The Light Between Us

It began on a train ride through the Swiss countryside, where snow-capped peaks met endless fields of wildflowers. Bianca sat by the window, a notebook in her lap, sketching the mountains as they rolled by. Across from her sat a stranger with tousled hair, worn boots, and a half-smile that seemed to know secrets the world had forgotten.

“Do you always draw in motion?” he asked.

She looked up, surprised, but smiled. “Only when I want the lines to feel alive.”

Lucas was a traveling photojournalist whose eyes saw more than he said and his voice sounded like a lullaby. He was heading to Zermatt for a hiking assignment. She was just wandering, searching for color after a long winter of grayscale.

Their conversation didn’t stop when the train did.

For the next two weeks, they explored the alpine trails together—her with her pencils and his camera slung over his shoulder. He captured light. She used graphite to chase it. And somewhere between shared sandwiches and snowball fights, they began to fall.

It wasn’t a thunderclap love. It was a slow, warm build—like the sun rising over the mountains they climbed. Lucas showed her how to breathe again. He taught her the names of stars and made her laugh until her sides ached. In return, Bianca gave him the quiet kind of love—the kind that listens, that waits, that sees beyond the surface.

They stayed in a small cottage with creaking floors and a fireplace that never quite worked, and it became their world. A world of soft kisses, tea-stained mornings, and whispered dreams under heavy quilts.

He called her “Laney.” She called him “Luce.”

They danced one night with only their laughter as they danced beneath the falling snow. In the icy air, Lucas pressed his forehead to hers and breathed warmly. “Promise me something?” he asked.

“Anything.”

“If we ever have to say goodbye… let’s do it without regrets. Just love, even if it ends.”

She nodded, not knowing how deeply that promise would root itself in her soul.

Because some stories, no matter how bright, are meant to be brief.

It started with a cough—dry, persistent, easy to ignore. But it grew worse. Then came the hospital visits, the tests, the fear hanging like frost in the corners of their room.

Lung cancer. Stage four. Aggressive. Inoperable.

Lucas, who had spent his life running up mountains, now struggled to walk across the room. He smiled through the pain, still made her laugh, still whispered, “You make the world look like poetry.”

Bianca stayed. She sketched him every day—his hands, his profile in the window light, the curve of his smile when he saw her. Her pages filled with him, as if she could hold onto him through pencil and paper.

In his final week, they returned to the place they’d first met. A train ride, slower this time. He rested his head on her shoulder as the mountains passed by once more.

“I’m not afraid,” he whispered. “Because I’ve already lived a lifetime in your arms.”

When he passed, it was in that small cottage, with snow gently falling outside. Bianca held his hand and read him the last page of the notebook she had filled over the months.

"You were the light between my shadows. The warmth in the cold. And even as you fade, Luce, you are still everything bright in me."

Years later, Bianca still walks those mountain trails. Alone, but not empty. She sketches with quiet reverence, leaving drawings of Lucas tucked under stones, pinned to trees, and hidden inside books at cafés.

Because true love, even the kind that ends, never really disappears. It echoes—in every heartbeat, every snowfall, every morning light.