The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance

on the ground and leaned against the oak’s rough bark. She’d cried when she identified him in the morgue, she’d cried when she met with the funeral director and she’d cried herself to sleep every night since his death. She had thought herself cried out.
    But she hadn’t been to the tree. Not until just that moment.
    The weight of everything they’d been to each other since the eighth grade hit her with full force; her knees gave way, and she collapsed. Sam’s death and her loss suddenly became terribly real. She sobbed and hugged herself. He was gone someplace where she couldn’t reach him, couldn’t find him, couldn’t hold him, and all she had left was ashes.
    “Oh, Sam,” she whispered. “Oh, Sam, I still need you.”
    “Oh, Sarah,” she heard Sam’s voice ask, as if from the other side of the tree, “how could you leave me?”
    She froze. A fog had come up and somehow she hadn’t noticed. She rose on shaky legs and picked up the urn with Sam’s ashes in it. Had she actually heard anything? Was she wishing Sam’s voice into the air around her, or was her mind playing tricks on her? Or was someone there?
    She gripped the urn tighter, grateful it had a screw-on cap rather than a lid. If someone was there, she didn’t want to hit the trespasser and send Sam’s ashes flying.
    In the moon-illuminated fog, she could make out a shape kneeling by the tree. Familiar, that shape. She slipped closer, soundless. Or so she thought.
    “Who’s there?” He sounded exactly like Sam. He couldn’t be Sam, but oh, God, she would have thought she could have recognized Sam’s voice out of all the voices in the world. Was she just hearing what she wanted to hear?
    “Who are you?” she asked. Her voice quavered.
    The shape in the shadows froze. Like a deer in headlights, she thought.
    “You . . . sound like Sarah,” he said.
    “That’s because I am Sarah,” she said, “and you’re trespassing on private property. You need to leave. Now.”
    He stepped forwards, saying, “My wife died, and I don’t know who you are.”
    They saw each other’s faces at the same time as a gust of wind tattered the fog.
    The urn slipped from Sarah’s fingers and crashed to the ground. She heard the dull thud of something heavy hitting the ground by his feet too. She took a step towards him, not breathing - not daring to breathe - and reached out a hand to touch his cheek. It was warm. Rough with end-of-the-day stubble. Solid.
    In all the world, in all her life, there had only ever been him. She knew what was happening was impossible, but she also knew that this was Sam. Her Sam. Somehow . . . and she didn’t care how.
    Nor did he.
    He touched her hair, and his hand stroked it as it always had. She bowed her head and leaned into the pressure, willing the dream not to end, willing her confusion to stay because for that moment she had him again, even if she was hallucinating, even if she was going crazy.
    When he pulled her close and kissed her, she didn’t let herself ask questions. This was a gift. No matter how real it wasn’t, it was a gift. It was the goodbye she hadn’t got, the goodbye ripped from her by the telephone calls from the school where the boys wanted to know where she was, and from her RN friend Judy telling her that she needed to get to the hospital.
    Sam kissed her, and she kissed him back. There were five days of hell and desperation and yearning and despair in that kiss.
    “Oh, God,” he whispered, and pulled away from her. But he wasn’t leaving. He took her hand and led her towards the ladder up to the tree house, and she beat him to it. She launched herself up to the platform, through the door and onto the futon that had been there since he designed and built the place.
    He was right behind her. They didn’t talk. It was as if he knew he was a dream, as if he understood that this was all going to go away. For that moment, they were solid and real, and with only whispered “I love you”s, they undressed, and took each other — two starving people presented with one last banquet before a forced march into the desert of the rest of their lives.
    Making love with him was what it had always been: wild, unexpected, an adventure. But this time, the desperation was so clear, the knowledge that it was the last time so poignant, that Sarah found herself weeping. When they were spent, she touched Sam’s face again and felt his tears wet on his cheeks.
    She lay beside him after, her hand on