Each night she gave me a little more of herself. A memory. A laugh. A whispered promise in the dark that felt heavier than any promise I had made in daylight. And each night I gave her everything I had, because I had never had anyone to give it to before.
But every morning after, I woke a little weaker. My face in the mirror looked more tired, more pale, dark circles growing under my eyes. I told myself it was just love keeping me up at night, wearing me thin the way it does in every love song ever written. I did not want to look any closer at it. Looking closer is what ends a love affair, and I did not want mine to end.
Then I found the journal.
It was hidden behind a loose panel in my grandmother’s wardrobe, wrapped in old cloth. The handwriting inside was small and shaky, decades old.
She does not lie, my grandmother had written. That is the cruel part. Every word she told you is true. She just never told. She cannot live in this world on her own. She needs love to open the door for her, real love, given freely. Every kiss opens it a little more. Every promise turns the key. I loved your grandfather more than my own life. I did not know that loving him was how I was giving her his soul, piece by piece, until there was nothing left of him to bury but an empty body.
If you are reading this, I am sorry. I could not burn this house down. Some part of me, God forgive me, still loved her too.
I sat on the floor for a long time, rain hitting the window, and I understood, with a fear that had nowhere left to go, that I had already given her almost everything.
That night she came as always, at 2:17. But now I could see it. A faint shimmer at the edge of her body. The candle flame leaning toward her, like it was being pulled, like it was feeding her light.
She opened her eyes and smiled at me. For the first time, I saw past the smile, into something old and patient underneath it. Older than the house. Older than longing itself.
“You found it,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“You never lied to me,” I said, my voice shaking.
“No.” She touched my face, and even now, even knowing what I knew, I leaned into her hand, the way you lean into warm sunlight after a long winter. “I never had to.”
“Why me?”
“Because you were lonely enough to believe I was a gift.” Her voice was soft, almost kind. “And you were right. I am a gift. Just not the kind you hoped for.”
I could have left. I want that written down, clearly. There was a real moment where the door was still mine to walk through. But I thought about my life outside that house — how empty it was, how quiet, how many years I had gone without anyone loving me at all. And I chose her anyway. Not because I didn’t know the truth anymore. I knew it now. But some broken part of me believed even a borrowed kind of love was better than none.
“Stay with me,” she whispered, her lips close to mine.
“Yes,” I said.
I kissed her slowly, deeply, every second as if the world had ceased to exist. She smiled against my lips, her hand gliding gently across my chest before drifting lower, drawing me even closer. We made love with a tenderness that needed no words, every touch carrying a lifetime of unspoken devotion. In that moment, I felt the last warm piece of myself leave my body and find its place within hers, like a long-held breath finally released, leaving nothing between us but love.
After that night I don’t know what happened to me.
They found my body six weeks later, when someone from the post office finally came to ask about the unopened mail. The report said “unexplained” and “natural causes,” because there is no simple word for a man who dies from having nothing left inside him to give.
They boarded up Thornmere that winter. The driveway grew wild again. Strangely, the birds never came back to that lawn.
But sometimes, on rainy nights, a lonely man will drive down that old road, past the dark, empty house, maybe taking a shortcut, maybe just lost, maybe on a road he never meant to take. And something makes him look up.
In the upstairs window, behind glass fogged with rain, he sees her.
Waiting.
Smiling.
Already sure, somehow, that he will come inside.
