“When I woke, she was gone.”
The house, he explained, became a fortress after that. Locks. Alarms. Bells on doors. Precautions layered upon precautions. Fear had shaped every wall.
I wanted to deny his story, but then something happened that made denial impossible.
One morning, a housekeeper told me she had found me standing at the top of the staircase in the middle of the night, unmoving, eyes wide open. My husband had been holding me, soaked in sweat, keeping me from stepping forward.
“Do you see now?” he asked me later, desperation raw in his voice.
I was terrified, not only of him, but of myself.
Yet fear did not break us. Instead, it became routine. Routine turned into something resembling safety.
One night, during a power outage, I reached for his hand in the dark. He did not pull away.
“If I am scared,” I whispered, “will you stay awake?”
“I will,” he answered without hesitation.
Months later, he collapsed.
The hospital corridors smelled of disinfectant and dread. Machines hummed around him as he lay unconscious, suddenly frail and older than I had ever allowed myself to see.
A doctor pulled me aside.
“What is your relation to the patient?” he asked.