Gwen stepped inside the cottage, once warm and welcoming, now cold with disuse and laden with the burden of responsibility. This was no longer home, merely a collection of things. Things to move. Things to sell.
But they were not just things. Memories were attached to every piece scattered throughout the cottage. The blanket they shared on cold nights, draped over the back of the lounge. The chess board frozen in time, pieces poised mid battle. His book open and face down on the coffee table, its spine cracked and rutted.
Overwhelmed, Gwen went to the kitchen for a glass of water. In the sink sat a large mixing bowl and whisk, both crusted with bits of batter blackened over time. It had been a year since she placed these things in the sink, a year since she was interrupted by the knock at the door.
She had barely registered what the policeman had said, but small pieces stuck with her just as the fragments of food still clung to the bowl in the sink.
‘…accident…believed drowned…no trace of his body…’
Gwen looked out the kitchen window to the lake, black and menacing in the twilight.
She was exhausted—from the trip here, from just being back here. She shuffled to the bedroom, slipped off her shoes and slid fully clothed under the covers.
Gwen lay curled in a ball on one side of the bed, sheets and covers tucked tight under her chin. She buried her face in the pillow, still smelling of him, and laid her arm limply in the space he used to occupy.
A familiar feeling like a warm breeze brushed her cheek and she smiled. She leaned into it, longing for a forgotten touch.
The sensation continued down her neck, hot breaths peppering her skin.
A warmth encircled her, an embrace that radiated about her body and she nuzzled into it, finding a comfort she thought lost to the lonely nights. She slept soundly.
When she awoke, he was there. Any disbelief had dissipated through the night at the return of his familiar touch and she knew, in whatever form, it was him.
‘I’ve missed you,’ she said.
The warmth left her and was replaced by a coolness that spoke only of sadness.
‘I know,’ she said, sitting up, ‘but you’re here now. That’s all that matters.’
The air around her pulsed with energy. The hairs on her arms and on the back of her neck stood upright as invisible hands caressed her skin. She fell back into bed, rapt in his touch.
Days passed. The cottage, cold and alone for so long, returned to a place of warmth, of love. Gwen did not know how he had returned to her and did not care. They were together.
He would not, or could not speak, but Gwen found herself chatting in his presence as if he sat across the table from her. He returned with sensations carried to her in their own language. She spoke of her life without him, of loneliness, of the struggle to cope. She spoke of the cottage, reminiscing about good times spent here and lamenting that it too was soon lost. She spoke of hope.
‘Once I’m packed up here,’ she said one day, remembering the reason she had come back. ‘We can find a new place.’
The air in the room suddenly blazed, the loving warmth replaced by a red hot wrath and a wailing despair.
‘What is it?’ she asked, voice trembling. ‘What’s wrong?’
As quickly as it had come, the inferno receded. The warmth and glow she had nestled in over the last few days returned, but somewhere behind it, unseen and unspoken, lay a finger of darkness threatening to creep into the light.
They did not let the darkness reach them that night. Entwined in each other—his presence so close, her want so palpable—passion overwhelmed all else and they burned bright as one through the night.
When Gwen awoke, however, he was not there. Loneliness, long suffered over the last year, swept over her and she rushed from the bed to find him. He was not in the cottage—no hint of heat could be felt in the house that now chilled her as it did when she first returned.
She slid a dressing gown over her shoulders and stepped outside. Down the hill from the cottage, the lake lay glistening in the morning sun, a perfect mirror against the sky. She wandered down to the edge, her bare feet trailing tracks in the dewy grass.
He was there. A spark in the air ignited as she drew near, but the heat was lacking, like a fire going cold, resigned to its fate. She stood there with him, staring into the blue depths that had claimed his earthly form.
‘You can’t leave can you?’ she said.
The life drained from the air in collective understanding. Whatever they had now was only temporal, a dream that would always end.
‘I can’t lose you again,’ she said, yearning to hold him, to feel the life pulsing through him from the heart she knew was hers. From him the same yearning surged towards and through her, a longing to be together always, as one.
‘Is it the only way?’ she asked.
It was fleeting, but it was there. A tinge of hope, a truth exposed, before it was thrust away, the air crackling with cold and creating a great icy barrier between them.
But Gwen was already past that barrier. In that brief moment, the answer had been laid as bare as the vast expanse of water before her.
She stepped into the water, her dressing gown billowing on the surface as ripples formed, shattering the delicate crystal mirror. From the shore came an intense burst of regret, a pleading for her to stop. She turned and smiled towards him, unsure if he could even see it, before she waded into the lake to join him forever.