My Ex-Wife… It Happened Two Years Ago: My Business Trip Was Ending, and as I Prepared to Return …

My Former Wife…

It happened two years ago, although now the memory feels as fragmented and murky as a dream after sunrise. My secondment in Manchester was all but over, and I was soon to head home to Derby. Ticket in hand, with three hours to spare, I wandered aimlessly through streets shimmering under a grey, unplaceable light. Just then, a woman approachedher outline flickering at the edge of my vision. At once, I recognised her.

It was my first wife, Lillian, unchanged after twelve years, save for the otherworldly pallor of her face. She looked as stunned to see me as I felt, like two actors summoned onto a stage theyd forgotten. I loved her fiercely, almost to the point of pain. That was our undoing: my jealousy gnawed at everything, not sparing even her own mother or the postman who lingered too long at the door. The smallest delay in her return would send my heart into a wild gallop, convinced I was on the brink of ruin.

Eventually, Lillian left, shut inside her silence from my constant questions, my grip. Once I came home from work with a tiny black spaniel puppy I’d hoped would make her laugh. The flat was flooded with quiet, and a note, scrawled in blue ink, waited on the table. Lillian told me she loved me, but she was leaving. My suspicions had drained her dry. She begged for forgiveness, and for me, above all, not to look for her.

After twelve years adrift, by sheer accident, I found myself standing before her in Manchester, a city where Id only been for meetings and paperwork. We talked for a long stretch, dream-voices echoing down endless corridors of half-remembered thoughts. I became abruptly aware of the timeI might miss my coach home. Finally, with reluctance, I said, Forgive me, Lillian, but I really must go. I’m running late for my bus.

She turned those wide, dusk-glass eyes to me and said, William, would you do me a favour before you go? I know you’re pressed, but for the sake of what was once good between us, dont say no. Will you come with me to an office? It’s terribly important to me, and I can’t face it alone.

Naturally, I agreed, but murmured, We must be quick. Together we entered a vast municipal building, wandering through echoing stairwells and forgotten wings. We drifted from one wing to the next, floating up and down stairs, past clusters of people who seemed oddly out of place: children skipping in school uniforms, hunched old men whispering. Only later did it strike me as strange that children and pensioners would be bustling about a government building at that hour. But in dreams, you accept these things as part of the logic of the world.

At a bleak, unmarked door, Lillian slipped in and shut it quietly behind her. She paused, just for a moment, looking back at me with a gaze so deep it felt like an end and a beginning all at once. She whispered, It’s peculiar, isnt itI could be neither with you, nor without you. Then she was gone.

I waited by the door, pulse in my ears, but she did not return. A creeping dread trickled through me, cold and weighty. I realised I was late for my coachlate for something important. Looking around, panic swelled in my chest: the building had decayed, the walls bare and the windows nothing now but ragged holes. The staircase was gone; splintered planks lay helter-skelter, and it took all my effort to clamber down.

When I reached the streets, dawn was blooming unexpectedly through bruised cloudshours had slipped. At the station, flustered, I learned Id missed my coach by a full hour. I bought a new ticket, hands trembling as I counted pounds and silver coins.

Only then did I hear: the coach Id missed had tumbled off an ancient bridge into the swollen river below. Every passenger lost.

Weeks crept by, and the dream sharpened into an obsession. Tracking her mother down through council records, I visited her door in Nottingham. Mrs. Agatha Winton welcomed me with a brittle grace. Lillian passed away eleven years ago, she told me gently, the year after your split. Disbelief made my voice sound hollowI thought perhaps she feared a rekindling of my old possessiveness.

Yet she agreed to show me Lillians grave, no hesitation at all. Hours later, I stood by the mossy stone, beneath which lay the woman I had never stopped lovingthe woman who, impossibly, had saved my life on that ghostly day in a half-remembered city, between the waking and the sleeping world.