In that pause, I realized how real this marriage had become.
“I am his wife,” I said firmly.
An elderly nurse later showed me records. The first wife had not died in bed. She had fallen from the roof during a sleepwalking episode. She had survived several similar incidents before, each time because someone had been awake to stop her.
“He was not controlling her,” the nurse said gently. “He was guarding her.”
When my husband recovered enough to come home, he no longer sat in the chair. He slept near the door instead, farther from the bed.
“You do not need watching anymore,” he told me.
But I watched him. His illness worsened. Fever dreams haunted him. I held his hand when he whispered nonsense and begged shadows not to leave.
Eventually, the truth of my condition emerged. A specialist explained that my sleepwalking was tied to trauma from childhood, buried until stress awakened it. My husband had recognized the signs long before I did.
“Why did you not tell me?” I asked him.
“Because you would have fled,” he answered quietly.