Celeste was seven years old, quiet, distant in a way people didn’t understand, a child who avoided eye contact, who spoke in whispers, who preferred watching ants crawl across the ground or lining stones into perfect patterns instead of playing games, and because of that, the town had never been kind to her.
While her parents were unraveling in front of everyone, Celeste wasn’t even near them; she was behind the oldest part of the church, near a crumbling stone wall that supported an abandoned section of the foundation, and at first, I thought she was hiding from the chaos—but when I stepped closer, I realized she wasn’t hiding at all.
She was digging.
Not casually, not absentmindedly, but with a frantic, almost desperate intensity, using a rusted garden tool to hack into the hardened soil until it bent and snapped, and when it did, she didn’t stop—she dropped to her knees and began clawing at the earth with her bare hands, tearing through ivy, dirt, and stone as if something underneath mattered more than anything else in the world.
“Celeste?” I called out, my voice tight with confusion.
She didn’t answer. She didn’t even look up. She just kept digging.