“Go to sleep. I want to look.” The way he said it put my hair on end… and the next morning, I understood that this marriage revolved around money.
“Nothing will happen tonight. Go to sleep.
My name is Nora Hale.
That night, I sat huddled on the edge of the bed, wearing a pony dress that looked like armor, shaking so much that my teeth were chestnuting.
I looked at the door like it was a septexic about to be executed.
When the door opened, he slowly entered, with his gaze lost and distant, and the chair he was holding it icy for me. He brought her closer, sat down and watched me without blinking.
“I won’t. I just want to see you sleep.
I didn’t understand what that meant. Was he sick? Was it dangerous? Was it some kind of control?
But it was exhausted, and in the morning I still had to look “normal” in front of my father. I went to bed without even taking off my dress.
When I woke up, he was gone.
The second night, the third night, everything was repeated. The chair. The silence. The look. The family moved as if they had made a pact: porridge heads, closed mouths, without explanations.
By the fourth night, something had left me petrified. I was asleep when I felt someone by my side. A hectic breath near my ear.
I woke up startled and there it was, so close that I could smell his former colony. I hadn’t touched yet. I was hypnotized, staring at my eyelids like I was choking.
He shuddered as if he had been caught committing a crime and immediately backed down.
I sat down and suddenly the room got colder.
She looked down.
I didn’t lie. It’s just… tonight was different.
During the day, I couldn’t take it anymore. I asked what was scaring me:
He stayed right next to the window. Outside, the trees swayed with the wind.
I felt like I was going to cry my throat.
SŅ respŅesta coÿteпía more fear than υe certainty.
That night I pretended to sleep, with my eyes closed and my mind awake. He brought the chair. He sat on the floor, by the bed, like he was on duty.
Long silence.
He admitted, “Yes.”
“Whose?”
He didn’t look at me.
“It’s not about you,” he said. It’s about your past.
Little by little, the truth began to come out. He told me that his first wife had died in his sleep.
Doctors said it was heart failure. But he thought something else had happened.
“She woke up at night,” she said, “with her eyes open, but like she wasn’t really present… like someone else was driving her.”
My goosebumps were put on.
Then he confessed the worst.
He had fallen asleep once. And when he woke up…
It was too late.
After that, he turned the house into a fortress: closed closets, doorbells, locks on the windows. I felt like I was living in a prison built with fear.
I quietly asked, “Do you think I could…?”
