The first note said Stay. Nothing else.

It’s taped on my phone, where I’ll see it before anything else.

I read it three times. I don’t understand. I peel it off, and the tape leaves a grey mark on the screen, and I think, what a strange thing to write, and then I think, well, that’s sweet, that’s Daniel for you, leaving me love notes as if we were still twenty-one.

I didn’t think about it again until the next morning, when I found another one. Same word. Same slant to the letters

Stay.

‘You keep leaving me these,’ I said to him over breakfast, and he looked up from Noah’s shoelaces, one knee on the kitchen floor, and said, ‘Leaving you what?’

‘The notes.’

He laughed and said he hadn’t left anything anywhere, he said maybe it was Lily practising her letters again. Lily was seven years old. Lily couldn’t yet make a Y that looked like that.

I let it go.

You’d let things go too if you had two kids and a husband who travels for work three days a week and a restless dog that chews everything. You’d let a lot of things go. I made the packed lunches. I found Noah’s other shoe. I kissed Daniel at the door and told him to drive safe on the A61, because it always rains near Skipton at this time of year, and he said he would.

That was the Wednesday I remember clearly. After that the days get harder to line up.

Here is the thing I still don’t understand.

Why has Daniel never asked where the kids are? Why doesn’t he miss them like I do when the grandparents take them on vacation or have them over the weekend? Maybe because he knows they are safe and loved, and that they always have fun and come back happy.

I wonder why sometimes he is sad and grumpy without any reason. Maybe all those long business trips tire him out.

‘You’re never here’, he says.

‘But I am, I’m right here. I’ll finish mowing the lawn before the kids come back.’

‘What kids? There are no kids here.’

‘Of course the children aren’t here. They’re at their grandmother’s.’

I go outside and forget what just happened.

When I return inside, there’s just Daniel, hunched over coffee with the grey coming in at his temples.

‘You read the note,’ he says.

‘I don’t understand it.’

I don’t understand him.

‘I know. You never do. What did the other one say? Last night. What did he tell you?’

I sit down.

‘The other who? What do you mean?’, I laugh.

‘Your other Daniel. Does he still take Noah and Lily to the grandparents?’

‘Are you ok hun? You should cut back on the business trips a bit. They don’t do you any good.’

Daniel closes his eyes and puts his head in his hands.

‘Yes, I am. You’re not though. Do you want me to stop?’ he said.

‘I want to know why. Why does the note always say the same thing? Why does everyone keep telling me I’m awake? I know I’m awake! I’m standing right here! I’m right here!’

‘Because you’re not. Because you’re not here. Not really. And because I ask you to stay,’ he said. ‘Every day. I don’t know how else to say it.’

‘Stay where? I am staying. I’m right here. I don’t understand.’

‘Are you,’ he said. Not quite a question.

Try it. Wake up tomorrow and prove to me that you’re awake. You can’t. You can only believe it.

I thought that this would be like drowning.

It’s not.

It feels more like being fluent in two languages and never noticing which one you’re speaking until someone asks.

I told him that he scares me, and he apologised without explaining, and I went to get the phone and called my grandparents.

The line is busy.

I try again.

Not answering.

I try again.

‘The line is out of order.’

‘Where are my children? What have you done to them?? I can’t stay here! My children are not here!! They need me!!’

‘Please, it’s been long enough. Come back to me,’ said Daniel, gripping my hands tightly.

‘Sit down, love. I need to tell you something, and I need you to really hear it this time.’

He told me there was no other home. There had only ever been the one, this one, the quiet one, the one with no dog and no drawings on the fridge and no small shoes by the door.

‘Tell me, when did Lily lose her second tooth. The bottom one.’

I open my mouth. Nothing comes.

‘You don’t know, because it changes. Last week it was the left one. Two weeks ago was the right.’

I want to shout at him.

I see Lily in my mind. Her smile is missing both bottom teeth, the gap wide and even, and something in my heart collapses.

‘What is this? ‘What’s happening to me?’

I want to argue.

But I can’t. Instead, I just felt utterly drained.

Daniel doesn’t answer. He just steps back, and the kitchen folds away like paper catching fire at the corner, and I am somewhere else entirely.

White light. The smell of antiseptic.

A low, steady beeping from a machine.

I don’t have a body here. I just listen.

‘Mr. Thompson.’

A woman’s voice.

‘It’s been fourteen months. I know this isn’t what you want to hear.’

‘She squeezed my hand last week.’ Daniel’s voice, older than it should be. ‘I felt it. I know I felt it.’

‘The reflex movement is not the same as...’

‘Don’t.’

A long silence. I can hear him breathing heavily.

‘The scans. Tell me about the scans again.’

‘There is activity,’ the doctor says, more gently now. ‘More than we’d expect this far out, honestly. Whatever is happening in there, her brain is working very hard at something. We just don’t know what.’

‘She’s dreaming,’ Daniel says.

‘Perhaps. We don’t fully understand what a mind does with nothing to hold onto. Some patients build entire lives there.’

‘Will she come back.’

The pause before the answer is the longest thing I have ever lived through, dead or alive.

‘I don’t know,’ the doctor says. ‘I’m sorry. I truly don’t.’

I hear him crying uncontrollably.

And I understand, all of a sudden, with a clarity that feels like being slapped awake.

I want to cry.

I miss my children.

I want to go back to them.

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I found the second phone on a Friday.

Not hidden, exactly. That’s what I keep coming back to.

It was placed on the kitchen counter next to the fruit bowl, face up.

The screen lit up when I walked past it. A name I didn’t know. I read it four times before the screen goes dark. Show me a woman who wouldn’t!!

Are you coming home tonight?

I sat in my own kitchen and read those words and felt the floor becoming a thin, unsteady skin stretched over a huge hole. And I think, this is how it begins.

You should know what it’s like between us before I tell you the rest. Otherwise, you’ll think I was mad from the beginning, and I wasn’t.

He never stays overnight. He has a reason, always, and the reasons are good, an early start, a flat that’s being done up so it isn’t fit for company yet.

I noticed all of it. I want that on the record. I noticed every single thing. I just put the wrong story to it.

He came in from the garden at six. He kissed the top of my head, and I let him.

‘Who’s Adriana,’ I said.

He didn’t flinch.

I want that on the record.

He poured himself a glass of water and drank half of it before he answered, and his hand was steady.

‘You went through my phone?’

‘It lit up.’

‘A colleague,’ he said. ‘Why.’

‘She wants to know if you’re coming home tonight.’

‘I work with her, Ana. We have a project. You know I have the project.’

‘She said home.’

‘It’s an expression.’ He put the glass down. ‘Colleagues say this to each other.’

I had been calm up until then. I had rehearsed it in the long hours of the afternoon. But calm is a thing you build out of not-knowing, and the not-knowing was gone now, so the calm went with it.

‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t you dare stand in this house and talk to me about expressions. You call me love. You call me sweetheart. I’ve washed your shirts. I’ve smelt what’s on your collar and told myself it was mine. So don’t.’

‘You’re getting paranoid, love.’

“There’s no one else. There has never been anyone else. It’s you. It’s only ever been you.’

‘How long.’

‘Ana.’

‘How long??!’

He came around the island towards me with his palms open, that gesture people make when they want you to believe they’re holding nothing back, hiding nothing.

‘There is no one else,’ he said. ‘I talk to people at work. That is all I do. I take my job seriously for someone in my position, so I talk to the people I work with, and none of them have ever been anything other than colleagues to me. I don’t flirt. I have never flirted. You know me. You know I don’t have it in me.’

‘I know you.’

I didn’t mean to, but it came out more like a question.

‘You’re rationing me. And I can’t keep doing this. I can’t. I love you so much it frightens me, but I will not be cheated any more. I won’t. I’m worth more than the leftover hours.’

He takes both my hands and holds them tightly.

‘Why do I always feel like I’m not enough?’

‘You are the only one,’ he said. ‘You. There is no other woman in my life. There is you. Do you hear me? I loved you even before I knew I’d love you. There’s no one I want the way I want you. If I could fold every hour of my life into us, I would. I’d never leave it.’

And God help me, the way he says it, I believe him.

I have never wanted anything as much as I wanted to enter the version of my life where those words were true.

I’ll start keeping a list, building my case. I know he’s lying to me. I am right about everything.

Then his phone rang. The first phone. The one I knew.

He looked at the screen and he put it back, and that small reflexive shame told me more than the second phone ever had.

“Answer it,” I said.

“It’s nothing.”

“Answer it or I will.”

“Ana.”

“Who is she.”

He was quiet for a long moment.

“You don’t understand,” he said, and his voice had changed.

He had become gentle, which was even worse.

‘You’ve never understood, and I let you not understand, because it was easier. For both of us. I told myself it was better.’

‘Understand what.’

‘You can’t talk to me like that.’

He said it almost tenderly.

‘You don’t have the right. You never had the right.’

‘I’m your wife.’

Then he looked at me with eyes close to sadness.

‘No,’ he said. ‘She is my wife.’

I heard it and couldn’t make any sense of it.

I stood there, turning it over in my mind - she, she, she - trying to find the place it fit, and there was no place, there had never been a place, because the place I thought was mine had always belonged to someone else.

‘That’s not...’ I started. ‘I live here... This is my house… These are my... I have a ring, I have...’

I looked down at my hand.

There was no ring. There had never been a ring. I had been seeing one for so long that I had stopped seeing my own bare finger.

‘You come to me,’ I whispered. ‘You come here.’

“Yes.”

‘On Fridays.’

‘Yes.’

‘And then you go home.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I go home.’

The temperature dropped all at once.

This is when I saw them.

