Six inches of candle, one inch a year of life per flame.Light it: your past unwraps like newsreel nitrate—every scent, every syllable mirrored in the hazy flicker of a flame.Blow it: a year you haven’t lived peels off the end of your story.Mara’s son is dead at five years old from a pointless accident. She’s watched him laugh, run, breathe again… and again… and again.Now the wax is a child’s finger, the wick a heartbeat. Thirty memories, maybe twenty, maybe ten.Outside, the world turns on without her. Inside, she balances the candle like a loaded gun, counting birthdays she’ll never see against the dimple of a boy who will never grow.Yet as she keeps burning she must choose: try and move past the dark years ahead hoping to heal an ache as old and known to mothers as time, or strike the match and meet her child one last time—knowing the final flare will swallow every tomorrow she has left.Love is measured in melted wax.And the night is almost gone.