“Yes,” he said.
“Yes what?” I asked softly.
“I am afraid,” he admitted. “But not of you. Of what might happen when you are asleep.”
The truth came in fragments after that. His first wife had died years earlier. Officially, her death was labeled as sudden cardiac failure. He never believed it. He told me she had wandered at night, eyes open yet unseeing, moving as if guided by something else.
“One night I slept,” he said. “Only once.”
His voice broke.
“When I woke, she was gone.”
The house, he explained, became a fortress after that. Locks. Alarms. Bells on doors. Precautions layered upon precautions. Fear had shaped every wall.
I wanted to deny his story, but then something happened that made denial impossible.
One morning, a housekeeper told me she had found me standing at the top of the staircase in the middle of the night, unmoving, eyes wide open. My husband had been holding me, soaked in sweat, keeping me from stepping forward.
“Do you see now?” he asked me later, desperation raw in his voice.
I was terrified, not only of him, but of myself.
Yet fear did not break us. Instead, it became routine. Routine turned into something resembling safety.
One night, during a power outage, I reached for his hand in the dark. He did not pull away.
“If I am scared,” I whispered, “will you stay awake?”
“I will,” he answered without hesitation.
Months later, he collapsed.
The hospital corridors smelled of disinfectant and dread. Machines hummed around him as he lay unconscious, suddenly frail and older than I had ever allowed myself to see.
A doctor pulled me aside.
“What is your relation to the patient?” he asked.
In that pause, I realized how real this marriage had become.
“I am his wife,” I said firmly.
An elderly nurse later showed me records. The first wife had not died in bed. She had fallen from the roof during a sleepwalking episode. She had survived several similar incidents before, each time because someone had been awake to stop her.
“He was not controlling her,” the nurse said gently. “He was guarding her.”
When my husband recovered enough to come home, he no longer sat in the chair. He slept near the door instead, farther from the bed.
“You do not need watching anymore,” he told me.
But I watched him. His illness worsened. Fever dreams haunted him. I held his hand when he whispered nonsense and begged shadows not to leave.
Eventually, the truth of my condition emerged. A specialist explained that my sleepwalking was tied to trauma from childhood, buried until stress awakened it. My husband had recognized the signs long before I did.
“Why did you not tell me?” I asked him.
“Because you would have fled,” he answered quietly.
When his health failed again, he urged me to leave, to take my father and start over. That night, when he finally slept, I sat in the same chair he once used and watched him breathe.
He smiled in his sleep.
The danger had never been me.
After a risky surgery, he survived. We sold the house. We moved to a small town where no one knew our names. No alarms. No guards. Just one bed and two people learning to rest at the same time.
