was a spectacle. It was as if the trees were throwing a party before dying. She went to an apple orchard and drank hot cider, watching a child drop a donut in the mud. The world felt cozy, wrapped in flannel and the scent of cinnamon. November stripped it all away. The wind returned, rattling the bare branches. The sky turned back to that familiar, steely grey. It was a melancholy month, a time of saying goodbye to the light.

arrived like a slammed door. She stepped off the plane in Chicago, and the air bit her cheeks so hard they felt like two frozen apples. The world was a monochrome of grey sky and white ground. Back home, January meant sweat and mangoes. Here, it meant scraping ice off a car she didn’t own yet and watching people run from heated building to heated building like fleeing refugees. She hated January.

You live inside their beautiful, brutal, glorious story.

The snow vanished overnight, replaced by a violent, shocking green. The grass didn’t just grow—it exploded . Trees that had looked like skeletal hands a week ago were suddenly fuzzy with buds. And the rain. God, the rain. It wasn't the soft, warm mist of the equator; it was a cold, sideways needle-rain that soaked you to the bone in ten seconds. But for the first time, Elara saw daffodils pushing through the mud. She felt a pulse.

was a liar. One day, the sun would appear, the icicles would drip, and she’d think, Ah, spring . She’d wear a light jacket. The next day, a polar wind would scream down from Canada, dumping six more inches of snow. March, she decided, had a personality disorder.

But then, on the last day of , she smelled it. A crispness. A hint of smoke from a distant chimney. The air changed from soft to sharp. The green leaves began to show their true colors—yellow, then orange, then a red so fierce it looked like the tree was on fire.