The Feather Code

For a year, she painted a single feather every morning—each one a shade of his absence. On the 365th day, she turned the canvas over and found his handwriting tracing the edge: "You counted them wrong."

Her breath hitched. The feathers weren’t just strokes of grief; they were coordinates. Latitude in the barbs, longitude in the vanes. She mapped them onto old flight logs—his last route before vanishing over the Pacific.

The final feather, painted in storm-gray, pointed to an uncharted atoll. There, under a canopy of frigatebirds, she found his plane intact, cockpit empty except for a single note weighted with sea glass: "I taught you how to read wings for a reason."

The wind lifted a primrose feather onto the dashboard—fresh, unfaded. Alive.