Kill Switch by Penelope Douglas

make it a year and was now annulled. They’d moved into the
city, Ari refusing to ever be in the same room with me again.
Somehow I’d find the strength to go on living.
And we still hadn’t heard anything about her father. I
hoped it stayed that way.
Winter planted her forehead on mine, gliding her fingers
down my arms.
“It’s snowing,” she whispered.
“How’d you know that?”
We weren’t outside. She couldn’t feel it.
“I can hear it,” she said. “Listen.”
We sat there, so still and quiet, and I closed my eyes,
trying to see the world how she did. I inhaled, smelling the
cold air, but the silence rang in my ears, and I couldn’t hear it
at first.
But then I picked up a hint.
“On the glass,” I told her.
She nodded, smiling. “I love that sound. Like the world is
asleep.”
It looked like it, too, remembering the blanket of white
over everything outside. How water kind of had a habit of
quieting the world around me my entire life, and in one form
or another, I sought it out and reveled in hiding behind it.
Looking over her shoulder, out the window, the snow fell,
charging the air with a little more beauty, the animation
making the Earth look alive even when everything else was
still. A little more pretty. A little more peaceful. A little more
cover.
She always got that about me. She felt it, too.
Even when we were kids, she knew.
I sit in the fountain, the water spilling over the sides from
the bowl above, down around me, and hiding me from her.