if someone was whispering her name from the bottom.
When I gently touched her shoulder to guide her back to bed, she wouldn’t blink. She would stand there, her small body trembling like a leaf in a gale, whispering phrases that made my blood run cold:
“The man with the long fingers is coming up the stairs, Mommy. He’s looking for his keys.”
“There’s no one there, sweetie,” I would whisper back, my heart hammering against my ribs. “Mommy’s right here. You’re safe.”
“He says the walls are too thin,” she would murmur, her voice dropping an octave into a flat, monotone whisper that didn’t belong to a seven-year-old child. “He says if we don’t open the window, the cold will get inside our bones.”
I blamed her night terrors on the damp Oregon air, on an overactive imagination, on the lingering psychological
tremors of my divorce. I bought a white noise machine, a galaxy projector that splashed spinning stars across her ceiling, and organic lavender spray for her pillows. I thought love, patience, and routine would fix it.
Instead, the strangeness migrated from Emma’s mind into the very fabric of our marriage.
A few months ago, right as the summer heat began to bake the city, Evan’s sleeping habits underwent a jarring transformation. For the first three years of our relationship, we had clung to each other in the dark, sleeping tangled together like vines. But then, almost overnight, Evan began pulling away.
It started with midnight restlessness. Around midnight—always between 11:45 PM and 12:15 AM—Evan would groan softly, rub his lower back, and slide out from under the heavy down duvet.
“My back is killing me, Carrie,” he would whisper in the dark, his voice
raspy with simulated exhaustion. “The mattress is too soft. I’m going to take the living room sofa for a couple of hours so I don’t keep tossing and turning.”
At first, I accepted it without a second thought. Evan worked long shifts as a structural engineer, climbing scaffolding and crawling through damp industrial basements all day. His body was battered. I would kiss his cheek, murmur my sympathy, and roll back over, listening to the soft scrape of his bare feet against the hardwood floor as he made his way downstairs.
He did it once a week. Then three times a week. Then, eventually, every single night.
Every night without fail, right around midnight, Evan would slip out of our bed. And every morning when I woke up at 6:00 AM to start the coffee maker, I would find him stretched out on the living room
