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You woke to the sound of something breaking.
Not loud. Not dramatic. Just a sharp, brittle crack. Like wood splitting under too much pressure, or a bone giving way where it should’ve held.
Then the creak of the porch floorboards.
Then silence.
Not even the usual chorus of crickets. Not even the sigh of wind through the trees. Just stillness.
You sat up slowly, the sheets falling from your shoulders in a lazy hush. The air in the room had turned cool, but your skin felt flushed. Alert. Your body knew something was wrong before your mind caught up.
You blinked sleep from your eyes and held your breath, straining to hear beyond the stillness.
The bed was cold beside you.
Your hand slid across the mattress, reaching for warmth that wasn’t there. His pillow was untouched. No indent. No trace of where his head should’ve rested. Like he’d never even tried to sleep.
You already knew it was him.
Remmick hadn’t spoken much that day.
His silences had stretched too long. Those odd, bloated kinds of quiet where sound might’ve fit if it dared, but nothing did. You’d watched him slip further into his own mind with each passing hour. His eyes, sharp and unblinking, caught too often on things you couldn’t see. The corners of the room. The shadows between trees. The empty hallway outside the bathroom door.
He hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t smiled.
When you kissed him goodnight, soft, coaxing, slow, his mouth barely moved against yours. Like he was somewhere else already. Like the gesture was happening in another lifetime, and he was only half-remembering how to be there.
You swung your legs over the edge of the bed and stood barefoot, the floorboards cool beneath your soles. The old house murmured around you. Walls breathing, windows creaking in their frames, but nothing sounded alive.
You wrapped a shawl around your shoulders and stepped into the hall. Dim golden lamplight poured down the walls behind you, but ahead, the back of the house was cloaked in shadow. The screen door hung open just a crack. Just enough.
You crossed the kitchen with an urgency. A knowing.
Then you saw him.
Just past the threshold of the back door, kneeling in the dirt beneath the stars.
His shirt was half-unbuttoned and clinging to his back with sweat. Like he’d fled the house in a panic. Like something inside had grown too tight, too loud, and he’d needed air, needed space, to keep from tearing himself apart.
The wood sighed beneath your feet, but he didn’t turn. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t even seem to hear you.
He was on his knees in the dirt, his entire body drawn taut like a wire on the verge of snapping. Both hands were gripped tight to the sides of his head, fingers threaded through his hair so violently it looked like he meant to rip it out by the root.
And his mouth was moving.
At first, it sounded like muttering. Uneven, breathless, near incoherent.
But then you heard the words.
And your stomach dropped.
He wasn’t muttering.
He was pleading.
You treaded forward, slowly. The wooden porch slats groaned as you moved, but the night was louder, somehow. Even though the cicadas had stilled and the air had gone eerily quiet.
Your nightgown brushed the floorboards behind you, the fabric whispering against wood, the breeze tugging at the hem like it, too, wanted you to run.
But you didn’t.
You stepped down into the yard, grass damp beneath your feet, dirt soft and uneven. Every motion forward was careful. Slow. Not out of fear, but care. Reverence, even.
And there he was.
Not kneeling anymore.
Collapsed into the dirt, hands buried elbow-deep in the earth like he meant to rip the whole world apart. His fingernails, already dirt-caked and raw, curved into clawed, monstrous points. Blood streaked his wrists where he’d scratched too deep.
His shoulders heaved with every breath, but they weren’t full breaths. They were splintered. Shallow. Wet.
You knelt beside him, heart thudding so hard it echoed in your ears.
“Remmick.”
He didn’t hear you.
Or if he did, he didn’t know it was real.
His breath came ragged. A tremor ran the length of his arms and into his spine. His fingers clawed and clawed, dragging clumps of soil from the ground as if trying to dig something out, or bury something deeper.
“Stop it- stop- I told ya I didn’t mean to, I told ya-”
His voice cracked. Split right down the middle.
Then came the sob. The kind that didn’t sound human. That sounded like it had been fermenting somewhere inside him for years, decades, longer. A scream caught in a bottle, opened at last.
He slammed fist into the ground with full force, dirt flying. You saw the skin on his knuckles split open. No stone beneath him, just unforgiving earth.
And still he didn’t stop.
You reached for him.
He recoiled like your touch burned him, like your hand was a brand pressed to his skin. He flinched so violently his claws tore fresh tracks in the ground, eyes going wide.
“Remmick, it’s me.”
His whole body twisted away.
“I ain’t do it- I ain’t- she was already- God, I saw her-”
“It’s me,” you said again, firmer this time. “It’s just me, baby. You’re safe.”
But when he turned toward your voice, the eyes that met yours weren’t his.
They were wild. Red as fresh blood. Glowing dimly in the night like something feral had cracked its way through his skin and crawled out through his gaze. They shimmered with unshed tears, soaked already from the ones that had fallen. His mouth opened, baring his fangs, then closed, like he was trying to form a word. Trying to hold onto some anchor of the present, but none came.
He backed away on his hands like a cornered animal, limbs jerky and uneven, until his back hit the nearest porch post. He didn’t feel the splinters. Didn’t blink.
His chest rose and fell in shallow bursts. Every inhale seemed like it hurt. Sweat gleamed across his collarbones, dampening the half-unbuttoned shirt clinging to his frame. His jaw trembled, lips working without sound. Desperate.
You caught a glimpse of the gold chain around his neck, tangled and half-buried beneath the torn collar of his shirt. It glinted faintly in the moonlight, streaked with soil.
