I remember that frost-covered train door like it was the last thing I ever saw. Because it was.
The escape spot I’d spent three years scraping together? My fiancée was sitting in it, wearing my parka. Her brother had my hiking boots on his feet. Her mother clutched the medical kit I’d carried six miles through ash-covered roads. And Caleb Frost—the ex she’d sworn was just “someone from the past”—stood in the seat that should have been mine, lifting my silver emergency flask in a toast.
While I froze out in the subzero ash storm, my lungs burning like they were filled with shards of broken glass, they turned their backs to me under the warm yellow light inside.
Then I woke up.
The calendar read May 3, 2041. Exactly one year before the Yellowstone chain eruption would turn the northern hemisphere into a frozen grave.
On the TV, experts were still downplaying the volcanic tremors, insisting there was no immediate risk to the public. My fiancée walked into the bedroom wearing one of my white shirts, carrying coffee in the blue mug she’d bought with my card. She reached for my forehead, asking if I’d had a bad dream.
None of them know I’ve already died once.
They’re still plotting how to make me pay for her brother’s failed investments, how to sneak texts to her old boyfriend, how to use me as their most obedient, most useful doormat until the world ends. I’ve sold the downtown office towers, mortgaged the lakefront house, bought the abandoned geothermal station no one wanted in the dead mountains, and signed a stack of engineering contracts they’ll never bother to read.
They still smile and thank me, tell me I’m the best fiancé in the world.
They have no idea who will be holding the key to the door, when the sky goes dark forever and the snow never stops falling.