Three of them, then more, I couldn’t count them, barefoot on the frosty grass, their hair loose and moving even though there was no wind. They didn’t walk so much as they appeared, closer each time you blinked, like a photographer taking different slides, ever closer. The Iele. The ones who come for what has overstepped.

He did not look at them. He could not see them. He was still standing in his colleague’s kitchen, in his mistress’s kitchen, with pain on his ordinary face, a married man who had stayed too late.

The nearest one pressed her hand against the window. Her breath did not fog it. Her eyes found mine and held them, and when she spoke, her mouth did not move.

You have raged in a house that is not yours, she said. You wore a ring that was never given. You cried like a wife and called her pain yours.

“I didn’t know,” I said. My lips are barely moving. “I swear to you, I didn’t know.”

You knew, she said, almost kindly, and it was the same kindness he had used.

You knew every Friday when he left. You built a life out of the leaving. You made yourself the story you could bear.

Behind her, the others had begun to circle, soundless on the grass, and where their feet fell the frost went black.

‘What happens now,’ I said.

Now you take your right place, she said. The one you have refused. The one behind the door, in the corner, on the edge. The place of the woman who is not spoken of.

He turned then, finally, at the sound of my voice, though I no longer remember speaking. He looked at the spot where I was standing, and his face was confused, and he said, into the empty kitchen, into the cold, “Ana?”

But I was already at the window. I was already on the other side of the glass with the others, looking inside, unbound and barefoot on the frost, and the woman beside me took my hand, and her hand was so cold it was almost warm, almost the hand I knew, and she said, There. You see. Now you know which one of you was always the ghost.

He poured another glass of water.

He checked his phone.

He turned off the kitchen light, and went home to his wife.

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We’d moved in on a Thursday.

At least I think it was a Thursday. The days had been passing quickly lately, just like it happens when you’re tired, and I had been so tired.

The house was old and the previous owners had left it way too dirty.

I went through each room, opening the windows.

That was when the dresser caught my eye. Walnut, heavy. Behind the top drawer there was another drawer, smaller, and behind that, pushed flat against the back, a leather book with a cracked spine.

I sat on the floor in an empty bedroom, in the afternoon light, and opened it.

I don’t know how I know, but I think it’s a man’s handwriting. Strongly slanted to the right. The first entry was dated a few years ago, in the spring.

Today is one of those days everyone thinks of, it began. She wore her mother’s earrings and laughed at the wrong moment in the vows, and I have never loved anyone the way I love her when she gets things wrong.

A wedding. A stranger’s wedding. I felt the small guilt you feel when reading someone’s private heart, and then I felt something stronger than guilt, which was that I could not stop.

‘Does his wife know about this?’ I wondered. ‘I hope she does. It’s not fair that I know if she doesn’t.’

She thinks I don’t notice, but I do see the things she thought she’d hidden.

I notice the way she’d hum when she is frightened. The way she’d save the burnt toast for herself.

I turned the page.

She’ll find the chip in the blue teacup and pretend she didn’t, so I won’t feel bad for breaking it.

I don’t know why I went to the kitchen. The boxes were still sealed, except for one, and from that one, I picked up the blue cup that we’d carried through three houses, and on the edge, there was a chip I had never seen before. New.

I pretended I hadn’t seen it. So he wouldn’t feel bad

It was strange how close I felt to her. The wife.

I told myself it was only good writing.

Still, when I read that she cried to a song on the radio, I found myself crying too. When I read that she found his coat in the hallway, still smelling of him, I went into the hallway, and there was my husband’s coat, and I found myself smelling it.

The house was very quiet. I kept noticing just how still it was. I told myself the last people who lived here must have taken all the noise with them when they moved out.

The good years filled most of the book.

A garden. A dog that dug the garden. A night they had a power outage and lay on the kitchen floor, with candles and kisses.

I read it fast until I could no longer tell whether I was reading her or remembering her.

I couldn’t stop.

I should have put the book down. I want to tell you I closed it.

But you have to understand what it was like, reading their lives.

I kept turning the pages.

He wrote everything as if he were afraid of losing it all, and while I was reading, I felt as if I were living it.

Then the writing changed.

Today is one of those days no one thinks of. We can get through this too, I told her. It’s a small lump. Let’s call it Pinocchio, because it’s a liar. Cancer is a liar, and I don’t believe liars.

I read it twice.

Then my hand went up to my throat.

The lump was there. Small. New.

I hadn’t felt it that morning

I told myself I was imagining it. I told myself I’d caught her fear, that it was sympathy, suggestion, anything.

I should have stopped.

The entries came quick now, the dates leaping. Scans. The wig she refused to wear. The evenings she was too tired to reach the window, so he described the sea to her, the sea he was inventing, because there was no sea, only the back garden with a dog that dug it.

She is so brave it frightens me, he wrote. I am not brave. I am only here. I think being here is the only thing I ever knew how to do.

And as I read it, I heard a sound from somewhere in the house. A small brave sound. The sound of a woman not letting on how much it hurt. I went looking for the room it came from and there was no room, no woman, only me in the hall with the diary

I turned to the last entry he’d written. The ink is darker there. Newer.

So I kept reading. God forgive me, I read faster.

Today is one of those days no one wants to live. They lowered her this morning. Her mother’s earrings went with her, the ones she loved. I keep this diary because it is the only place she still does things in the present tense. Here she is always about to laugh. Here, the lump is always still a liar.

My love, if you ever find this, you always did get into things you weren’t meant to, my little wren. So, if some part of you is reading over my shoulder the way you used to, I want you to know I will come to this page every day for as long as I can hold the pen. As long as I write you, you are not gone. Wait for me here.

Little wren.

He only ever called one person that.

My hand went up, past my throat, to my ears, and there they were. My mother’s earrings. The ones I was buried in.

I looked up from the diary.

The house was not new.

There were no previous owners.

There was only him.

I turned to the last entry written.

My love, keep reading. Please. As long as you are reading, I am still able to write you, and as long as I write you, you are not entirely gone. I will come to the page every day for as long as I can hold a pen. Wait for me there.

I am waiting now.

The last page he wrote ends in the middle of a sentence.

The ink is not yet dry.

He is somewhere in this house, an old man at a table, choosing what to give me next. A morning. A teacup. A made-up sea. Whatever he can bear.

So I sit on the floor in the afternoon light.

Waiting for him to finish it.

Please. Keep writing, my love.

Give me one more day no one thinks of.

Warmest, tightest hugs to you, my darling reader. Please don’t be a stranger. Say hi if you feel called to do so.

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My sister and I were identical twins.

She died in March, on a rainy road outside Sibiu, in Romania, where she was working as a translator.

A truck. And a guardrail that failed to do its job.

My sister was the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

She was driving to the airport when it happened.

Closed casket.

I signed the papers. I brought her home in the hold of an EasyJet flight - a sentence I will never be able to say out loud - and I buried her.

Her phone was never retrieved from the car. The insurance report listed it as destroyed.

I want to be clear about what happened next, because the details matter.

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I started counting the spoons three months after we got married.

That was the thing - I don’t care about spoons.

Daniel said I’d moved them. He stood at the drawer with that patient face, and he said, ‘The spoons go on the left, Simone, they’ve always gone on the left.”

I looked, and they were on the right, and I had no memory of moving them.

“You did it again,” he said. Soft. So soft. “It’s all right. We’ll sort it out.”

I want to be precise about this, because I have spent a long time since then trying to find the moment it started, and there isn’t one.

His mother came on Sundays. Then Wednesdays. Then she had a key.

Helen. Sixty-eight, smelling of expensive perfume, watching me. She’d find things. My pills in the wrong place, three where there should be four. My letters opened, then folded back wrong, and when I said something, she’d press her hand flat to her chest and look at Daniel, and Daniel would look at me, and I learned, slowly, that there is no defence against people who decide you are unwell.

The sister, Sophie, came on Wednesdays too, and she’d flinch when I moved too fast, and I didn’t know yet why a grown woman would flinch at me.

Then my daughter, my Ruxandra, she was eight. She started watching me too. That was the worst. A child copies and learns whom to believe, and I was outnumbered.

I’d hear them in the kitchen. Daniel and his mother and his sister, the three of them, voices going low when I came down the stairs.

“She forgot to collect Ruxandra again.”

I had not forgotten. The time on the note had been changed.

I’d seen it change. Or I’d written it wrong.

By December I couldn’t tell you which, and that not-being-able-to-tell - that’s the thing they were building, brick by brick, around me.

A little house with no windows. And I was helping them lay it because what else can you do when your own memory keeps coming back empty?

“There’s a paper,” Daniel told me one night. “A form. Just so someone can talk to me. A doctor friend of his mother’s. Just to help.”

I signed nothing. But I saw the paper on his desk, and my name was already on it.

***

The women came on a late winter evening.

I don’t know how to tell this part so you’ll believe it, so I’ll just say it.

It was past eleven. Everyone was asleep and I was at the kitchen table, just sitting.

I wanted to cry. My body wanted to cry.

Instead, I was frozen in silence.

The back door opened. I hadn’t heard a knock. Three of them came in out of the dark, and they were ordinary women, that’s the thing. That’s what I keep coming back to.

A woman in a green coat. A woman with streaks of white hair and gold earrings. A young one, barely grown, with bare feet on my cold tiles, and I remember thinking she would catch a cold, and then I didn’t think about it at all because the girl looked at me and her gaze dropped to the ground.

“You’ve been counting spoons,” said the one in green.

I didn’t ask how she knew.

“Who are you,” I said.

“Shhhh. That’s not important.”

The grey one sat down across from me. It looked like she’d done it a thousand times.

“We come when one of ours is being buried alive. We can hear it,” they all said in the same voice.

The young one walked the perimeter of my kitchen, touching things.

The drawer.

The kettle.

