The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance

his belly, feeling him breathing. “It’s hell without you,” she said.
    “You should have let me go get them,” he whispered. “Then I would have died instead of you.”
    “I did let you,” she told him. “That’s why the boys and I are alone now. They would have been so much better off with you.”
    “The kids are with me. And they’re falling apart without you.”
    They lay in the dark, now turned to face each other. She could barely make out the planes of his face. “Sam,” she said carefully, “your funeral was today. I have your ashes in an urn at the base of our tree. You . . . aren’t real.”
    “The urn is there,” he said. “But the ashes are yours. I kept our promise. I brought you back here.”
    They sat up, and some stupid flicker of hope shivered to life in Sarah’s chest. “What is this, Sam?”
    “I don’t know.” He touched her shoulder, her breast, rubbed his thumb against her chin. “I don’t know. But if it means I get to keep you, I don’t care.”
    “How can it? How can it be anything but me losing my mind?”
    “I’ll be crazy if it means I get to keep you.”
    She smiled. It was the first time since the phone call from the hospital, and it was because that comment was so purely Sam.
    She looked out the tree-house window. Fog blocked her view of the house. “You think they’ll be all right?”
    He hugged her. “The doors are locked. I have the keys. The kids will be fine.”
    Sarah had the keys, too. They were in the pocket of her blue jeans, lying crumpled on the floor next to his.
    He was right. They would be fine.
    So they lay in each other’s arms, talking, laughing, happy, while the night passed them by.
    Sarah woke to sunrise peeking through the tree house’s east windows. Sam yawned and stretched. “I watched you sleeping for a while,” he said. “Just because I could.”
    Sarah nuzzled his chest and laughed. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep at all. But I haven’t been sleeping well since ...” She shook her head and touched him. “You’re still here. How?”
    He pressed a finger to her lips. “Don’t ask. Just accept this, whatever it is.”
    “How do we explain this to everyone?”
    “We’ll think of something.” He pulled her close. “I don’t know what, but something. The kids and your parents and your friends will be happy to have you back. They were devastated.”
    Yours were, she thought, not mine, but she didn’t say anything. It brought up events and images she needed to push from her mind.
    “I love you,” she told him. She was sombre again. She had sometimes taken him for granted. Had forgotten how wonderful he was. She had never realized how the world without him in it didn’t hold enough air. She would never take him for granted again.
    “They’re going to be up soon,” Sam said. “We should get back so they don’t wake up to an empty house. They have no idea how things have changed.”
    She sighed. “You’re right.” They rose and dressed, slowed a little by the fact that neither of them could keep from touching the other.
    When they climbed down the ladder, Sarah caught a glimpse of the urn on the ground, still half-hidden in fog.
    “Don’t look at that,” Sam said. “That isn’t us.”
    They turned towards the bridge, and the fog-wreathed shapes of the flowers on their many tripods confronted both of them, rows of monsters marching through the mist.
    Sarah said, “We’ll get rid of them.”
    Sam wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “The next few weeks are probably going to be rough,” he told her.
    She arched an eyebrow. “As rough as the next forty years would have been?”
    He laughed and kissed her. “Nothing could be that rough.”
    They clasped hands and smiled at each other, and stepped onto the bridge together . . .
    . . . and he was gone.
    He did not gradually fade, he did not dim or slip away from her with a warning. His hand was warm and strong and callused in hers, and then it was gone.
    Sarah faltered in mid-step, stumbled, and screamed, “Sam!”
    She turned back to the island to discover no Sam. The floral arrangements on their stands now stood in crisp detail, the urn lay toppled on its side where she had dropped it the night before. “Sam!” she shouted again. She ran back to the tree house and climbed into it. The futon was folded up the way they’d left it, with no sign that anyone had spent the night there. The hand-rubbed oak floor bore no forgotten article of his clothing