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I don’t tell him about the night in the garage. About our bike that’s still under that sheet, still exactly where I left it.

I don’t tell him about the sounds either.

They started small. A creak in the hallway outside my room at night, the same three-beat pattern every time. Heel, shift, heel, like someone pausing outside my door and deciding not to knock. The radio in the garage that switches stations on its own, always landing on the same song, “Light On” by David Cook, the one she used to hum along to while she pretended not to know all the words.

It’s gotten worse since then. Or better. I haven’t decided which word actually fits.

Two nights ago, the bathroom faucet turned on by itself while I was standing three feet away doing nothing but staring at my own reflection. I watched the water run for a full ten seconds before I found the nerve to shut it off, hands shaking harder than they did on my worst detox night.

Last night I woke up certain that someone had been sitting on the edge of my bed. The mattress still held the shape of it, a slight give where weight should’ve been, gone by the time I was awake enough to reach for it. I lay there afterward, staring at that small, sinking depression in the mattress until it finally eased back flat, like watching proof erase itself in real time.

This morning, the coffee mug I set down on the counter, the one that used to be hers before it became mine by default, was sitting a full six inches to the left of where I left it, turned so the chipped handle faced away from me the exact way she always used to turn it, so that crack wouldn’t cut her lip.

I don’t tell Knox because I know exactly what he’ll say. That it's grief. That the mind plays tricks on us to survive the unsurvivable, and mine’s apparently decided the strange thing it needs is her. My Raven lingering at the edges of every room I try to build a life back inside of.

Maybe he’s right.

I’ve started keeping a kind of ledger in my head, though I’d never call it that out loud. Every sound, every moved object, every impossible small thing, weighed against every rational explanation I can force myself to consider first. Old pipes. Settling foundations. A draft from a window that doesn’t seal right. A mind so starved for her it’s learned to manufacture proof out of nothing, the way a man dying of thirst in the desert swears he sees water.

I run through all of it, every single time, and every single time the rational explanation loses. Old pipes don’t turn a mug. A draft doesn’t remember which way a chip in the ceramic faces.

Maybe I’m just cracking in a new direction now that the bottle’s not there to crack in the old one. That’s the explanation I keep circling back to, because it’s the one that doesn’t ask me to believe in anything. A man who spent months drowning himself in whiskey finally gets sober and discovers the drinking wasn’t the sickness, just the symptom. And not the real thing underneath it has room to grow instead. Grief, gone feral. Grief, teaching itself new tricks now that the old one’s been taken away.

I ask myself, most nights, whether I’d rather be haunted or insane. I don’t have an answer that stays the same two nights running.

If it’s insanity, at least there’s a name for it, maybe even a cure, if I could stomach admitting it to anyone. If I could stand the way Knox’s face would fall hearing it. If I could survive being the man his sister married, turning into the man everyone has to speak carefully around.

If it’s her, I don’t know what that costs either of us. I don’t know if there’s a version of this where I get to keep whatever thin, impossible thread is doing this without it eventually undoing me completely. I don’t know if she’s stuck somewhere because of me, tethered to a grief she shouldn’t have to keep witnessing. Or if some part of her chose this the same stubborn way she chose everything else in her life, without asking permission from anyone, least of all death.

But some nights, lying there alone in my room, listening to sounds that shouldn’t have any reason to be there, I let myself believe, just for a minute, that it’s really her. That some part of what I loved didn’t go into the ground with her.

That she’s still here, in whatever impossible way ghosts are supposed to exist, watching me fail to become a person worth watching, and loving me anyway. The same stubborn way she always did.

I don’t know which possibility scares me more.

Losing my mind or being right.

Some nights I whisper her name into the dark just to see what answers. Most nights, nothing does. But often enough, now that I’ve stopped being able to call it coincidence, something does. Small and quiet and impossible. I’ve started to wonder if the real question isn’t whether I’m losing my mind at all.

Maybe the real question is whether I even want to be found sane, if sane means a world without her reaching for me in it.

Astra

The examiner’s voice is doing its best to stay neutral, but even she can’t quite keep the corner of her mouth from twitching when she hands me the slip of paper confirming I passed. “Head over to the photo counter, and they’ll get your license printed up.”

The camera flashes before I’ve fully arranged my face into anything resembling composure, and a few minutes later, an actual, real laminated license is in my hand.

Outside, Knox is leaning against his truck, exactly where he said he’d wait, arms crossed, trying and failing to look like a man who isn’t nervous on somebody else’s behalf.

I hold up my new license before he can even ask.

“No way,” he says, pushing off the truck.

“Way.” I wave it at him like a winning lottery ticket. “I passed.”

“I knew you would.”

“You did not. You’ve been fidgeting with your keys for the past twenty minutes,” I say with a giggle. “I could see you from inside.”