She stopped at the photographs on the wall, Daniel’s people.

She made a small sound in her throat that I felt in mine too.

“You think you’re losing your mind,” the one with gold in her ears said.

I kept calm.

“You’re not. They’re taking it from you.”

I started to cry.

Finally.

“We can’t take you with us,” she said. “You have a child. We don’t take the ones with children. It’s a rule older than we are. But we can give you something.”

“What.”

The young one came and crouched in front of me, and she took both my hands in hers.

“Your own eyes back,” she said. “That’s all.”

“We’ll give you certainty,” said the one in the green coat. “You’ll never doubt again.”

That was the word she used. Not truth.

“Isn’t that what you want? To stop asking yourself if you’re the mad one?” finished the one with gold earrings.

I want to say I asked sensible questions.

I didn’t.

I said, “Yes. Please. Yes.”

They were gone before the kettle I hadn’t filled began, impossibly, to whistle.

I slept that night like a dead woman and woke up like a living one.

Here is what I saw, after.

I saw Helen come in with her key at nine and go straight to my pill bottle and tip one into her palm and pocket it, and turn with her hand on her chest the second I appeared, asking how I’d slept, dear, you look tired, dear. And I saw it. The whole choreography. I’d been the only one in the house who couldn’t see it.

She was poisoning me!

I saw the note on the fridge in Daniel’s hand, the time written and then written over, and I didn’t doubt my eyes for one second, and that not-doubting was the gift, that was the whole gift, and it was worth more than anything else.

I stopped arguing.

That was the change in me, and it frightened them more than the arguing ever had.

I just watched.

I let Helen move the spoons, and I moved them back and held her eyes while I did it. I found the paper with my name forged on it, and I photographed it, and I put it back exactly, exactly where it had been.

I smiled at dinner.

Daniel started sleeping badly.

He’s a man who needs his story believed, you see. They all need it. The story only stands up if everyone agrees to hold it, and I’d let go of my corner, and he could feel the weight of it shifting onto him alone.

He started saying odd things.

He said the women in the photographs moved at night.

He said he heard a kettle.

He told his mother I’d done something to him and his mother, for the first time in her violet-scented life, looked at her son the same way she’d taught the whole family to look at me.

By February he wouldn’t leave the bedroom. He said the light hurt. He said I’d changed, I’d gone strange, didn’t anyone else see it, and the beautiful thing, the terrible beautiful thing, was that no one did.

Sophie stopped coming.

The doctor friend came after all, up the stairs with his soft bag, to the room at the top where Daniel sat in the dark insisting, insisting, that he was the only sane one left in his own house.

It was going so well. I need you to understand that. I was winning.

***

The one in green coat came back alone one night. I was at the table past midnight and she was simply there, across from me.

She didn’t sit.

“You’re pleased,” she said.

“You gave me back my eyes.”

She tilted her head. “Is that what we did.”

And here’s the thing, here’s the exact thing. A year before, those words would have gone into me like a splinter. Is that what we did.

I heard myself say, calm, “Of course it is.”

“Tell me about the cat,” she said.

“What cat.”

“Last winter. Not the spoons winter. The one before.”

“There was no winter before.”

“You don’t remember the first winter, do you” she said quietly. “You’ve made it so it began with the spoons. It didn’t. It began with the cat. Listen to me now, Simone. We took something. That’s what we do. We always take.”

What did you take?

Instead I said “But they were poisoning me. The pills. The notes. I saw it.”

“Your husband moved the spoons to the left because a doctor told him a small ritual might steady you. Sophie flinches because of her hand. The note times changed because you kept arriving at the school gate in your nightgown. The pill your mother-in-law takes from you each morning is the second one, the extra, the one you don’t remember swallowing, the one too many.

“That’s a lie.” My own voice. Certain. So certain.

“Is it.” She turned towards the door.

“You can’t feel the doubt that would let you check. That’s what’s gone. You’ll never wonder again, not for one second, for the rest of your life. We made sure. It was the sweetest thing we’ve taken in a hundred years and I’ll be honest with you, I’d take it again. And now you feel …”

“Fine,”I said. “I feel fine.”

“… right,” she finished. You feel good. You will feel good about it for the rest of your life and you will never be able to verify it, because that is the thing we ate, and we ate it all.”

The kettle began to whistle. I hadn’t filled it. When I looked back at the woman, she was gone.

***

Ruxandra found me on the landing this morning. She slipped her hand into mine and she looked at the closed door, and behind it her father was talking to someone who wasn’t there. Talking about me. Saying my name.

“Is Daddy poorly?” she asked.

I looked down at my girl.

I had my own eyes. I’d had them since the longest night.

“Yes, my love,” I said, “Let’s leave Daddy alone. He’s not well.”

And we went down the stairs together into the light, and somewhere far off, just for a moment, I thought I heard a kettle.

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I have been dying since October. ‘Aggressive’, said the oncologist. Then he urged me to get my affairs in order. Funny how, in that little beige room, my brain could only notice a poster on hand hygiene on the wall.

It is February now. I still have most of my hair. My body has lost its strength. When Mara falls asleep on the couch, I can’t lift her up the stairs, and I have lost the appetite for the foods I loved, and I have lost about forty pounds, but I have most of my hair, and the nurse who comes on Tuesdays tells me that’s something. People keep telling me things are something.

I also have morphine on a drip I control with a button.

Mara sleeps beside me now, although there’s barely room on a hospital bed. She wedges herself against the rail.

I want to be precise about this, because I have spent the hours since then trying to find an explanation that would make it ordinary, and there isn’t one.

In the dark I listen to her breathe and I think about how I will not get to hear it for very long, and that thought is worse than the dying.

The dying I can almost manage.

The leaving is what undoes me.

Cristofor came on a Thursday. I think.

I did not hear a door. I did not hear anything. It is just after three in the morning. I open my eyes, and he is sitting in the armchair by the window, where Mara reads to me in the afternoon.

He is old.

He is also not old.

He writes something in his little black notebook, patiently and slightly bored. I cough to grab his attention.

“Don’t wake her,” he said softly.

I was not frightened. That surprised me. I think when you’ve been dying for four months, your supply of fear gets spent on smaller things, on whether you’ll make it to the bathroom, on the sound of your own swallowing. A man in the chair was, somehow, the least of it.

“You’re not staff,” I say.

“No.”

“Then you’re a thief or a priest, and I’ve no use for either.”

He smiles at that. It is a kind smile.

“I am neither. My name is Cristofor.”

“It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

He smiled, and it was a faint smile.

“We came down from the mountains aeons ago and have been coming for people like you ever since.”

“People who are dying,” I say.

I press the morphine button out of habit. Nothing changes.

I tell him to leave.

He doesn’t.

I tell him I’ll ring the bell, and my thumb finds the call button and hits it, and I hear it ring at the desk down the hall, and I hear Dorothea’s chair scrape, and I hear her footsteps come down the corridor and stop at my door and then go away again.

What just happened?

I want to say I was brave then. I was not. I lay completely still. I don’t want Mara to wake up either.

“I’m not afraid of dying,” I whisper.

“People who are about to choose,” he says. “We’re not here to take you. Those are different fellows, and they are punctual; you’ll meet them soon enough. We’re here to offer you something.”

We? I don’t see more of you! I must be hallucinating. A brain starved of oxygen can hear things.

“I can’t afford it now.”

“It’s free.” He leaned forward. “We will show you the others.”

“The other what.”

“The other lives.”

“You only got the one, here, this room, this woman, this disease. But there were so many. You assume life is a line. It isn’t. It branches out. Every choice you didn’t make went somewhere and kept going without you.”

He spread his fingers slowly.

“We can show you. The ones where you said yes instead of no. Where you turned left. Where you never got sick. Where you never met her at all and slept fine because of it.”

We? Who’s we? This is starting to annoy me.

I looked at Mara. The rail had left a red line on her cheek.

“Show me,” I said.

And so he did.

I won’t tell you it felt like a dream because it was nothing like a dream.

In one I was a teacher in a coastal town, and I had three daughters and a wife named Ruth, and I loved her the ordinary way, and I was sixty-one and not dying, and I stood at a window watching gulls and felt nothing at all remarkable, which is its own kind of grace.

In one I’d taken the job in Lisbon and married no one, and I had an apartment with a huge balcony and a dog and a great deal of money.

Cristofor led me softly back to the dark chair by the window.

“You see,” he said. “There were softer ones.”

“Take me to the one where she is the happiest,” I said. “Without me. Well, show me the greatest of those. I want to see her fine.”

Something waddled across his face.

“That’s the trouble,” he said.

He showed me anyway.

He’s a creature of his word, I’ll give him that.

In every life where I never came, she wound up to something else. A man named John who hit her.

A long flat loneliness in a shared house in Leeds.

A car on the M6 in the rain when she was thirty-four.

I watched her die nine different ways, and not once did anybody hold her hand, and I came back into my body with a moan in my throat I didn’t recognise as my own.

“Stop,” I said. “Stop, stop.”

“You asked to see her fine,” Cristofor said. “We looked. We had been looking for a very long time. There isn’t one. All run the same direction in the end. You were the only branch where someone was there.”

No, it can’t be. My Mara. My sweet girl who I would die for. My soulmate.

The clock on the wall before me said 3:40. Mara breathed.

“Why are you really here,” I said.

I know now that the peace you spoke of was not what you came for.

He was quiet for a while.

“We are not here for you,” he muttered at last. “We told you that part true. We are a cataloguer. We come at the end, and we take the record of a life, all its branches, all the ones that ran and the ones that didn’t, and we file them away so the universe knows it happened and that it mattered. That’s the whole of our job. We come for the dying.”

“I’m the dying.”

“No.”

