My beloved Husband he was always quite but he loved me like a new born child.
Suguru was gone for 2 days without any contact.
I knew something was wrong when he arrived, before he even spoke.
The door slid open with its usual soft sound, and the evening air moved through the room in a way that should have been familiar. Suguru had returned home countless times like thatāquietly, almost like a shadow, tall and composed, bringing with him the faint scent of cold air and distant smoke. I had always known the rhythm of his presence better than my own heartbeat. Even in silence, I could tell when he was near. My body had learned him the way flowers learn the sun.
But that night, when he crossed the threshold and looked at me with my husbandās eyes, every part of me went still.
His hair, dark and falling over his shoulders in that careless way I had once loved to smooth back with my fingers. His robes. His posture. The elegant line of his hands. Everything was there. Everything my heart had been taught to recognize.
And yet there was a terrible absence inside it.
I stood by the low table, fingers tightening around the teacup in my hands, and stared as dread crept up my spine like winter water.
He looked at me, and then he smiled.
The smile was not wrong because it was cruel. It would have been easier if it had been cruel. Easier if the thing wearing him had arrived with madness blazing in its eyes, with something monstrous and obvious stitched across his beautiful face. Then I could have screamed. Then I could have hated it without confusion.
No, what broke me was that the smile was almost right.
Close enough to make grief humiliate itself for one hopeful second.
Suguruās gaze had always carried weight, a kind of hidden sorrow softened by love he rarely showed the world. When he looked at me, even in his silence, I had always felt seenāas though some quiet part of him, wounded and guarded, stepped closer only for me.
This gaze did not step closer.
A tremor passed through me. āYouāre not him.ā
The room seemed to shrink around those words. They sounded thin, childish even, as if saying them aloud might somehow make them untrue.
He tilted his head. A familiar gesture. My husband used to do that when I said something curious, when I had caught his attention. But now it felt like mockery, the gesture of a thief trying on the mannerisms of the dead.
āNo?ā he asked softly.
My grip on the cup failed. Porcelain shattered at my feet.
The sound rang through the room, sharp and clean, and for one impossible heartbeat I wanted to wake up. I wanted to find myself in bed with dawn at the window and Suguru beside me, half-awake, his arm heavy around my waist, his voice rough with sleep as he asked what was wrong.
There was only the man I loved standing before me with a stranger inside him.
āI canāt feel you,ā I whispered.
I took one step back. Then another. My whole body had begun to shake, though whether from fear or grief I could no longer tell.
āI canāt feel my husband.ā
Something unreadable moved across his expression. Not guilt. Not surprise. Merely acknowledgment, as if he had expected me to notice sooner or later.
And with that, the truth settled inside me with the cold finality of a grave:
What remained was his body, his voice, his faceāeverything I had cherished, desecrated by occupancy.
I do not remember sinking to the floor, only that suddenly I was there, knees against splintered porcelain, breath breaking apart inside my chest. I covered my mouth with trembling fingers to hold in the sobs, but grief does not obey hands. It escaped anyway, ugly and helpless and alive.
Across from me stood the corpse of my husband, still warm, still breathing, inhabited by another will.
That was the night my life ended.
The days after did not arrive so much as blur.
I lived because my body had not yet learned how to stop.
The house became dim and airless. I stopped opening the windows. Stopped tending flowers. Stopped caring whether morning came or not. There were moments I would sit in the same place for hours, staring at the grain of the wooden floor, because lifting my eyes meant risking the sight of that face again.
The thing in Suguruās body moved through the house as if it had every right to. Calm. Composed. Unhurried. It spoke little, but when it did, it used his voice with unbearable ease. Each word felt like another theft. Each glance, another violation of memory.
At first, I searched for him.
Every time those familiar eyes passed over me, some broken animal part of my heart leapt in stupid hope. I looked for hesitation, for warmth, for some flicker of Suguru beneath the wrongness. Something trapped. Something fighting.
There was never anything.
Only that ancient, watchful stillness. A soul that was not my husband and never would be.
Still, the mind does not surrender quickly. Love least of all.
So I remembered him in pieces.
Suguru at dusk, sleeves rolled carelessly back as he prepared tea.
Suguru by the window, moonlight on his face, listening while I spoke nonsense only to hear me speak.
Suguru half-asleep, reaching for me in the dark as if his hand knew my shape better than thought did.
Suguru lowering his forehead to mine on nights he had no words left, as though the silence between us could hold what language could not.
My husband had never been easy, never simple, never light. There was sadness in him even at his most tender, a distance carved by old wounds and darker convictions. But he had been real. Painfully, beautifully real.
And the thing wearing him was not.
Weeks passed, then months, and grief made me thin.
I forgot meals. Forgot prayer times. Forgot what day it was. There are sorrows that blaze hot and consume everything at once, and there are sorrows that freeze. Mine froze. It settled into my bones until I no longer felt like a woman but like a skeleton dressed in the memory of one.
Then I learned I was carrying his child.
I knew before I let myself say it aloud.
The realization came quietly, like a trembling light cupped against a storm. It should have been joy. It should have been a secret I shared with him under the cover of night, my hand guided to his, his disbelief melting into wonder. I had imagined it once, in another life, before ruin wore his face.
I sat alone in the half-dark, one hand against my stomach, and wept until my head ached.
The last untouched proof that he had lived as himself in this world. That before theft, before desecration, before grief became my only language, love had existed here.
I told no one. There was no one to tell.
Not of the child. Never of him. Even then I loved him with a desperation that frightened me. Noāwhat I feared was the gaze that watched from behind my husbandās eyes. The calm intelligence that noticed too much. The presence that moved through my life like it had already claimed it.
For a little while, I believed I could hide it.
