“What do you want from me?” I asked, my voice barely steady.

He looked down at the floor.

“Sleep,” he replied. “That is all.”

The following day, I confronted him in the study. He stood by the window, staring out at the tall oaks lining the driveway.

“Are you afraid of me?” I asked.

His silence was heavier than any answer.

That night, I pretended to sleep. I kept my eyes closed and my thoughts alert. He placed the chair beside the bed, closer than before, and sat on the floor with his back against it, as if guarding something fragile.

After a long while, he spoke.

“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.