The Nothing Before New Year

There are days that don't have names. The stretch between Christmas and New Year's Eve—that grey, shapeless time when the calendar seems to hold its breath. When the decorations look tired. When the gifts have been opened and the wrapping paper thrown away and there's nothing left to anticipate, nothing left to unwrap, nothing left but the long exhale before the world remembers how to count again. Eliot is eleven years old, and she is drowning in the nothing-time. Her grandmother died in October. Margaret, who taught her to see the underneath of things—the doors hidden in walls, the kingdoms that exist in the gaps between moments. Margaret, who believed that magic was real and that Eliot had inherited the eyes to see it. Margaret, who is gone now, leaving behind a family that doesn't know how to grieve together, only separately, each of them locked in their own private winter. On the third night of the nothing-time, something knocks on Eliot's second-story window. The Keeper of Lost Hours has been collecting for a very long time. Every moment people wish away—the boring hours, the painful hours, the minutes we spend waiting for something better to begin—they all flow to his kingdom, a place built from discarded time. He offers Eliot an escape: come with him, leave the grief behind, live in a world where time doesn't hurt because time doesn't matter. But the kingdom has rules. And the biggest rule is this: stay past midnight on New Year's Eve, and you stay forever. The children who came before Eliot are still there—some of them translucent now, fading into the architecture, becoming part of the walls they thought would protect them. The Nothing Before New Year is a story about grief that doesn't pretend grief is easy. About a girl who must choose between escaping her pain and walking through it. About the terrible, beautiful truth that the only way out is through—and that the people we lose would want us to keep living, even when living hurts. The nothing-time is a liar. It tells you it's empty. But it's not. It's just waiting for you to fill it with something worth remembering.