He stood up. He was very gentle about it.

“She is. She has been since the autumn. Four months ago you sat in that chair, the chair I am sitting in now, and watched a doctor tell her in a beige room. You couldn’t take your eyes from the hand hygiene poster. You forgot. The forgetting is a mercy. You’ve been visiting, every night, the version where it was you instead.

Every night.

The branch where you got to be the one in the bed and she got to be the one who stayed. It’s the kindest thing we’ve ever watched a man do for a woman. You took her death and you embraced it.”

He gazed at the bed now, at the red line on her cheek, at the rail, at the small, terrible room. “She passed at eleven, when you were asleep. We came to file her in. I found you here, in the only branch she wasn’t alone.”

I looked at the bed.

The bed was empty. It had been empty the whole time. The rail. The line on the cheek. The breathing I’d been listening to in the dark.

“One more night,” Cristofor whispered from the doorway. “You’ve earned it. But we do have to take the record now.”

He paused.

“You may come if you choose. There’s a version where you’re already there, waiting on the platform.”

I stood out of the chair by the window.

My legs did not hurt.

That was how I knew it.

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The dress arrived in a cardboard box marked Strada Popa Tatu. I immediately recognised the careful handwriting of my aunt Vera.

She had died in March. I flew home to Bucharest in April.

I was the only one of her granddaughters who came. The others had small children, or were too far away, or had their own reasons.

The apartment smelt of paprika and stagnant air. She had lived there for forty-one years, alone for thirty-three of them. Her husband had gone to Germany for work in 1992 and had never returned. She didn’t talk about him. None of the women in our family talk about the men who left or the men they left. We talk about the weather. We talk about which of the neighbours’ sons was killed in the ’89 protests.

I started with the kitchen, the easiest part.

By the next day, I had reached the wardrobe in the bedroom.

There I found the dress.

It was wrapped in yellowed tissue paper at the folds. Green silk. Long sleeves. A row of small covered buttons down the back. The edge had been undone at least four times. I counted the rows of old needle holes in the silk.

Grandma had worn it in the only photograph we had of her as a young woman. Constanța, 1953, before my mother was born. She was twenty-two years old. Her brown hair was styled in curls. She was sitting on a balcony in Constanța with one hand on the railing and the other on her hip, laughing at someone out of frame. I never found out who.

My mother once told me that the dress was made by a woman named Mrs Aurica, who had a workshop above a bakery on Lipscani Street and only sewed for women who were leaving someone. The dressmaker took six measurements and one question.

“Where will you wear it first.”

My grandmother had answered, “at the train station.”

My mother had told me that part just like you tell a child a story, as if it were something that had never happened to anyone we knew. She hadn’t told me the other parts. She hadn’t told me that Mrs Aurica had dressed my great-grandmother in 1919 and her mother before her, and that the workshop was still there, above the bakery, and the dressmaker was still there, and her hair was still black, and her hands still sharp, and that this was something the women in our family knew but never said anything out loud.

I found out this part later.

I sat on the bed with the dress on my lap. The silk was cold against my skin. I could smell my aunt’s wardrobe in it. Lavender and mothballs.

I hadn’t worn a dress in three years. He didn’t like dresses. He said they made me look like I was advertising. I once asked him what I would be advertising, and he slapped the side of my head and asked if I thought I was funny. He was in Cluj that week for work. He called me twice that day. He thought I was at my mother’s place in Brașov.

I got up. I took off my jeans, my shirt, my bra. I pulled the green dress over my head.
Surprisingly, it fit me. There was no flaw in that dress; it fit my body perfectly.

I couldn’t reach the covered buttons on the back. I went to the hallway mirror, the one with the gilded frame that Vera bought at the Sunday flea market, and stood with my back to it and turned my head over my shoulder. The dress was open at the back. I could see the small bones of my neck and shoulders. I have lost a lot of weight in the last year. I hadn’t realised how thin I was.
Then I started to feel them, one after another, from the middle of my back to my neck, small and warm fingers that I couldn’t see in the mirror. She was humming a melody I had never heard before.

I stayed still.

I couldn’t scream.

I never told anyone, in the years that followed, that part. It’s the part that sounds like I’m lying.

The kitchen faucet stopped dripping when I took a few steps back and entered the kitchen.

There were seven women at the table.

They were wearing green silk dresses.

Each had a slightly different shade of green.

They were all about twenty-two.

I knew them, not by name, but through the small bones of the face. We had the same bones.
The one in the middle stood up. She had my mother’s mouth and a mole on her left cheek, where I have mine too.

“There’s not much time left,” she said, in Romanian, with the old village pronunciation that my grandmother used. “Mrs Aurica keeps the door open for only an hour. After that, the dress goes back to sleep and you go back to him.”

“Who are you?”

“We all are,” she said. “We wore it. We left. We have lived.”

She gestured towards the table. “Maria. Ana. Floarea. Elena. Mihaela. Sofia. Me.”

Seven faces. Seven of my own.

She walked past me towards the door. The other six stood up, one by one, and followed her. Each one touched the back of my neck as they passed.
Voice after voice began to flow like an echo. I knew about these Sanziene from Romanian forests, who appear once a year.

Maria said, “You came at the right time. Most people come too late.”

Ana said, “He will hit you again if you go back.”

Floarea said, “One more time. Then once more after that.”

Elena said, “Then you won’t get up.”

Mihaela said, “I’ve seen all of them, the women in this family, and I’m telling you what I’ve seen.”

Sofia said, “Let us take him off your chest.”

“And those who haven’t left?”

They did not answer. They looked at the chair at the head of the table. It was empty. I understood immediately. The chair was empty because the woman who would have sat there did not live long enough to do so.

“The dress looks after us,” she said. “Each person who wears it adds a point. Mrs Aurica counts them. When she has enough, she will stop sewing.”

“What happens then?”

“Then the women in our family won’t have to run anymore. But until then,” she lifted her hand, “until then, go to the station. Take the train that leaves first when you get there. Don’t think. The dress has always known the right train. It will take you to a city you will love.”

The last one stopped with her hand on the latch.

“He will wake up tonight in Cluj,” she said, “with the feeling that someone has been in the room. He will look in the mirror and not recognise his face for a long time. He will think it was a dream. It wasn’t a dream. Mrs Aurica went and looked at him for us. She put a thread in him. He won’t find you. The thread will not let him go. The thread will not let him go. The thread will not let him go. And so it is!”

“What kind of thread.”

She smiled. My smile, the better version.

“Shhhh,” she said. “He doesn’t know yet whose hand was holding the other end.”

She opened the door.

The corridor beyond was not the corridor of my aunt’s apartment. It was a long room, lined with mirrors, and in each mirror, a woman in green silk was moving away from me, in the same direction, with the same step.

All were me. All were not me.

The door closed behind them without a sound.

The faucet began to drip again. I breathed for the first time as if I had been holding my breath until then.

I sat alone in my aunt’s kitchen, wearing a green silk dress that had buttoned itself.

I didn’t pack anything.

I left the suitcase open on the bed. I left my phone in the bowl by the door, ringing, with his name on the screen.

I went to the North Station in the green dress in the April rain.

I bought a ticket for the departing train. I didn’t look where it went. The woman at the counter looked at the dress, then at me, and slid the ticket under the glass without taking my money. She said, in Romanian, “good luck, sister. Good luck, sister.”

I got on the train.

It was full of women in green silk dresses.

They were in every seat, and in the aisle, and in the luggage rack. Knitting. Some were reading. One was breastfeeding a baby who was looking at me with my eyes. They didn’t speak.

I sat by the window.

The train left Bucharest slowly, through the old industrial neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city.

I rested my head against the window. In reflection, the woman next to me was Mrs Aurica. I had never seen her in my life. Anyway, I knew her. She was very old and had very black hair and was holding a needle in her hand.

She smiled at me in the mirror.

“Almost,” she said.

She didn’t say almost what.

I don’t know where the train was going.

I didn’t know, in the years that have passed, what I would have done if I had stayed.

I have never returned to Bucharest.

Now I have a daughter. She is seven years old. She has my mole. She has the dress folded in tissue paper in a cardboard box on the top shelf of her wardrobe, and she doesn’t know yet, and I hope she never finds out.

But if she does, Mrs Aurica will be waiting above the bakery on Lipscani Street, needle in hand, counting the stitches she has left to make.

The dress will know what to do.

It always has.

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The first time he said he was jealous, I didn’t believe him. He slapped me when he was jealous.

Little things made him jealous.

Little things made him slap me.

My laugh on the phone with my girlfriends apparently sounded different from my laugh with him. The waiter at the diner was smiling a second too long over our order. A song on the radio that he hadn’t heard, but I knew the words to it. It happened to be a love song.

“Do you miss your ex?”

“No, it’s just a song.”

One evening, I was crying at my mother’s photograph. She died four years ago.

“Still miss him, huh?”

He kept a catalogue. I think we both did.

Mine was bruises and apologies.

I want to be careful about how I say this, because for a long time I thought I was making it up. The catalogue was in his head and his head was now saying, “I don’t like the man at the bakery.”

In the car afterwards he did not speak. He drove with both hands squeezing the wheel and his jaw set in a way that meant later, not now, but later for sure. I knew the routine of his silences by then.

I stopped going to the bakery on Saturdays.

Soon after, I stopped going to the bakery at all.

I started being quick at lying to keep the peace. He asked whether the man worked weekdays as well.

He could go through his catalogue like a rosary. He never forgot a name. He found new ones and slotted them in.

Occasionally he tested me.

“What was the name of that one at the wedding”, he would say, casually, six months later, holding my wrist to check my pulse, and if I hesitated, he would smile, because the hesitation proved the guilt, and if I answered straight away, he would smile, because the speed of the answer proved the guilt.

