I missed her when she left. Even after I married Marie, even though I loved her and we were happy, sometimes I would dream of Olivia coming back to me.
Marie died, and I felt like I had betrayed her with my dreams. I felt like I’d wished her dead.
I was half mad with guilt and grief. That’s the only way I can explain what I did.
Four years ago I was sitting in front of the fire on a winter night. There was a storm shrieking outside and doors rattling through the house and a fire burning that seemed to have mocking faces hidden in its depths. Alan was sitting by the fire playing with his dinosaur cards and trying to talk to me. I couldn’t think of a word to say to him. Marie had been dead less than a month.
I thought the pounding on the door was part of the storm but it continued, insistent and purposeful, and eventually I went to check.
I never even had the chance to invite her in. Olivia came out of the storm and out of my dreams, running into the room toward the fire as if it was the first warmth and light she had seen in years.
She looked so much older, she looked so wild and scared, I barely noticed the bundle that she let fall on the floor. I thought it was a bundle of possessions, perhaps a bundle of rags. I didn’t know. I didn’t think it mattered. Not with Olivia come back to me and so afraid. I held her hands and they were like claws. She was talking about magic and demons and darkness even as I tried to warm her, to reshape her hands into a shape that felt more human. I thought it was simply madness.
I didn’t pay attention. I am ashamed to write this now, but I was—I think I was happy. My dreams had come true. She was back, and we could heal each other. I had a wife again, and hope.
If I had only known.
While I was looking into Olivia’s mad eyes and dreaming, my son left his game and his place by the fire. I didn’t even notice as he went toward what I had thought was a bundle of rags. I didn’t notice as he turned it over and drew back the blanket, lifted it carefully in his small arms.
I only noticed when he spoke.
“Look, Daddy!”
Then, too late, I turned around. I did not know what I was seeing, but even then I felt a sudden lurch of shock and dread. I felt as if I had looked away at a crucial moment and my child had fallen into the fire and been horribly burned.
I saw my son, my Alan, my darling boy, and in his arms a creature with staring, terrible black eyes. Something that had not stirred or cried out even when Olivia threw it on the floor.
“Daddy,” Alan said, glowing. “It’s a baby.”
The first entry stopped there, a line drawn decisively under the last words in blue ink that had bled slightly into the paper. Mae risked a look up at Nick. He was standing against the attic wall, a little hunched in because of the slope. He hadn’t moved, and his face was as still and cold as ever.
“How’re you,” Mae said, and swallowed. “How’re you feeling?”
She realized an instant later that this was probably the wrong thing to say to Nick, but he met her eyes and answered readily enough.
“Surprised.”
“Uh, surprised?”
“Yeah,” Nick said roughly. “I didn’t know that was how he thought about me. Makes sense, though.”
It did make sense. The little paper book felt too heavy in Mae’s hands as she thought of that poor man with his dead wife and his son suddenly in danger, thought of a silent child with empty eyes. She couldn’t argue with Nick, couldn’t even blame Daniel Ryves.
He’d had every reason to hate it.
“Don’t think anything bad about him,” Nick ordered. “He never let me see what he thought. I always—believed he liked me.”
Nick seemed to pause, a faint clicking in his throat as he swallowed, to find the right words. Mae stared up at him helplessly and wished she knew how to read him. She thought she could fix this situation if she just knew what was going on.
“C’mon,” he said to her eventually. “I’ll run you home.”
Mae hesitated and then saw how the sky outside had dimmed, sunlight leaching away until what had been a soft gray sky turned steely. She’d only just have time to change and grab something to eat before Alan arrived at her house to take her to the Goblin Market.
They went down the attic stairs, the old wood so worn with age that the stairs groaned softly instead of creaking under their feet.
When they reached the hall, the kitchen door was flung wide, a summer breeze flooding in. Mae only had time to think that Alan was home early and had left the back door open and to feel an unreasonable rush of panic, as if they’d been caught doing something wrong.
Then Nick broke from her side in a sudden violent spring, and the thin figure standing at the kitchen table with his back to them turned, and it wasn’t Alan at all.
It was Gerald.
“Wait,” Gerald called out.
Nick did not pause, but he did turn so he was circling Gerald like a predator waiting for the right moment, instead of like a predator leaping straight for his throat.
“Sorry to intrude,” Gerald continued, his voice losing its note of urgency and becoming pleasant. He slid his
