Most creepy bedtime stories start with a monster. This one starts with a kind voice, a box of love letters, and a man who slept on my husband’s side of the bed.
2:00 AM
The first night I heard his voice, it was 2:00 AM and I had not slept properly in a year.
Tom died in March. Cancer. He was thirty-four. After the funeral, everyone told me sleep would come back. It didn’t. Every night I lay on my side of the bed, the right side, and looked at his side. His pillow still had the shape of his head. I never fixed it.
One morning there was a small card in my mailbox. Dark blue, with silver letters.
Can’t sleep? Night Pages. One short story, every night, read softly.
I almost threw it away. But at 2:00 AM that night, I found the podcast and pressed play.
A man’s voice. Low and calm, a little rough, like someone who had also been awake too long. He read a short story about a lighthouse keeper who left a lamp on for a ship that never came. It was simple. It was kind.
I fell asleep before the end. I slept for five hours.
The next night, I played the next episode. And the next.
By the second week, I noticed something. In one story, a young couple burned their pancakes on their first morning together and ate them anyway, laughing. Tom and I did that. In another, a husband wrapped his coat around his wife during a storm because she was scared of thunder. I am scared of thunder.
Lots of people burn pancakes, I told myself. Lots of people are scared of thunder.
Then one night, the voice began: “This story is for a woman who still sleeps on her side of the bed, and leaves his side the way it was.”
I sat up in the dark and held my breath.
For Anna
The podcast page said very little. Read by W. Boston. There was an email address. I wrote to it before I could stop myself.
Who writes these stories? My name is Anna Reed. I think some of them are about my husband.
The reply came the next morning.
Anna. I was hoping you would find them. Can we meet? I’ll explain everything. — Will
We met at a small café near the river. He was tall and thin, maybe thirty-five, with tired gray eyes and a soft way of moving, like he didn’t want to take up space. When he said my name, I knew the voice at once.
“I was a night volunteer at the hospice,” he said. “I sat with Tom on the nights he couldn’t sleep. We talked a lot.”
I didn’t remember him. Those last weeks were a blur of beeping machines and cold coffee.
“Tom knew you wouldn’t sleep after he was gone,” Will said. “So he wrote you stories. Every night, as long as he could hold a pen. He asked me to read them to you, but never to say they were from him. He said his own voice would break your heart.”
He put a cardboard box on the table. Inside were hundreds of pages, handwritten in blue ink. Every page began the same way.
For Anna.
I knew that handwriting. Tom’s long, leaning letters. I touched the words like they were warm.
I cried in that café until the waitress brought me napkins. Will didn’t say anything. He just sat with me, the way he had sat with Tom.
The Left Side of the Bed
I didn’t mean to fall in love with him.
At first, we met once a week so he could tell me about Tom’s last nights. Then twice a week. Then he was fixing my leaking kitchen tap, and staying for dinner, and making me laugh about nothing. I had forgotten I could laugh like that.
He never pushed. He never asked for anything. He just kept showing up.
One evening in June, he came to my door holding something small in his hand.
“The hospice called me,” he said. “They were clearing out an old drawer and found this. They knew I knew you.”
It was Tom’s wedding ring. It went missing the night he died. I had looked everywhere.
I kissed Will that night for the first time.
By August, he had moved in. He slept on the left side of the bed. Tom’s side. I fixed the pillow for the first time in a year and a half, and I told myself that was healing.
I slept every night now. I didn’t even need the podcast anymore. I had the real voice, right next to me.
If you had asked me then, I would have said I was happy. And I would have meant it.
The Sympathy Letter
In October, I finally opened the box from the funeral.
It had sat in my closet for nineteen months. Flowers dried to paper. The guest book. A stack of sympathy cards I had never been able to read.
One of them was from Will.
Anna, I sat with Tom at night. He talked about you more than anything. I am so sorry. If you ever can’t sleep, I am here. — Will
It was a kind note. I smiled. Then I looked at it again.
The handwriting felt familiar. Too familiar.
I went to the bedroom and took one page out of the story box. I laid the sympathy letter next to it on the bed.
They were very close. The same blue ink. The same lean to the right.
But not the same. Not quite.
Tom wrote his capital A flat on top, like a little house. I used to tease him about it. Will’s A was sharp at the top, with a small curl at the bottom.
Tom crossed his T with one long line, sometimes across the whole word. Will’s T had a short line, slanted up.
I looked at the story page. For Anna.
A sharp A. A small curl.
My hands were shaking. I found my old shoebox of Tom’s love letters, the real ones, from before we were married. I spread them out next to the story pages.
Every A in Tom’s letters was a little house. Every T had a long line.
Every A in the stories had a curl. Every T was short and slanted.
Even my own name, at the top of three hundred pages, was written by Will.
I heard Will’s key in the front door. I pushed everything back into the box, pushed the box into the closet, and went to the kitchen to say hello.
He kissed my cheek. “You look pale,” he said.
“Long day,” I said.
Small Things
I told myself there was an answer.
Maybe Tom’s hands were too weak at the end, and Will wrote the stories down while Tom spoke them. Maybe Will was trying to protect me. Maybe I was a grieving widow seeing ghosts in the letter A.
So I said nothing. I watched instead.
And once I started watching, the small things came.
One Sunday morning, Will was making coffee and humming a song. Moon River. My hands went cold.
I sang that song to Tom at the hospice. Every night, at the end, when the pain kept him awake. Quietly, so the nurses wouldn’t hear. I had never sung it anywhere else. Not once in front of Will.
“Where did you hear that song?” I asked.
He smiled at me. “It’s an old song, Anna. Everyone knows it.”
Another day, I asked him to get a towel from the hall closet. He went to the top shelf, behind the winter blankets, without looking. That is where I keep the good towels. I had never shown him.
And the ring. I kept thinking about the ring. The hospice told me it was lost the night Tom died. Who was on the night shift that night?
I lay awake beside him that night, watching him sleep on Tom’s side of the bed. For the first time in months, I couldn’t sleep at all.
Too Interested
On a Tuesday, when Will was at work, I called the hospice.
A nurse named Linda answered. She remembered Tom. She remembered me.
“I’m trying to reach a volunteer,” I said. “Will. He did the night shift.”
There was a long pause.
“Will doesn’t work here anymore,” Linda said carefully. “We let him go, about a year ago.”
“Why?”
Another pause. “I shouldn’t really say. He was found sitting in patients’ rooms at night when they didn’t need him. Just sitting there in the dark. Listening.” She lowered her voice. “And he got too interested in one family. He kept asking about the wife. Where she lived. What she did.”
I couldn’t breathe. “Which family?”
Linda was quiet for a moment.
“Yours, honey,” she said. “I’m sorry. I thought you knew.”
I hung up. I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets, and I thought about the blue card in my mailbox. Can’t sleep? Night Pages.
I had never asked who else got that card. I already knew. Nobody else did.