There was no version of me that came through the test without a smile from him.

I learned not to look at men.

I learned not to look at women either, because they might manipulate me into looking at other men. He knew how women were.

I learned to look at the floor in restaurants.

I turned myself blind to the world.

We lived in a house his grandmother left him, on a road with no other houses for half a mile. Beech trees, mostly, and a creek behind the property. I used to love that creek. I used to think how lucky we were. The creek was loud and drowned out the sound of his jealousy.

He’d say I’m sorry. He’d put ice in a tea towel. He’d bring it to me on the couch and hold it to my face himself, and I’d close my eyes and feel his hand, the same hand, doing both things in one evening.

There was a kind of peace in it I have never been able to explain to anyone.

I was twenty-three when he asked me to live with him. Best day ever. I am thirty-one now.

Soon after we moved in together, I started finding the hairs. Long ones. Black. Mine is brown and shoulder-length. I found them in the bathroom sink first. Then on the back of the couch.

I asked him about it once.

Just once.

I said, “There’s a dark hair on the pillow,” and held it up between us in the morning light. He looked at it for a long moment. Then he looked at me, and I watched his jaw tighten.

I said quickly, “I think it must be from the dry cleaner’s, the blanket I picked up on Tuesday,” and he relaxed. He smiled. He kissed my forehead. He stamped me again. He said, “You always overthink things, sweetheart.”

I burnt the hair in the kitchen sink. I don’t know why.

A week later he raised his hand to me in the hallway, and his arm stopped.

I want to be clear about this.

His arm stopped, suspended at the height of his shoulder, as if someone had caught it there. He looked at his own hand and then at me. He walked past me into the bedroom and shut the door, and I stood in the hallway with my hand on my cheek, still defending myself.

That night I dreamed of a woman sitting at the foot of our bed. She had her back to me. Her hair was long and black and very straight and she was braiding it slowly, one section at a time, humming something.

I asked his mother, casually, at Sunday lunch, whether he had been married before. She paused with her wine glass at her mouth. She set it down without drinking. She said, “He didn’t tell you about Iliana?”

He had not.

She said, “Sweet girl. Quiet. From Bucharest originally. They were only married a year,” she said. “She left him, you know. Just packed up one day. Didn’t even take her clothes. He came home and she was gone. We never heard from her again. Poor thing must have had her reasons.”

She looked at me over the rim of her glass when she said that. Poor thing must have had her reasons. She held my eyes for a moment longer than was comfortable. Then she said, “More potatoes, love?”

I started looking even when I didn’t know yet what I was looking for. I went through the boxes in the attic while he was at work. I found her wedding ring in a velvet pouch at the bottom of a tin. Smaller than mine. Engraved on the inside. I.M. & D.K., forever.

I found her passport in a drawer in his study. Expired six years ago. I found a photograph of the two of them on a beach in Constanța, her dark head against his shoulder, his hand on her stomach in a way that suggested she might have been pregnant. I had never been pregnant. He had told me, when I cried about it once, that he had never wanted children. That he had always been clear about that.

I sat on the floor of his study with the photograph in my hands and felt something shift in me.

That night he came home and slapped me at the kitchen sink. I don’t know what for.

I felt the hit and I felt the heat, and then I felt the cold, an actual coldness, moving up my spine and into the back of my throat. His face changed. He stepped back. He looked behind me.

There was no one behind me.

He said, very softly, “Iliana?”

I didn’t turn around. I didn’t have to. I could feel her now.

He left the kitchen. He left the house. I heard his car start and the gravel and then the quiet of the road, and I stood at the sink with my hands on the cold porcelain, and I said, out loud, to the empty kitchen, “Help me. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Help me.”

She didn’t answer. But the kettle, which had not been on, began to whistle. Slowly at first, then with that high, insistent pitch they get when they’ve been boiling a while. I turned the burner off. It kept whistling. I unplugged it. It kept whistling.

I understood, then, what she wanted.

******

He is asleep upstairs now. He came back at three in the morning, drunk, and I helped him up to bed.

I am writing this at the kitchen table.

I can feel her standing behind me, because I’ve been smelling something faint and floral since the kettle went quiet. I think she has been here longer than I knew. I think she has been holding his arm at the height of his shoulder for months now, just enough to make him doubt himself and keep me in one piece until I noticed.

I am going upstairs in a moment. She is going with me.

I don’t know yet which of us is going to do what needs doing. I don’t think it matters. We have both been waiting a long time, the dead and the living, and the creek behind the house is loud enough tonight to cover almost anything. I now love that creek.

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We were at the corner place on Nicolae Filipescu, my favourite café on Town Street in Bucharest, the one with cracked vinyl booths and soft lighting. I was stirring cream and sugar into a coffee I wouldn’t finish that day.

He was watching the door.

He was always watching the doors. He always chose a place from which he could see the danger.

From who?

“Why can’t we just be a normal couple.”

I had asked this before. Hundreds of times. The words had calluses on them by now.

“Why do you always have to go somewhere. Why don’t you pick up when you’re away.”

He didn’t answer straight off. He turned his cup in its saucer, a half rotation and back. A small ritual I’d watched for over ten years and never asked about. I did try once, but no joy, so I gave up.

“Because if we were normal,” he said, “you’d die.”

I laughed before my brain registered what he’d said. The laugh comes up automatically when someone has told a joke and you don’t want to be the one who didn’t get it.

He didn’t laugh back.

“What.”

“You’d die, Mira.”

He said it patiently, with the same rhythm he used when he explained why I couldn’t have his phone number on the work trips. Why I couldn’t visit his mother. Why I should stop wearing the green dress.

My heart was frantic and wanted to cut itself out of my body.

He was already a man who counted my drinks at parties and the people I talked to, who recorded the kilometres on my car, who counted the minutes and seconds spent with my friends, “because details matter”, he said, and who knew the names of every man I worked with.

And now I might die.

Because of him.

The word NO came up in me.

I didn’t say it out loud. I have carefully learned not to say things like that out loud. My last bruises were still healing.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” I said.

I didn’t go to the bathroom.

I walked out the side door, through the alley. Down the hill toward my flat.

It was a hot summer day.

I talked to the universe the whole way, without moving my lips, because there are CCTV cameras on the high street and because I have spent my whole life being a woman who knows where the cameras are.

I said, I don’t know what you are. I have not been a believer.

I said, I am asking now. I am asking because I am out of other places to ask.

I said, Please. Get him off me. Get him out of my chest. I don’t care how.

I have never in my life said I don’t care how and meant it.

I meant it.

I let myself into the flat. I locked the door behind me. I leaned against it.

The flat was the same. The kettle on the counter where I’d left it. My dead mother’s photograph on the bookshelf. The plant by the window, which was dying slowly because I had been forgetting to water it on purpose. I didn’t trust myself to keep anything alive while I was with him. And I was jealous.

I sat down on the kitchen floor against the cabinets.

I closed my eyes for what felt like a long time.

When I opened them there was a woman sitting at my kitchen table.

She was wearing my green dress. She had my hair, my hands, the small scar on my left wrist from when he didn’t appreciate that I was ten minutes late from work.

She was drinking from my favourite cup.

She looked at me without any surprise at all.

“Sorry I took so long,” she said. “I had to come a long way.”

I didn’t scream. I think the part of me that screams had already gone somewhere else. I didn’t know anything anymore.

“Who are you.”

She tilted her head. The exact angle I tilt my head when I’m deciding whether to be honest.

“I’m the version of you that didn’t meet him,” she said. “Or the version that left him in the second year. Or the one who walked out of the cafe today and didn’t come back. There are a few of us. It depends on which thread you pull.”

She set the cup down with both hands. The way I do. I didn’t even want to blink.

“You asked,” she said. “On the walk. You asked properly. So one of us came.”

I pressed my palms flat against the kitchen floor. The tiles were cold and real.

“He said I would die.”

“He wasn’t lying.”

I felt my stomach turn slowly.

“There’s something that comes for women who love him. He’s not the danger. He’s the lid on the danger. He just enjoys being the lid.”

She picked the cup back up.

“You can stay,” she said. “I’ll walk back to the café and finish the coffee and let him drive me home and put up with the green dress comments for another seven years. You can have what I have. That is, a small flat in a city you don’t know yet but you’ll love, a job that doesn’t degrade you, and a man who’ll appear in about six months and who will make you laugh.”

She took a sip. She made the small satisfied sound I make.

“Or I can stay,” she said. “And you can go. And whatever comes for you out there, you’ll meet it without him as the lid.”

I thought about his hand on my neck in restaurants, pressing just enough to make me aware that he didn’t like something about me. I thought about how I had learned to order what he ordered. The way my own voice had become smaller in my mouth, year over year.

I thought of dying.

I thought of a flat in a city I didn’t know but I would love.

My phone buzzed on the floor beside me. His name on the screen. Where did you go. He never used question marks.

“Don’t answer”, she said.

The kettle on the counter clicked on by itself. It hadn’t been plugged in.

I stood up from the kitchen floor.

“Tell me which train to take,” I said.

She smiled. Not my smile. A better one. A smile that had been somewhere and come back.

“There’s a bag in the hall cupboard,” she said. “I packed it for you on the way in.”

I went to the hall cupboard. There was a bag. It was the green canvas one I’d been meaning to buy for two years and never let myself. Inside it, folded neatly, were three things I owned and four things I didn’t.

At the bottom, a train ticket to the city I will love.

Behind me, in the kitchen, I heard her pour a second cup. I heard her settle into my chair with the small sigh I always make. I heard her pick up my phone.

“Hello darling,” she said, in my voice. “Sorry. I just needed some air.”

