In Corriveau, love that is sworn aloud has to be paid for in years off the end of your own life, and only one of you ever pays. The one who pays goes silver. The one who is loved keeps the hair they were born with.
Nobody can see the cost, or how much anyone has left. These are the people living inside that.
A couple who have loved eleven years unbound, finally holding the certificate that asks which of them will go silver for the other. A marriage sworn cheap to feel nothing, that doesn't hold. A Keeper who comes to prove a widow never paid, and learns her husband dyed his own silver head brown for thirty years so the ledger would name her the one who loved.
A man who reads a stranger's white hair as great love and buys her a drink, and gets the whole story wrong. Two people who kneel to swear deep and feel the words refuse, and understand, without a number, that one of them is near the end. A house girl who opens the wrong door in the cellar and finds what her mother's dark hair actually cost.
Each one drops you all the way into a single couple and a single impossible choice, and each ends somewhere you didn't expect.
The forger who fakes devotion for a living and won't fake it for the woman he loves. The lovers who run for the border just to love the way another country lets them, both paying, both going silver, matched. The one married by a god the city stopped believing in and denied by the book the city runs on now. The widower who fills two cups every morning and will never learn how many of his own years he spent keeping her alive.
Every one stands on its own. Open to any number and you're fully inside it in a paragraph.
Together they turn the same cruel machine over and over, the sworn love that costs everything and the free love that protects nothing, holding it up to a new light each time.
These are aching, human stories about deciding who goes silver so the other can be loved, and about doing that math blind, on faith, with a life you were never allowed to count.
Thirteen standalone shorts from a city where sworn love is paid for in years off your own life and only one of you pays, each following a single couple through the same buried question, which of us goes silver so the other can be loved, and each leaving you doing the arithmetic on your own.
