Chapter Three

The Almost

The power died just after eight, with no warning and no storm to blame.

One moment the lamp beside the couch threw its usual soft circle of light across my notebook; the next, the entire building dropped into a thick, sudden dark. The refrigerator’s hum vanished. The distant traffic outside seemed louder without the buffer of electricity. I sat still for a few seconds, waiting for the familiar flicker of return, before accepting that this outage intended to stay.

I found the candles by memory two in the kitchen drawer, one on the bookshelf, a fourth already half-melted from some previous failure of the grid. Matches...