I closed the front door behind me very gently. I held my breath while doing it.

I did not look back.

Outside, the summer rain started to fall properly. I tilted my face up into it. A lightning bolt followed. A thunder immediately after. The smell of freedom.

I walked toward the station.

I did not, in any of the years that came after, ever find out what happened in the flat that night.

I learned not to ask.

The universe answers. It does not always explain.

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When my mum made the transition to the other side, I was only 19.

My grandma (my dad’s mum) strongly insisted that I go to a psychologist.

And I could see the benefits of doing this:

- you say what’s on your mind and heart, and it stays there; no one else is listening
- no one judges

Well… I hope she didn’t judge me and I hope it stayed there. After all, we are only human.

But there was a moment when I told her “I am still a child at heart”, and oh boy, she took it the wrong way. She misunderstood.

She insisted on BEING an adult. On FEELING like an adult. On SEEING life through the eyes of an adult.

What the heck?!? That pushed me aeons away from my dreaming. In that split second, I seriously doubted MY way of seeing and feeling this world. This reality. I want to say I almost felt humiliated for being who I was.

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Doesn’t she know that my dreaming was the ONLY permission slip I had at that moment to keep going and not take my life?? Because I was there too. I held that knife close to my wrists. I also considered, later on, buying many of whatever tablets I could get my hands on and simply going to sleep. It was the dreaming, that is, the faith, that invisible powerful energy that flows through all of us, that prevented me from doing that. Did you know that? Did you know we all have that thread of divine energy that breathes life into us and keeps us going? I felt that thread vibrating stronger within me in those moments.

She shouldn’t have asked me to add/ be/ do anything. Instead, she should have taught me to release. Layer by layer. The cynicism that was learned in order to survive. The conceit that was built in order to be seen. The need to know in advance who I am and what I will become. All of it, she should have said, can be set down.

The homecoming is the relief of stopping. I am still in the process of stopping, like a computer waiting to delete all the old programs. Now I know that Love and Creation have dissolved the contracts of need. Knowing reclaims inherent worth.

Anyway, I don’t want to make this article too long, so what I’m saying is, the child I was talking about, I was referring more to the innocence that a child holds, so when innocence often asks me “now that you have done all of that, can you stop performing it?”, I say YES.

Yes, my best friend ever, my sweet innocence, who’s the most loyal companion.

It was never about becoming anything. It was about removing what was obscured. People have everything upside down, don’t they? But that’s ok, because I know for a fact that NOTHING can harm us, certainly not our true selves. Yeah, the masks and personas we surround ourselves with, yes, they will be hurt, for they all play their roles like the best Oscar-winning actors.

But my question now is, whyyyyy am I so afraid?? Why?? Of what??

Given what I know and who I am, why am I still afraid?

I guess that’s why I’m here, in plain sight, coming out of the closet, facing all my fears, which, by the way, everyone knows don’t really exist. And so, I guess I am afraid to show my vulnerability because I was taught to be a Spartan in this world. But I’m still that innocent child who likes to feel deeply and enjoy the beauty and the splendour and magnificence of My inner world, which for me is ‘dreaming’.

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Warmest, tightest hugs to you, my darling reader. Please don’t be a stranger. Say hi if you feel called to do so.

I see you, sister. I see you. And I love you and accept you just the way you are.

I am grateful for you and appreciate you, for you are a unique expression of God/ Source Energy/ All That Is/ Love (however you want to name the Higher Power that breathes life into us). I see you doing all the ordinary things we all do in our daily lives. I have been her. I am her. We are her. And SHE is good. Lord, she is good. And somewhere underneath her, somebody else is screaming.

You know… sometimes… I think about the way we hide from ourselves. And I want to tell you something, from my heart… because I know there are women out there - maybe you - who’ve been carrying a magnificent, jaw-dropping universe inside them and still feel unseen. I know what that feels like. I know what it’s like to build a life that looks different from outside, while the real you is standing behind the curtain, waiting for someone to say, “It’s okay. You can come out now.” But the truth is… nobody can open that curtain but you.

You see… our beloved one and only ego tells us stories. It runs its broken record like this:

“Don’t show them your cracks.”

“Don’t let them see you cry.”

“Don’t want too much.”

“Don’t shine too bright.”

“Keep your head down.”

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In Romania we have a saying: “The bowed head is not cut by the sword.” (this is a rough translation). But why? Why would I keep my head down all the time? What sword is cutting my head? Where? What? How?

And we listen, because we think it’s protecting us.

But really… it’s building a cage!!!

Here is the secret nobody tells you about midlife, and even when they do tell you, you don’t believe them, so maybe that’s why they’ve given up on giving unsolicited advice. However, this is the thing I need to tell you now, because I write this as someone who has lived it and still does. The cage I am describing has nothing to do with the marriage or the job. The cage is the self you constructed to survive being a girl, then a young woman, then a mother, then a wife, then whatever they needed next. The cage is the ego, my lovely soul sister. And the ego is so, so relentless in its deceptive games.

And can I tell you something? - I am terrified of being seen. And I am dying of not being seen. Both. At once. Every single day. It’s this tug of war within me, the push and pull between the ego and my heart.

But listen to me (and I’m saying this with the softest heart ever)… there comes a moment, usually around your late thirties, forties, or fifties, when something inside you awakens. For me, it came when I turned forty and went through what is called “the dark night of the soul”.

I no longer call it that, because although it was depressing and I had doubts about everything in my life, looking back and seeing the progress makes me want to call it “the transformation process” or “the baking/ the cooking process”, because I can see the good in it, the cleansing of more layers of the ego that I had to set aside.

That person inside you who awakens is you, an upgraded version of yourself, who’s willing to experience the same life from a different perspective.

She says,

“Let me out.”

“Let me breathe.”

“Let me live.”

And suddenly, I could no longer do many of the things I used to do, which was both a surprise and a shock to my system and those around me. While I felt ALIVE, breathing the FRESHEST breeze ever, everyone around me started calling me ‘menopausal’ and ‘suffering’ from mental health issues. Little do they know that I am so happy NOW!!!!!

NOW I can speak my truth, NOW I have freed myself from the shame, guilt, and terror of not being liked and approved by people. So what?? So what if they don’t like me anymore? So what my husband and mil (mother-in-law) call me menopausal? So what if some of my friends doubt me and still ask me the same questions “are you sure you’re ok?”

All I can do is laugh inside out and tell them with the most loving and indifferent heart that “yes, I am more than fine!”

How can I not be? I am BORN AGAIN into this new layer of existence. I have just upgraded my life’s game. And, my God, my gorgeous Source Energy, how much better it is, for I, finally, LOVE MYSELF!

This moment is the best, because the ego knows it cannot survive a soul who chooses truth over approval.

My darling Soul Sister, open your heart. The door of the prison was never locked. We were just so used to the dark we kept calling it home. You can walk out in your slippers. You can walk out in tears. You can walk out laughing. You can walk out as you are. I walked out messy, crying and laughing and blowing my nose and everything else in between in this rainbow of emotions. God, I was messy. Ha

But please, Be seen. Be seen badly. Be seen anyway.

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Hi my lovely souls out there,

If I’m being honest, my all-time favourite has always been age gap and single dad stories.

Here are a few sweet reads for your weekend:

Millie has never taken the expected path. Her childhood love for bugs and science led her to entomology and her role as a curator, inspiring museum visitors every day. It’s her dream to run her own department, so when a rare director position opens, she is determined nothing will distract her from her goal. Especially not Finn, her grumpy coworker with his permanent scowl, electric blue eyes, and endless supply of astronomy ties.

. . . Not that she’s spent time noticing any of those things.

Finn doesn’t mean to glare at everyone, but he’s juggling his role at the museum, navigating the grief of losing his sister, attempting to make his nieces smile, and trying not to ruin dinner for the fifth night in a row. He can’t afford to let anything slip and certainly doesn’t need more to deal with, especially not Millie literally stumbling into him, with her bright smile and sunny optimism.

He bugs her. She’s too starry-eyed for him. They want nothing to do with each other. But with Finn on the interview committee, avoidance is impossible. And Millie soon realizes it’s one thing when a job is on the line. It’s quite another when it’s her heart.

Give Me Butterflies is a sweet and sexy STEM romance, featuring:

• Grumpy x Sunshine

• Heroine in STEM

• Slow burn

• Open door spice

• Found family

• Nerdy banter

Rhys Bridger has one rule for his family’s chocolate shop: absolutely no dating.

But when his grandmother’s relentless matchmaking becomes unbearable, the grumpy chocolatier panics and claims he’s already taken—by Molly, the bubbly seasonal hire who knows nothing about making chocolate.

Molly agrees to the charade, mostly to watch the stoic Rhys squirm. But the plan melts down when a staff shortage forces her into the kitchen. Suddenly, amidst sugar candy disasters and “fake” kisses that feel terrifyingly real, Rhys must decide if he’s brave enough to break his own rules for a love he never saw coming.

Tropes: Grumpy x Sunshine, Fake Dating, Workplace Romance, Forced Proximity
Heat Level: Sweet & Swoony (Passionate kisses, no graphic scenes)
Content Note: One scene contains mild swearing

Wild Irish Heart - Book 1
It is time…

An ancient book, a power untouched, and a heart unloved lead Keelin O'Brien from her graduate studies in Boston to a small village on the coast of Southern Ireland. Determined to unearth the secrets lying hidden in the enchanted waters of the cove, Keelin has little time for a surly Irishman who infuriates her during the day and haunts her fantasies at night.

Inexplicably drawn to the woman who has stepped from his dreams and into his world, Flynn fights a stubborn battle against his increasing attraction for Keelin. Forces unknown have better plans for the two.

