She couldn’t go back there, not to that dark place of uncertainty and silent longing. No matter that the burning desire coursed through her like a living thing. He had disrupted her life, shaken her to the very core and dismantled every solid thing she had known and understood, had shaped her view of the world in an entirely new way, and only recently had she learned to live beyond that.

She couldn’t tell him that in her bones she’d always believed he was alive, that she had been so sure she felt his presence in the quiet moments in her house. She couldn’t tell him that it had been impossible for her to reconcile the possibility that he might not have been, despite her very best attempts to the contrary.

She had managed secrets before, had stemmed the flow of their poison from seeping into other parts of her life. It was only internally that she suffered the penance for that. And she couldn’t help but wonder now how much sharing secrets in this moment, with this man, might rupture everything, causing truths to bleed across the carefully segmented parts of her.

Seeing him slip through these hours, a medley of simple moments and mundane things, it showed that he was just a man. A complex one perhaps, but made of blood and bone, of poor choices and agony. No less real than those who came before him, no matter the shadowy place in which she’d stored her thoughts of him, a vision created from half truths and secrets kept.