Don't Let Him In Please

She knew the difference between the house making noise and something outside waiting. Three years alone in this old place had taught her that. She knew every sound this house made. She knew which floorboard groaned when the wind blew from the east. She knew the way the kitchen window rattled in November like it was cold and couldn't get warm. She knew all of it. You learn a house the same way you learn anything you can't get away from. Slowly. Without even trying. But this was different. This wasn't the house settling. This was the silence after a sound was made. The kind of silence that feels wrong. Like the air knew something had just happened and was pretending it hadn't. Mara had lived alone long enough to recognize that kind of silence. The house wasn't just quiet. It was holding its breath. She was thirty-two years old. She hadn't been scared of the dark since she was six. And honestly, there was nothing left to be afraid of, after all she had gone through. She had decided a long time ago, somewhere deep in her grief, that the world had already done its worst to her. Elliot was the worst thing. Losing him was the kind of loss that changes you so completely that nothing after it scares you the same way anymore. What else could the dark possibly do to her? She would look back on that thought later. She would almost laugh at herself for it. But that was later. Right now it was 2:47 in the morning. November. Dark and cold and quiet. And someone had just knocked on her door three times. Soft knocks. Almost gentle. The kind of knock that knows it shouldn't be there and doesnt even belong there. She didn't move. She stood and counted. Counting was something she had started doing after Elliot died. It helped her stay calm when everything felt like it was sliding. She counted to four minutes and twelve seconds. Then she got up. She told herself later, when she tried to explain it to Della, to herself, that as she lay awake in the night at four in the morning, she said she opened the door because she was not afraid. Since the worst had already happened to her and she survived. Nothing could do her harm now. That wasn't really true though. The real reason was harder to say out loud. The real reason was that some part of her, the part that still slept on her side of the bed and left his side untouched, the part that still had his voicemail saved on her phone, the part that had moved into his family house because leaving it felt like losing him all over again, that part of her already knew the shape of what was standing on the other side. Not knew, exactly. Hoped. The way only someone truly broken can hope... Quietly, shamefully with both hands already reaching before her brain had even agreed to the idea. She opened the door. And the thing standing on her porch looked at her with her dead husband's eyes. Spoke her name in her dead husband's voice. And something inside Mara, something she had spent three years two months and eleven days carefully building back up, cracked right down the middle. She was going to let him in. She knew it even then. Standing there barefoot on the cold floor with her hand on the door she should have kept shut. She was going to let him in. The only question was whether the thing wearing her husband's face knew it too. Whether it had always known. Whether those three soft knocks were ever really a question at all. Or whether everything that was about to happen had already been decided long before she walked to that door. She let him in. God help her. She let him in