🔹 Part 4 – The Deer in the Dark
The cabin creaked with memory. Not from wind or age, but from the weight of presence—three generations breathing in the same space, under the same patched roof, lit by the same soft glow of firelight and oil lamp.
Tom couldn’t sleep.
Not for the usual reasons—his knee, his back, the phantom limb of Lillian’s warmth beside him—but because something in him had stirred. A shift. A feeling he’d long believed too buried to rise again.
He sat up on the cot, pulling the blanket tighter. Across the room, Matt slept with his arm resting across his eyes, the way he always had as a boy. Josh was curled up like a question mark near the stove, cocooned in two sleeping bags zipped together. His fishing rod leaned beside him like a trusted sword.
Tom quietly rose, pulled on his boots, and slipped outside.
The air was cool, but not biting. The storm had veered east sometime after dusk, leaving behind a wash of moonlight that turned the trees silver. The stars winked through the shifting clouds.
He hadn’t stepped out for long—not even down the steps—when he saw it.
The deer.
Same one. He knew it now. Not because of antler points or body shape, but because of the eyes.
Still. Observing.
It stood just beyond the clearing, half-shadowed under a tulip poplar, like it had always belonged there. Its breath came in little puffs of fog. And it didn’t move—not away, not forward. Just waited.
Tom stared.
He felt foolish, maybe. Talking to a deer. But the woods had always blurred those lines—between logic and faith, man and creature, past and present.
He took a step forward.
The deer didn’t flinch.
“You showed them the way,” Tom whispered. “Didn’t you?”
The deer blinked slowly.
Tom glanced back toward the cabin, toward the warm orange light seeping through the chinks in the wall. He remembered another light like that—thirty years ago—when Matt had been just a teenager and stormed out after another shouting match.
“You never listen,” his son had screamed. “You only ever talk about what you think is right!”
Tom had chased him out the door then. Yelled back. Words sharp as arrows.
That was the beginning of the silence.
Now, in the still of these woods, that moment echoed louder than the shouting ever had.
He looked back at the deer.
“I’ve made a mess of it,” he said softly. “But they came anyway.”
The deer tilted its head, as if listening.
Tom took another step.
This time, the deer turned.
And slowly, without panic or rush, it walked into the woods.
Not away.
But as if inviting.
Tom didn’t follow right away.
He stood at the edge of the clearing, staring into the trees where the deer had vanished. He knew that path. The ridgeline bent east, then curved down toward the glade where Lillian used to pick wildflowers in the spring.
His foot lifted before his brain decided.
He followed.
The moonlight guided him. No flashlight needed. The forest floor glowed in patches, broken by shadows of pine and alder.
Each step forward felt like peeling back time.
He passed the old ranger marker—a rusted post with his initials carved in the back. Still there. Still forgotten by everyone except him.
And then he came to the glade.
Empty. Still.
No deer.
Just wind passing gently through knee-high grass, and a tree stump where Lillian used to sit with a sketchbook in her lap.
He walked over, slowly, and lowered himself onto the stump.
His breath came slow. Heavy.
It wasn’t the deer he’d followed.
It was her.
He let his hand rest on the stump beside him.
“I told myself I’d let it go,” he said aloud. “That if I stopped walking toward it, the grief would ease. The regret would rot away with the seasons.”
A breeze lifted his hair.
“But it didn’t.”
He glanced upward, past the treetops.
“I was scared, Lil. Not of death. Of living wrong. Of screwing up what mattered most.”
His voice cracked, thin as dry bark.
“I never told him how proud I was. I never told him I understood. Even if I didn’t show it.”
Silence.
But in it, something shifted.
A warmth—not physical—moved through his chest. Not from outside. From within.
Something unknotted.
Tom looked down.
And there, at the base of the stump, was a single sprig of goldenrod.
Fresh.
He didn’t remember seeing it on the way in. Didn’t remember it growing here in autumn.
He reached down, touched it gently.
And for the first time in years, he wept.
Not the quiet kind. The full-body kind. The kind that shakes a man free.
He returned to the cabin as dawn kissed the sky.
The air had turned cooler, but not cold. The door creaked as he stepped inside.
Matt was awake.
Sitting at the table, cradling a tin cup of reheated coffee.
He looked up.
Tom walked in and sat across from him.
Matt studied his face. The red around the eyes. The damp sleeve.
Tom didn’t hide it.
“You went out there?” Matt asked quietly.
Tom nodded. “To the glade.”
Matt nodded too. “I haven’t been there since she passed.”
Tom looked at him long.
“I think she’s still there. In some way. Watching.”
Matt stared at his coffee. “Josh asked me last night if I hated you.”
Tom’s breath caught.
Matt looked up. “I told him no.”
Tom blinked. “Why?”
“Because I don’t.” A pause. “Not anymore.”
They sat in silence for a long time.
The fire crackled. The sky brightened.
“I’m tired of the distance,” Matt said finally. “I’m tired of pretending none of it hurt.”
Tom nodded. “Me too.”
Matt rubbed his chin, then glanced toward the sleeping boy in the corner.
“Maybe we try again,” he said. “Smaller this time. No big gestures. Just… breakfast on Sundays. Letters now and then. A few more fishing trips.”
Tom smiled. “I could get used to that.”
Matt stood. “I’ll wake the boy. You start the bacon?”
Tom chuckled. “You remember how I like it?”
Matt grinned faintly. “Burnt to a crisp.”
Tom stood slowly, stretching, and moved toward the old cooler.
As the skillet heated, and Matt knelt to nudge Josh awake, a beam of sunlight pierced through the cabin’s cracked window, warming the floor.
Outside, in the woods, the deer watched once more from a distance.
Then turned, at peace, and vanished into the dawn.
