Everyone told me I had to accept it.

So I tried. I drank the herbal tea my wife, Vanessa, brought to my bedside each evening.

“For your nerves, Marcus,” she would say softly, her hand lingering on my shoulder. “You haven’t been sleeping.”

I swallowed the pills my brother, Colby, pressed into my palm in the mornings.

“From Dr. Harris,” he told me. “Just to help your mind rest.”

Day by day, I felt heavier, slower, more confused. I forgot appointments. I stared at walls. I lost time. People said it was grief. I believed them.

Until that night.

The Child in the Moonlight

I heard it before I saw it—a thin, chattering sound, like teeth hitting together in the cold.

I looked up, and there, near the balcony doors, huddled in a corner where the moonlight pooled on the floor, was a small figure wrapped in a dirty blanket.

For a moment, my mind did exactly what it had been trained to do for months: it rejected what it saw.

“No,” I whispered.

The word felt like a prayer and a denial at the same time.

“You’re not real,” I said, my voice cracking. “You can’t be here. You’re…”

I stopped myself before the word I had been saying for months could form.