The Ice Between Us

The thing about snow is that it makes everything look softer—until you remember what’s buried under it.

By the time I turned off the highway and onto the narrow road that led to Iceveil Lake, the storm had almost erased the view ahead. The wipers dragged slush back and forth, revealing and hiding the road in equal measure. I should’ve gone straight to my mother’s house, but the wheel seemed to turn on its own, guided more by old habits than intention, to the place I’d been avoiding for ten years.

The lake emerged out of the snowfall in pieces—first the dark line of trees, then the old wooden fence, then the empty dock. Everything else was white. White sky, white ground, white breath when I stepped out of the car and the cold met me head-on.

I almost didn’t see the figure at first. For a second I thought the storm was playing tricks on me.

He stood near the middle of the lake, a dark blur on the wide stretch of ice, hands shoved deep into the pockets of a brown coat. He was too far out for the ice to be safe, especially this early in the season. A familiar jolt of panic ran through me.

“Hey!” I called, voice muffled by the snow. “You shouldn’t be out there.”

The figure turned.

Even at a distance, even after a decade, I knew the tilt of his head, the sharp line of his shoulders.

Nico.

For a second, I thought about getting back in the car and leaving. Pretend I hadn’t seen him. Pretend the lake was just a lake, and not the place everything fell apart. Instead, my boots crunched over the frozen shore, carrying me down the slight slope. When I reached him, he nodded once.

“Miles.”

Hearing my name in his voice again sparked something. Not anger. Not exactly grief. Something colder. Something unfinished.

“Didn’t think anyone still came out here,” I said.

He exhaled, breath clouding the air. “Didn’t think I’d come back either. But here we are.”

We stood in silence, snow falling fast around us. Then something glinted beneath the ice near his boots, catching the weak afternoon light.

A tiny, bright flash.

I frowned and crouched, pressing my gloved hand to the ice. The outline became clearer—something silver caught between layers of frozen water.

“Nico… what—”

“You see it too,” he murmured.

A necklace. A thin chain curled under the surface, its small pendant shaped like a snowflake. My stomach dropped.

Ellie’s necklace.

They never found it the day she died.

My breath scraped out of me. “No way.”

He kneeled beside me, jaw tight. “Thought I was imagining it. Figured… the storm brought it up.”

For a moment we just stared at it, the past shimmering between us. The snow muted everything except the sound of my pulse.

“You ever think about that day?” Nico asked.

I almost laughed. “Is there a time you don’t?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. The lake had held on to our past for a decade. Now it was returning a piece of it.

We were seventeen the winter Ellie died.

The lake had been our place since we were kids—the three of us skidding around on cheap skates, building sloppy snowmen, carving our names into the frozen shore with sticks. By high school it had turned into something else, too. A hiding place. A place between home and real life where the rules didn’t follow.

That day, the sun was out but the air was biting. Nico texted me to meet them at the lake—Hurry up, he said. Ellie and I are waiting for you.

What he didn’t know was that I’d been waiting too—waiting for a moment alone with her. I’d practiced what I wanted to say so many times that week I’d finally memorized the words. I hoped, selfishly, that Nico would be late. Or busy. Or anywhere but there.

But when I stepped onto the frozen shore, both of them were already on the dock.

Ellie was seated with one skate on and the other halfway laced, curls spilling from her beanie, her brown skin glowing softly in the cold. For a moment, the whole lake seemed so quiet around her.

Then Nico looked up and called my name.

“Miles,” he called, waving me over with a strained smile. “Come here for a sec?”

I tried not to show my annoyance. Great, I thought. Why did you have to be here? Nico was already striding toward the tree line, expecting me to follow.

I shot Ellie a quick smile—she smiled back, warm and unsuspecting—then I reluctantly trailed after him. When we were out of earshot, Nico kicked at the snow and let out a long, shaky exhale.

“I have to tell you something,” he said.

I crossed my arms, bracing. “What?”

He looked down, then up again, and there was something frantic in his eyes. “My dad took the job. The one in Chicago. We leave in a couple of days.”

The ground seemed to shift beneath me. “In a couple of days?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“That’s—wow.” My voice cracked. “That's so soon.”

“It is,” he said quietly. Then he ran a hand through his hair, gaze flicking toward the dock where Ellie was now standing, stretching her arms. “And that’s why I need to tell her.”

My stomach dropped. “Tell her what?”

“That I love her.”

The words punched the air out of my lungs.

He kept talking, oblivious. “I’ve loved her for years, man. And if I wait any longer, I’ll lose my chance. I was thinking I’d tell her today.”

“Today?” I echoed, a sharp frustration kicking up in my chest. “You’re moving away, and you’re going to drop that on her now?”

He flinched. “I’m not trying to upset her.”

“But you will,” I snapped. “You leave and then what? You expect her to what—wait? Move with you? Pretend everything’s fine while you disappear?”

He glared at me. “I’m just trying to be honest.”

“Honest?” I stepped closer. “Or is it that you can’t handle the idea of someone else telling her first?”

The accusation slipped out before I could stop it.

Silence dropped between us—thick, sharp, dangerous.

Nico’s jaw tightened. “You’re not the only one who cares about her.”

“I never said I was.”

“You didn’t need to.”

The wind gusted, cold enough to sting.

We didn’t notice Ellie had drifted farther out onto the lake. We didn’t notice the shift in the ice beneath her skates. We didn’t notice the widening stretch of darker blue beneath her feet.

We only noticed each other—our anger, our insecurities, our years of unspoken feelings colliding all at once.

And then—

CRACK.

Ellie’s startled cry cut through our argument.

We whipped around, hearts stopping as we saw her arms flail, the ice splintering beneath her boots.

“Ellie!”

She looked at us—eyes wide, mouth open—

And then the ice gave way.

Nico reached her first. I was seconds behind. We clawed at the jagged edge, calling her name into the black water, reaching, reaching— but the lake dragged her under.

The divers later found only the broken clasp of her necklace. The pendant and chain never surfaced.

A week later, Nico’s family left town.

We didn’t speak again. After that day, it got easier to hate him. And maybe he hated me too. It was simpler than facing the truth

Now, ten years later, the lake had released what it kept.

I crouched and pressed my palm to the ice above the necklace. My reflection wavered above the snowflake charm—older, different, nothing like the boy who couldn't save her.

“I didn’t think it was real,” Nico murmured. “Thought maybe grief was making things up.”

“Or guilt,” I said quietly.

He didn’t deny it.

We found a rock on the shore and tapped at the ice until cracks spread across the surface. The final layer was thin enough to break with my bare hand. Freezing water surged up and swallowed my wrist.

When the pendant bobbed up, my breath caught. I grabbed it. I closed my hand around it, and memory hit harder than the cold ever could.

“She used to chew on it when she was thinking,” Nico said.

“She’d chew on it, then complain it messed up her lip gloss,” I said with a small smile.

We stood there, remembering.

“What do we do with it?” he finally asked.

I stared at the tiny snowflake, dripping in my hand.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He looked at me. Really looked. And the anger I remembered from that winter wasn’t there anymore.

“So…” Nico’s breath fogged between us. “What now?”

The question hung in the cold air.

I didn’t have an answer. Not for him. Not for myself. Not for the ghost of a girl who’d loved us both in ways we never got the chance to understand.

All I knew was this—

We stood there, breath mingling in the cold, the past trembling beneath our feet. And for the first time in years, it felt like something between us had finally begun to thaw.