Vacant Heart

Chapter Forty-Six

Crashing lightning strikes outside the window, the raging snap and crackle of the storm bringing me out of my exhaustion already disoriented. First thing I realize, I'm on the floor of my bedroom, my clothing drenched in cool perspiration. The sliding door overlooking the balcony has sheer curtains pulled back neatly, which offer an intimidating sight of torrential rain, dropping from the sky in wild directions as the hurricane-force wind cuts through the air.

To sit up is a feat of difficulty. My muscles, my bones are weak, a full congested orchestra frenzies in my head with disturbing strength. Waves of thunder roll and rumble, shaking the apartment, and the floor beneath me. My eyes flicker to the clock on my nightstand, which reads 3:33am, reminding me of a wild night in my teens, when my friends thought, it being close to Halloween and all, that it would be interesting to try out an Ouija board to contact the spirit world, attempt to summon something beyond our fragile brains to comprehend. It was an expected failure, apart from one of us noticing that the clock stopped at 3:33 in the morning, which at the time they thought was some sort of omen.

Research proved our simplistic minds wrong.

It's regarded as an angel number, and that number is a sign to the onlooker, a message of spiritual presence. A promise of protection, an encouragement to be courageous and strong. While my body is still riddled with fright at the remembrance of the occurrences that happened before I fell unconscious, my brain can now comprehend why it was happening, and better yet—who was making it happen.

Nora and Lily have been a constant presence in my life ever since I met Aidan.

The second night in the manor, when the candles blew out, leaving me no choice but to run to Aidan, to which lead me to spend the night in his bed. It isn't lost to me that the same thing just happened to me, here in my apartment, as well as the shaking.

The same shaking that occurred when I was lead to find Nora's diary, the diary that I had no clue held the answers to her disease in chronological timeline. If I hadn't found that diary, I wouldn't have confronted Aidan about it. I wouldn't have run from the house. I wouldn't have gotten lost and broken through ice, submerging into the river. They were there, I saw them. I thought it was a hallucination.

They've been part of the entire journey. Even in moments I've created, to the moments that were completely lost to me.

The swing set. The laughter, the same laughter Aidan and I listened to within the manor. The creeping chill that's followed me for weeks, the constant inkling of being watched. I couldn't put it together before...but now... now, I know.

They brought us together. My actions in that manor were influenced by their presence, and every turn, every decision we made couldn't have been if they hadn't pushed us along.

We fell in love in a week—through unfathomable struggle, and an unearthly, numbing kind of emotion.

All along they have been ensuring that Aidan would never be alone again, that the harm in the past can be—not reversed—but mended.

It hasn't always felt like kindness, but as I sit here, feeling the weight of that number, that sign that angels are among me—and the lack of the ghostly presence I'm so used to—I'm undone, losing myself in relief, in tears of gratitude and consuming awe.

I don't know how I know it, how I know they are gone, but I do.

I can't pick myself up, overcome by staggering, almost hallucinatory combinations of emotions, which strike me immobile, giving me only enough energy to laugh and cry into my palms.

As blindingly joyous as I am, insurmountable sadness is just as prominent.

Sadness because for seven months, a chunk of my brain was clouded and torn away from the rest of me. And now that everything is so suddenly upon me, now that the pieces are conjoined, along with the months I spent in confusion, bringing Aidan with me, forcing him to live without me for this long, fight with me so tirelessly to stay in my life, I'm full of shame, shame from something that was beyond my control.