He turned and left then through the open door. I watched him walk down the porch steps and toward the driveway where I now noticed Bill’s truck was parked. Had he just arrived …? But then I spotted the ladder leaning against the side of the house and saw Bill climbing down from it. He reached the ground just as Duncan walked past him. As the two men nodded at each other I thought I saw the air between them sizzle, but it might have been a trick of sunlight. Bill, cap pulled low over his eyes, looked from Duncan to me. I was suddenly aware of what the scene looked like: Duncan leaving my house early in the morning, me standing in my flimsy nightgown and sweater in the doorway. I blushed.

I closed the front door – slammed it, really, in my frustration at myself. The panes of glass in the fanlight trembled with the impact. I looked up – into the stained glass face that so resembled my incubus lover. His full lips and almond-shaped eyes seemed to mock me. You are bound to me, they seemed to say. You will be mine forever. I will keep you in this house for all time.

“Like Lura,” I muttered as I stomped up the stairs, taking my anger out on the old worn and bowed stair treads, which creaked and groaned as if personally offended. Like Lura who was moldering away in her decaying house because she’d been jilted by her fiancé. I’d live alone in this house while it fell apart around me, bound to a fantasy lover.

At the top of the stairs I turned to go down the hall to my room, but paused outside of the door to the room that had been Liam’s study in the brief time he’d lived here. I’d never cleaned his stuff out of my house. I had thought I’d recovered, but I’d never even gotten up the nerve to go into his room. If I really was over him, I should be able to.

I turned the doorknob, steeling myself for the sight of his desk where he used to sit looking out the window to the street.

I paused, the door half open. I recalled my dream from last night – the way Liam had made me come by just grasping my hand – and felt my knees go weak at the memory.

I opened the door … and froze on the threshold, stunned. The room was empty. The antique desk and chair Liam and I had bought together at an antiques market in the country were gone. The windowsill, which he’d lined with stones and birds’ nests and pieces of wood, was bare. For a moment I suffered the vertiginous sensation that maybe Liam had never existed at all. I’d made him up. An incubus indeed! It sounded like the delusion of a crazy person.