Only the secrets of the cove can show Keelin who she really is, the beauty of her mysterious power, and a love that will break the bounds of what she knows.


Wild Irish Eyes - Book 2
Oh, to stop the voices in her head.

Other people's voices, that is. As a pub owner with an extra special gift, all Cait Gallagher craves is a moment of silence. That, and to own the building her pub is housed in along with the heart of the building's landlord, Shane MacAuliffe. Though she is irresistibly drawn to Shane, her vulnerabilities cause her to put up a tough exterior. When the two butt heads, more than sparks fly, and Cait finds herself trembling on the precipice of love.

Shane has watched Cait for years. Stubborn, beautiful, and with a trim body that he is dying to get his hands on, Cait is it for him. And yet, she continues to infuriate him by walking away from his kiss. Every time. At his wits' end, Shane doesn't know what to do to make Cait his own.

Unapologetic and fiercely proud, Cait must conquer her insecurities and reveal her true self or face losing everything.


Wild Irish Soul - Book 3
Love was never her strong suit.

Aislinn is used to living life on her terms. As an artist with an extra-sensory gift, she allows her moods, and those of the natural world, to inspire her paintings for her gallery. Aislinn has danced around serious commitments her whole life.

When Dr. Baird Delaney moves his psychiatry practice to town and stops by her shop to pick up some prints for his office, Aislinn's world tilts. Irresistibly drawn to his presence, yet convinced that the uptight doctor is a poor match for her free-flowing artistic soul, Aislinn is torn. Both Aislinn and Baird will have to suspend their beliefs as they tumble headfirst into a messy, unrepentant love that challenges both to accept each other unequivocally.


Wild Irish Rebel - Book 4
A loner at heart...

Morgan McKenzie has been on her own since she ran away from a nightmarish foster home at the age of sixteen. Afraid to put down roots again only to be hurt once more, Morgan prefers to be constantly on the move. Until she is inexplicably pulled to the small Irish town of Grace's Cove. Before she knows it, Morgan is settling in and forming relationships for the first time in her life. Determined to keep her walls up to protect both her heart and the touch of magick she carries, Morgan fights against her growing attraction for the town's golden boy, Patrick Kearney.

Patrick can't keep his eyes off of Morgan. Since the moment he saw Morgan across the dance floor at Keelin's wedding, Patrick has been lost. Pulled in by her beauty and vulnerability, Patrick's frustration grows as his advances are continually rebuffed. As Morgan rebels against her feelings for Patrick, she is swept into a battle against her own worst demons.

Behind The Net (book 1)

He’s the hot, grumpy goalie I had a crush on in high school... and now I’m his live-in assistant.

After my ex crushed my dreams in the music industry, I’m done with getting my heart broken. Working as an assistant for an NHL player was supposed to be a breeze, but nothing about Jamie Streicher is easy. He’s an intimidatingly hot, grouchy jerk who can’t stand me. The guy has a massive ego. Keeping things professional will be no problem, even when he demands I move in with him.

Beneath his surliness, though, Jamie’s surprisingly sweet and protective.

When Jamie learns how bad my ex was in bed, his competitive nature flares, and he encourages and spoils me in every way. The creative spark I used to feel about songwriting? It’s back, and I’m writing music again. Between wearing his jersey at games, rowdy parties with the team, and being brave on stage again, I’m falling for him.

He could break my heart, but it might be worth it.

The Fake Out (book 2)

The best way to get back at my horrible ex? Fake date Rory Miller--my ex’s rival, the top scorer in pro hockey, and the arrogant, flirtatious hockey player I tutored in high school.

Faking it is fun and addictive, though, and beneath the bad boy swagger, Rory’s sweet, funny, and protective.

He teaches me to skate and spends way too much money on me.

He sleeps in my bed and convinces me to break my just-one-time hookup rule.

He kisses me like it’s real.

And now I wonder if Rory was ever faking it to begin with.

The Fake Out is a pro hockey fake dating romance. It is the second book in the Vancouver Storm series but can be read as a standalone.

Tropes:

• Fake dating

• Ex’s rival

• Pro hockey

• Golden retriever hero

• Boy obsessed

• Forced proximity

The Wingman (book 3)

The best way to gain confidence in relationships? Hayden Owens—the hottest defenseman in pro hockey, my confident best friend, and my new dating coach.

He’ll teach me to be a player, but convinces me to practice with him.

We’ve been friends for years, but our flirting lessons and practice kisses push the bounds of friendship.

We’re roommates, but sleeping in the same bed.

He buys me a toy as a favor… but helps me use it.

All that relationship stuff he’s always avoided? He doesn’t seem to mind it anymore.

Rule number one of being a player is no attachments, but when Hayden sees me picking up other guys, he’s jealous enough that I wonder...

Maybe my wingman's been waiting for me all along.

The Wingman is a pro hockey best friends to lovers romance. It's the third book in the Vancouver Storm series but can be read as a standalone.

Gloves Off (book 4)

The only way to get my inheritance? Marry Alexei Volkov—the grumpiest enforcer in the NHL, a brutally handsome jerk, and the last man I’d ever fall for.

In public, we act as besotted newlyweds, but in private, we’re at each other’s throats. He’s competitive, arrogant, and surly. The guy’s never cracked a smile in his life. He’s jealous of my colleague, glares at my high heels, and insists he’s not attracted to me. He’s only marrying me for citizenship.

Fighting with Alexei is more fun than expected, though, and beneath his grouchy exterior, Alexei is surprisingly caring, protective, and generous.

He cooks for me and worries about my safety.

He sends me flowers with secret meanings and spends way too much money on me.

He makes me sleep in his bed and calls me his wife.

For a guy who said he’d never fall in love with me, Alexei’s doing a good impression of it… and now I’m wondering if this marriage is fake after all.

Gloves Off is an enemies to lovers marriage of convenience hockey romance. It’s the fourth book in the Vancouver Storm series but can be read as a standalone.

Tropes:
- pro hockey
- enemies to lovers
- marriage of convenience
- grumpy sunshine

Have fun now.

Happy Friday my lovelies :)

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I refuse to behave like a human.

There comes a moment in someone’s life when they look in the mirror and realise that the face smiling back at them isn’t really theirs. That moment came as soon as I turned 40. The moment couldn’t have been more precious and appreciated.

My ego immediately chimed in: “Too late.” “That’s way too late!”
My Higher Self continued: “Better late than never.”

It is a mask inherited through generations of people who lived as they were told to live and loved as they were allowed to love. I have worn this face for too long. And now, in the silence of my own becoming, I refuse it.

I refuse to behave like an earthling.

I write these words knowing how strange they might sound, perhaps even arrogant to some, but please find a little space in your heart to understand me, because I don’t want to say that I am better than others. In other words, I refuse to live according to the petty reflexes of the petty self, that trembling persona that demands to respond to insults with insults, to respond to coldness with coldness, to shrink when humiliated, and to show my teeth when teeth are shown to me. I did all of this for years. I did it well. I played each mask in the best manner possible, as if I were an actress performing on Broadway every night and succeeding. No Oscar could have satisfied me; I was outstanding.

But I forgot that I was alive!!!!! What a betrayal of self!!!

There is an old wisdom in our Romanian villages, a wisdom that my grandparents and their grandparents knew, which says that a man must keep his dignity above all else. But somehow, dignity got confused with pride, and pride began to bite almost everyone. I confused them too. I called it not letting myself be trampled. But I also added myself to this trampling. An image of Italians and their winemaking comes to mind, except that I was both the people crushing the grapes and the grapes themselves. I fell dizzyingly through the entire palette of negative emotions, without knowing that I was merely reacting. In the rare moments of originality, when I resisted the least against the infinite source within me, family and friends would revolt like Rottweilers. I was just a child back then. How great must their fear have been to lock an innocent child in the tomb of fear? Which, practically, doesn’t even exist; it is an illusion we have created and collectively agreed upon.

The truth is that I was reacting out of inertia and reflex, according to the inherited script written in every cell of my body. The first verse of the Romanian national anthem goes like this: “Awaken thee, Romanian, from the deadly sleep.” Now I believe this verse can be used globally, “Awaken, man, from the sleep of the ego.” Although initially the anthem practically incited violence (Romania’s history is bloody, it was practically a call to arms for the Romanian people, who had gone through slavery, to rise and fight against the enemy), reading it now through the eyes of the wisdom of love, I would almost say that the lyrics hide a profound spiritual quality. The next verse that catches my attention goes like this: “Now or never, let’s present ourselves to the world,” again supporting my theory, and I want to say that yes, by refusing to behave like a mere mortal, my behaviour is the beacon of light that others can look to and align with.

For so many years, the hours passed through me without meaning, and I was a corpse in good clothes, paying the bills on time. And the worst part was that I thought this was the human condition, that everyone was like this.

But we are not made up solely of our reflexes; we are also made up of what we choose in the narrow space between the stimulus and the response. There is a tiny moment like a seed there, and in that moment lives everything we could become. I have overlooked that moment my entire life. Now I have begun, slowly, awkwardly, often failing, to inhabit it.

When someone is cold to me now, I don’t freeze in return. I look at them and try, and only God knows how hard I try, to see the cold place inside them from where their chill comes. I feel something almost like sadness for the entire tired play of this theatre, a play we have performed so much that we have forgotten there is a world beyond the stage. I refuse to play. I refuse to deliver my lines on command. I refuse to behave like an inhabitant of Earth, by which I mean I refuse to be small in the petty way the world expects of me.

But here’s what no one tells you, and even when they do tell you, you don’t believe them, so maybe that’s why they’ve given up on giving unsolicited advice. However, this is the thing I need to tell you now, because I’m writing this as someone who has lived it: people can’t stand it when you change. I was so naive that I couldn’t believe my eyes even when it was happening. Ha, how naive I was to believe that my beloved friends and family were real, honest, and authentic with me. Bless my sincere heart!

