

Until Spring is a supernatural story about grief, longing and the unease of receiving what you most wanted. The mountain has returned someone it seemed to have taken away. Grant must decide how to live with that gift, what to believe about it, and how much uncertainty a second chance can carry before it becomes another kind of loss.