He looked at you like he didn’t know you.
Like he was seeing a ghost.
“I buried her,” he whispered. The words weren’t meant for you. “I dug and dug and she wouldn’t stop lookin’ at me, she wouldn’t shut her damn eyes-”
You didn’t hesitate.
You crawled closer. Over dirt, over roots, over whatever pain tried to rise in your chest, and took his face in both your hands.
Firm, but gentle.
Your palms settled on his jaw, thumbs grazing his wet cheekbones, skin sticky with tears and sweat.
“Remmick,” you whispered, bending low, your forehead nearly brushing his. “It’s not her. It’s me. Look at me. Look at me, baby. Come back.”
He blinked.
Once. Twice.
Hard. Like it hurt.
And then his breathing changed. Faltered.
You saw it. The exact second it happened.
His eyes focused.
His pupils, still holding that unnatural red glow, contracted. And locked on you.
The weight in his chest seemed to break. His shoulders collapsed like a building giving way to its foundation. His entire body wilted forward into yours.
He surged toward you, hands finding your sides, gripping so tight you gasped. Not in pain. Just from the suddenness. The intensity.
He clung to you like he thought you might disappear if he let go. Like the dirt might swallow you, too.
His entire frame trembled. His breath hitched. And then he sobbed against your shoulder so tightly that it almost came out as a scream. A desperate cry for help.
You cradled his head against you, one hand smoothing down the back of his neck, the other curling over the slope of his shoulder.
“I’m here,” you whispered, voice steady in the dark. “You’re not there. You’re not back there.”
He gasped against your collarbone.
“I saw her again,” he whined. “I was in that cottage. The one with the red windows. And she- I told her not to go upstairs, I told her-”
You felt it in his grip. The way his arms shook around you.
The way something inside him shattered all over again.
You didn’t ask who she was. Didn’t ask what she looked like, how she died, or why she haunted him. You didn’t try to name the ghosts.
There were too many.
And too many ways to get it wrong.
You just held him.
Held him as his entire body folded inward, as he collapsed into you like a dying star. Heat, weight, gravity, grief, all collapsing in on itself. You held him as his fingers, slick with blood and dirt, dug helplessly into your waist like you were the only thing keeping him tethered to this world.
His hands shook, and his mind, God, his mind was cracked wide open. Like a house with no walls. Like a place once meant for shelter, gutted now, everything inside laid bare to wind and time and ruin.
He clung to you in pieces. Shaking. Bleeding. Unmade.
And you stayed.
The moon hung high above you, pale and unsmiling. Watching. Bearing witness. The crickets had gone still, like even they knew this night wasn’t meant for song. Only the fireflies moved, low and slow, blinking solemn in the dark like old souls who’d seen all this before.
You kissed his temple.
“I’m right here.”
His breath stuttered.
“I can’t tell what’s real sometimes,” he choked out, voice raw and wet and fraying at the seams. “I look at ya and think maybe you’re just somethin’ I made up. That ya died too, and I just… I just pretend ya didn’t.”
Your heart cracked. Split clean through.
He said it like it had happened. Like he’d already mourned you a dozen times over. Like this moment, this warmth, this touch, might disappear if he blinked too long.
You gripped him tighter. Arms wrapping around him like roots. Like anchor lines. Like whatever it was that had tried to drag him under would have to take you too.
“Do I feel real to you now?”
He nodded fast. Too fast. Sharp jerks of his head like if he said it enough it might stay true.
His breath hitched.
“Don’t let go,” he whispered. It wasn’t soft, not really. It was broken. “Please. Don’t let go. Don’t leave me in the dark.”
“I won’t,” you said.
And you didn’t.
Not for hours.
Not when the ground beneath you grew cold and damp, biting at your knees and soaking through your nightgown. Not when your back began to ache against the porch beam, or when the cramps set into your legs, hot and numbing, from sitting too long in the dirt.
Not even when he went quiet again. Finally cried out, hollowed out, emptied of whatever storm had torn through him and left only silence behind.
You stayed.
Your hands on him like a spell. One braced on the curve of his spine, the other threading slowly through his hair, matted now with sweat and earth and moonlight. You stroked him gently, like you were winding him back together strand by strand.
You pressed your palm to the back of his neck, skin hot and clammy beneath your hand, and held it there. Just held. As if your warmth might sink deep enough to reach the part of him time hadn’t broken yet. As if maybe you could coax it forward, what little was left.
His breathing evened out eventually. Deep, but not peaceful.
The kind of breathing that came after you survived something. Not rest. Just relief.
But even then, even after the storm had passed and the night began to hush around you, he didn’t let go.
His arms stayed locked around your waist. His face still buried against your lap, breath fanning over the thin fabric stretched across your thighs. Every once in a while, a shiver would pass through him, small and involuntary, and your hand would still where it lay on his back, waiting for it to subside.
The fireflies blinked slower now. Dimming. Retreating.
The night crept toward dawn. Soft and gray at the edges.
Light seeped into the world like it wasn’t sure it was welcome.
You didn’t move.
Didn’t speak.
There was nothing more to say.
You simply stayed there. Back pressed to the post, knees curled in the dirt, head leaned forward until your chin perched on the crown of his head.
He stayed in your arms like he was made to be there. Like maybe this was the only place he could be anymore.
And he held onto you like you were the last real thing in the world.
Because to him, you were.