Night
They stood like that a while, neither of them in any hurry to break it. The breeze moved through the grass in long, slow waves, and somewhere far off an owl called once and went quiet again, and for a long time the only sound between them was breathing.
Alaric didn't fill the silence. It wasn't in him to. He had never been a man who believed a wound closed any faster for being talked at, and so he simply held her, his arms steady around her shoulders, his chin resting against the top of her head, offering the one thing he'd always been reliably good at giving her — his presence, unmoving, unhurried, the same as it had been every other night she'd come out here to grieve something the rest of the house had long since learned not to mention.
"Four days," she said eventually, quiet, almost to herself.
"Four days." He didn't add anything to it. There wasn't anything true left to add that hadn't already been said in some other year, at some other meeting, and he'd learned, over the fifteen years since it happened, that false reassurance cost her more than silence ever did.
She turned in his arms after a while, enough to look up at him, and found what she always found when she looked at him properly like this — not comfort exactly, nothing so soft as that, but a kind of unmoved steadiness that had somehow, over the decades, become its own particular form of comfort anyway. He didn't offer easy words. He never had. What he offered instead was simpler and harder to shake: he was still standing there. He hadn't looked away. Whatever grief she carried, he carried the weight of watching her carry it, and had done so every year without once suggesting she should carry it differently, or less, or quieter.
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"I don't think I'll ever stop looking for him," she said. "Even if it's fifteen years and then twenty and then thirty."
"Good." The word came out low, immediate, entirely without hesitation. "I'd think less of either of us if we did."
She studied his face a moment, the hard lines of it softened only slightly by the starlight, and something in his stillness settled something in her that words alone had never quite managed to. He wasn't a man who reached for poetry when the moment called for it. He reached, instead, for the one thing he trusted more than any sentence he could construct — staying. Simply staying, night after night, in whatever field she needed him to stand in with her.
"Come inside," he said finally, his voice rough with the hour. It wasn't a request so much as the quiet, practical end of a ritual they'd both performed too many times to need dressing up in anything gentler. "You'll take cold standing out here much longer, and there's nothing this ground can give you that I haven't already tried to."
She let him turn her by the shoulders, back toward the warm windows of the house, and neither of them spoke again the rest of the walk, the silence between them not empty so much as simply full of everything they'd already said to each other in fifteen years of standing in fields exactly like this one. The stars kept their slow watch overhead, patient, ancient, indifferent to anything so small as one family's grief, and yet bearing witness to it regardless, the same as Alaric always had — not with words, but by refusing, every single time, to be anywhere else.