The Woman in the Garage
Inside the garage, I froze.
What had once been a dusty, forgotten room now looked… transformed.
The concrete floor gleamed. The air smelled faintly of lavender and candle wax.
The walls—where I’d left old tools and spiderwebs—were now covered with delicate charcoal drawings: trees, stars, and faces.
One of them was my mother’s.
My heart pounded as I stepped closer to the table in the corner.
There, next to a flickering candle, stood a framed photograph—
my mother, smiling, her hand resting on the shoulder of a woman I didn’t recognize.
I turned slowly.
The homeless woman stood behind me, her expression calm but unreadable.
Her hair was still wet from the rain, yet she seemed… different.
Lighter somehow.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she whispered. “Your mother always loved this picture.”
My blood ran cold.
“You… you knew her?”
She nodded, eyes shining in the candlelight. “We were friends. Once. Before the accident.”
She paused, her gaze dropping to the floor. “Before she forgot who I was.”
The silence was thick between us.
I could hear the rain drumming on the roof, the soft hiss of the candle flame.
“I don’t understand,” I said, my voice barely steady. “Who are you?”
Instead of answering, she walked to a corner of the room and pulled out a small wooden box.
“I made her a promise,” she said quietly. “That if anything ever happened, I’d find you.”
She handed me the box. The wood was old, the latch rusted, but it opened easily under my trembling fingers.
Inside were several folded letters, tied with a faded blue ribbon.
On top of them lay a silver pendant engraved with a phrase I knew well—
“The light never fades, even in the dark.”
It was the same thing my mother used to whisper to me every night before bed.
Tears burned my eyes.
“How did you get this?” I asked.
But the woman only smiled, that same gentle smile I’d seen in the photograph.
“Because,” she said softly, “she asked me to give it back when you were ready.”
And then—
the candle flickered.
The shadows shifted.
And she was gone.
No footsteps. No sound.
Just the scent of lavender… and the faint echo of her voice in the rain.
I ran outside, searching the yard, the street—nothing.
Only the storm, swallowing everything in its gray silence.
When I returned to the garage, the candle had burned down to a puddle of wax.
But on the table, where the flame had been, lay something new:
a single, perfect white feather.
I don’t know who she really was—
a friend, a stranger, an angel keeping a promise long overdue.
But every time it rains, I hear her voice again in the thunder’s hush:
“The light never fades, even in the dark.”
And somehow… I believe her.
