ATHEISTMAS

Marty makes a living pricing the things dead people leave behind, which has given him a fairly airtight theory about meaning: most of it is sentimental markup.

Sick, estranged from his sister, and determined to sit Christmas out, he gets a feverish preview of what his own absence would actually leave behind — not hell, not judgment, just a family hurt by all the things he kept private until they were useless.

The story is not about converting him. It is about whether disbelief has to become isolation, whether hidden love counts as love to the person who never receives it, and whether a man can decide to participate in a life without pretending to believe something he does not.

DEVELOPMENT NOTE / The supernatural middle remains psychologically explainable. The change is behavioral, not theological.