It wasn’t a ghost. It was a man, a man who had been living in the shadows of my life. He hadn’t been dead. He had just been gone. He had been watching me grow old, watching me mourn him, and all the while, he had been fixing the house we once shared.

I don’t hate him. That is the part that hurts the most. I don’t feel anger. I feel a strange, hollow sadness. He was so broken that he couldn’t leave, and I was so lonely that I didn’t want him to. We were two people lost in the same house, separated by a thin wall of denial.

I left the house the next morning. I took a few clothes and my purse and I just walked away. I didn’t look back. I know he is still there. I know he is still fixing the house, one repair at a time, trying to keep a world together that fell apart eight years ago.

I don’t know what happens now. I don’t know if he will follow me. I don’t know if he even can. I am living in a small apartment across town, and for the first time in eight years, I am sleeping through the night. It is quiet here, a different kind of quiet. It is a lonely quiet, but it is mine.

I still have the notebook. Sometimes I look at it and I cry. It cost me eight years of my life, but I suppose that is what love looks like when it stops being a choice and starts being a prison. I am safe now, but I will never be the same. I know that now.