This is the part that hurt me the most at first. I imagined, in my naivety, that my friends would say, 'Look how much she has grown. Look how she no longer bites the bait.’ But that didn’t happen. What happened is that they started to become suspicious. They examined me closely. They tested me. Family said I am going through menopause. I can hear menopause saying: “What have I done here? Leave me out of this!” I could feel their thoughts and feelings. Yes, I am an empath too. How exciting! They wanted me to return to my old self, the one who argued, got upset, cried, and played the roles that were assigned to me long ago in the contracts of our friendship.
When I didn’t play the role, they got upset, and some even accused me of pretending and becoming arrogant. “You smile too much,” they said, because their hearts couldn’t bear the simple and pure joy of being alive and breathing the fresh air of my true self. What a precious air this is! The fresh breeze of the true you!

How dare I consider myself above them? How dare I not descend with them into the valley of the shadow of death and crawl with the worms of ignorance? An old friend told me, truly bitterly, that I have become false. Another said I was no longer funny, that I had become weird, that something in me had gone cold. You can be sure that my list of friends has shrunk considerably.

They didn’t understand that what they called cold was, for the first time in my life, warm. What they called false was the only thing in me that had ever been true. It was as if my world had been turned upside down, and only now am I adjusting the sails of my ship as they should be.

I have come to understand this: when you change, you break the agreement. Every relationship is, essentially, a tacit agreement about who each person will be. When one party rewrites its part of the agreement without consulting the other party, the other party feels cheated. And they have every right to feel that way. But do they really? Something has been taken from them, your predictability, your usefulness. Instead, you offered them a more honest version of yourself, but it is something they cannot see yet. Maybe they will never see it. Maybe this is the price.

There were nights, especially at the beginning, when I wondered if it was worth it. I thought: wasn’t it better before, when I knew the lines? No!!!! It wasn’t better!!!

Being part of those who walk in the dream does not mean belonging; it only means sharing a dream. And I was tired of dreaming upside down, that’s all. Nothing dramatic for an awakened person.

So I write this for anyone else who is changing, for anyone else who has started to feel that beautiful expansion within them, that miraculous (but exhausting) becoming.

I want to tell you that you haven’t done anything wrong. The resistance you feel from others is proof that you have evolved. I want to tell you that the pain you feel for your old version, for old friendships, and for the old comfortable prison is real, and you must let it pass through you, but you must not let it pull you back. I want to tell you that being a multidimensional being in a flat world is a kind of exile.

I am not the most beloved earthling. I have never been. I don’t think any of us are. But I would prefer to be the challenging daughter of the sky than the obedient daughter of a narrow earth. I prefer to be alone in truth than crowded in lies.

I refuse to behave like a mere mortal. I mean, I have finally refused to behave like the person I was told I should be, simply because I was constantly and loudly told so by the people I loved. I still love them. But now I love my true self more than I love their comfort.

And if you, reading this, recognise what I describe, if you too have started to refuse, then know that there is at least one other person, somewhere in this world, sitting at their desk in the middle of the night, who has not betrayed you by going back to sleep.

PSS (pretty silly statement): This year is the Year of the Fire Horse, so I feel as rebellious as a wild horse that no one can ever tame. I don’t think we realise how pathetic we are trying to tame Source Energy/ Divine Creator/ All That Is and squeeze it into the tiniest hole ever. That would truly be pure madness.

I’m grateful for all the mistakes I have ever made, for they’ve helped me see, feel, know more of who I am…

I am grateful for being so kind to myself and love myself enough to allow myself to make mistakes and forgive myself for all of them right in that moment.

I am grateful because I have realised how strong I am and that I can afford to experience what I don't always desire, just because I can.

I am grateful for all human beings on this planet who are much more magnificent and greater than our thoughts and minds can possibly perceive; so much so that we have layered ourselves into thick forgetfulness in order to contain our splendour and not bounce back to our lofty realms.

I am grateful for all our unique talents, which we brought into this dense experience, locked ourselves into this incredible journey, and imprinted on this puzzle of life. I am also thankful for having remembered and used these talents in one way or another, as they help us solve and transcend any challenges and contribute to our understanding as superconsciousness.

I am grateful for the gentle encouragements we receive every day from our wonderful soul family.

I’m grateful for each aroma and flavour of That Which I Am.

Warmest, tightest hugs to you, my darling reader. Please don’t be a stranger. Say hi if you feel called to do so.

“No, God. Don’t forgive him. Let him feel the intensity of what he’s done to his beloved. Let him fail.

You’ve exploded my heart into mud. Into a sick, evil mud, which no rain, no thunder, no purest and cleanest rivers could ever wash away. Have you ever tried to breathe in mud? It is that kind of mud that no screams or amount of tears will make show any mercy for you. A sort of mud that is so hungry for your soul, for the purest corners of your soul, that no ray of sunshine will ever dare to touch it again. A mud that unleashed the worms of anger, the worms of despair!! Rottweilers with seven bloodthirsty mouths attacked me as if they were specially trained to make me disappear from the face of the earth. As if their lives depended on my very existence. They bruised my soul countless times.

You locked me in this filthy hell. A moment that showed me all the shades of darkness. The moment you betrayed us. The last thread of light was abruptly severed from my soul. I was plunging dizzyingly into the insatiable arms of death. I was crucified by my passion for you.

Am I hallucinating?, my rotten soul wondered across multiple realities. Like a domino effect, I was affected in multiple realities and dimensions... The entire universe was crying.

What is this distortion of my reality?, I asked myself. Was I just another checkbox in the catalogue of... life? In your catalogue? The fear of not being the chosen one was devastating. Delirium at its finest. And just when I thought my soul had lightened, synchronistic whirlwinds of terror hypnotised me towards the mud. I was their puppet. I was caught in this unconscious pattern of destroying myself over and over again. Not only did you leave me, but you gave birth to a killer version of me. You started it, and I continued it. I dreamt myself into the darkness of this disease.

“In the beginning, was the word," they said... and your promise. Your lie. So imagine my dismay... in the beginning... the precious gift of love this man was giving up on.

I thought what we had was a cosmological agreement. Beyond this earth, beyond the stars even. You have betrayed the cosmic womb and our unborn children!! I thought we were the divine couple. I almost felt The Chosen!!! The One!! But we’re just mere mortals. So I woke up from my dreams. And I knew the love I need is not of this world.

What a sacrilege. Better burn me at the stake like a deformed witch, for I believed in such a miracle. The first miracle of this world should be unconditional love. I saw the abyss, and I can’t unsee it now.

You’ve depleted me of my energy. And in that zero point, I have found my rest, and I surrendered. I was ready to make the transition into the void.

And then, a small light hugged me, the smallest of them all, and shone upon my lethargic spirit. So, instead of letting go of me, I chose to let go of that memory. I transferred my consciousness into another memory. I trained myself to focus on a way to feel better. When the tiny soul appeared and I turned my gaze towards the little light it emitted, I heard applause from the void, innovations for me... I now understand my purpose. I came here for my joyous expansion. I won’t shrink myself for you.

I am a survivor. I survived you. And after such a death and massive loss, I experienced the exuberance of life once again, the first breath of the freshest air on earth. I am indulging in the blessings of my solitude now. So, I don’t want to breathe the old air with you again and fall into another manipulation, another tyranny...

The tyranny of not giving me the opportunity to consume my love.

I’m now aligned to the new cosmic template. And you’re not part of it.”

Warmest, tightest hugs to you, my darling reader. Please don’t be a stranger. Say hi if you feel called to do so.

He didn’t care about the torrential rain piercing through his clothes or the strong autumn wind. Five minutes later, Scott was still looking up at her bedroom window. “Heck! Does she still live here? You stupid man! Think!! You never think! Come on, Rosie, write something!”

He knew she wouldn’t reply; after all, he married her sister. And it’s past midnight. They promised just one more night, but it never happened. Funny how even the most affectionate love between soulmates has an ending, and then someone else comes along. Love is not as intense, and sex is less passionate, but they're comfortable enough to keep you going. You have fulfilled the expectations set by others and then confined yourself within them in such a subtle and graceful way that you didn't even notice how it happened. You just woke up one day and realised the trap you were in.

With shaking hands, Scott reached for his phone again and dared to call her.

“Come on, Rosie, my baby, the love of my life, I beg you, answer the phone. I hope you know somewhere deep inside that I never wanted to hurt you or push you away. It’s the precise opposite of what I wanted and still want,” he whispered towards the sky, defeated.

Nervous fingers yearned to write a final message: "What have I done to us? How overwhelming my fear must have been!!! How blind I was to trample on our love, my precious!!! My divine Rosie, I breathe only because I once met you, only because my heart knew the holy sweetness of love. Merciful God, love is everywhere, but no one sees it. It is the fertile soil that can grow anything, yet we mud it. I am a pro at mudding anything; I’ll give you that!”

The saddest eyes ever looked at the message, and a painful scream broke from his throat: “Ahhhhh, coward! You can’t do it, can you? You’ve always been the biggest coward on the face of earth!!”

He fell on his knees, defeated. “Cry with me, my God, and hold my hand now, for I have sinned against You! No priest is allowed to exonerate me! I have betrayed the purest love I have ever had the grace to receive. You showed me your grace, my God, and I destroyed it," he shouted with his arms raised, surrendering to the infinite source of all creation.

To be continued…

Is Rosie going to answer?

Warmest, tightest hugs to you, my darling reader. Please don’t be a stranger. Say hi if you feel called to do so. Or, perhaps, you could guess and tell me what you feel will happen next with Scott and Rosie?