His response contained more fear than certainty. That night I pretended to sleep, with my eyes closed and my mind awake. He brought the chair. He sat on the floor, next to the bed, as if he were on guard. A long silence. Then he admitted, “Yes.”
“Whose?” He didn’t look at me. “Not about you,” he said. “About your past.” Little by little, the truth began to come to light. He told me that his first wife had died in her sleep. The doctors said it was heart failure. But he believed something else had happened.
“She would wake up at night,” he said, “with her eyes open, but not really there… as if someone else was driving her.” I got goosebumps. Then he confessed the worst part. He had fallen asleep once. And when he woke up… It was already too late.
After that, he turned the house into a fortress: closed closets, bells on the doors, latches on the windows. I felt as if I were living in a prison built out of fear. I asked in a low voice, “Do you think I could…?” He interrupted me immediately. “No. But fear doesn’t require logic.”
Then came the first real shock. One morning, a servant told me I had been standing at the top of the stairs in the middle of the night, eyes open, unresponsive. He had been holding me, soaked in sweat, preventing me from falling. He looked at me and said, almost desperately: “See? I wasn’t wrong.”
Read more on the next page ⬇️⬇️⬇️
