The snow fell in thick, heavy flakes that December evening, the kind that didn’t just cover the city but softened it, turning traffic into muted shadows and streetlights into halos. Sound got swallowed. Even the honk of a cab became something far away and tired.
Clare Bennett sat inside a bus shelter that offered little protection, her shoulder pressed to the cold plexiglass as if the thin wall might lend her some strength. She wore a thin olive-colored dress meant for a warm living room, not for a storm that tasted like metal. Her legs were bare beneath the hem. Her hands kept disappearing into the crooks of her elbows, then returning, then disappearing again, a desperate rhythm of a body trying to remember how to stay alive.
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