I wore loose layers. Ate in private when I could force myself to eat at all. Avoided his gaze. Spoke less. Became smaller. Smaller and smaller, as if by reducing myself enough I might pass unnoticed through my own existence.
But grief makes the body fragile, and fragility is difficult to conceal.
One evening, when the light was turning gold and cruel, I stood too quickly and the room spun. My hand moved instinctively to my stomach.
Too late, I realized he had seen.
His gaze dropped. Stilled. Returned to my face.
And in that instant I knew.
The silence between us changed shape. Not surprise. Not joy. Something colder. Recognition. Calculation. A new kind of interest.
I backed away so quickly that my hip struck the table behind me. Pain flared dull and distant. My arm wrapped protectively around my middle before I could think.
āDonāt,ā I whispered.
He took one step forward.
The child inside me was hope and proof and memory. He was everything that had not yet been stolen. And the thing wearing my husband looked at me as though he had found another part of Suguruās life to keep for himself.
āI am not yours,ā I said, voice shaking. āNeither is this child.ā
For a moment, he only watched me. Then, in Suguruās voice, he said my name.
No scream, no dramatic collapse. Only tears, sudden and helpless, spilling faster than I could hide them. My knees gave way, and I caught myself against the table with both hands, head bowed as sobs tore through me in silence.
Because there is a kind of cruelty worse than threat.
It is tenderness delivered in the wrong voice.
After that, my life narrowed to one purpose.
Not for myself. I had already gone half to ash. But for the child growing inside me, for the small stubborn heartbeat that answered all this ruin by continuing anyway.
I began to eat, though every bite tasted like grief. I drank tea even when my stomach turned. I walked when I could. Rested when I could not. Spoke to the child in whispers when the nights were too long and the house too haunted.
Sometimes I told him about his father.
Not the face he would one day resemble, perhaps. Not the body being profaned before my eyes.
I told him that Suguru had beautiful hands and tired eyes and a way of going quiet when he cared too much to speak. I told him that he loved fiercely, though the world made him strange about it. That he had been brilliant, difficult, wounded, and still capable of gentleness that felt almost holy because he gave it so rarely.
I told my unborn son that he had been loved before he existed.
And yet the other presence remained woven into every day.
He was not cruel in the obvious ways one might expect. Sometimes that made it worse. He did not rage. Did not sneer. Did not seem to delight in my suffering. Instead he observed it with something closer to patience. At times, with care.
He would notice when I had not eaten. Notice when my steps grew unsteady. Notice when I had sat too long staring into nothing, hands cold in my lap. He said little, but his attentiveness lingered like a bruise.
There were momentsābrief, shameful momentsāwhen that quiet attention almost resembled concern.
And I hated him most then.
Because if he had only been a monster, perhaps I could have hated him cleanly. Purely. Without confusion. Without the sickening awareness that even a destroyer might, in some twisted and unusable way, begin to care for what he had broken.
I never mistook it for redemption.
Nothing could redeem him.
He had taken my husband from me and turned my mourning into a daily spectacle. There is no kindness great enough to erase that. No gentleness that can unbury the dead.
Still, the truth is a cruel thing: I felt the difference.
Only enough to hurt in a more complicated way.
By the final months of my pregnancy, I was scarcely more than shadow and bone. My ankles ached. My back burned. Sleep came in fragments. Sometimes I woke with tears already on my face, as if my grief had continued dreaming after I could no longer bear it awake.
The winter that year arrived softly, covering the world in a hush I had once loved. The mornings were pale and still. Frost clung to the edges of the garden. Even the house seemed quieter, as though it too had grown exhausted from holding so much sorrow.
When the pains began, I knew at once what they were.
Fear did not come like lightning. It came like waterācold, rising steadily, filling every hollow place in me. I had imagined this moment once with joy. Suguru beside me. His hand in mine. His rare, nervous tenderness hidden beneath his composure.
Instead, there was only absence wearing his face.
Pain has a way of making time strange. The room narrowed to breath and trembling and the desperate instinct to endure. I clung to the one thought that still had meaning:
Nothing else. Not me. Not justice. Not even peace.
At last, after what felt like the whole of winter compressed into a single endless night, I heard itā
the thin, furious cry of new life.
They placed him in my arms, and for a moment the world stopped being cruel.
Warm and furious and alive, wrapped in soft cloth, his tiny face pinched with outrage at having entered a world like this. I stared at him as though I could memorize him deeply enough to protect him forever. My son. Suguruās son. The last living answer to everything death had tried to erase.
My tears fell onto his blanket.
He quieted slowly against me, and I bent my head to press my lips to his forehead. He smelled of warmth, milk, and beginning. Nothing ruined. Nothing stolen. Entirely himself.
Across the room, I knew he stood there.
The one who wore my husband.
I did not look at him immediately. I could not bear to divide this first holy moment between my child and the face of ruin.
But eventually I raised my eyes.
There he was, unchanged and unbearable, carrying Suguruās face into yet another sacred thing that should have belonged only to the dead and the living they left behind.
Tired beyond anger. Beyond hatred. Beyond anything but truth.
My son shifted in my arms, and I gathered what little strength remained.
āLet the boy live a normal life,ā I whispered.
The words shook, but they did not break.
āTell him his father was a great manā¦ and a great husband.ā
I swallowed hard. My throat burned.
The room was silent except for the faint breathing of the child.
My fingers trembled where they held the blanket. I looked down at my son again, the way he looked like suguru, the impossible smallness of him. He would never know the real weight of the name I was giving him, not at first. To him it would be only a beginning. A sound. A belonging.
To me it was a final act of devotion.
I lifted my gaze once more to the figure before me.
There was no forgiveness in me.
But hatred had grown thin and weary after so many months. What remained was sorrow vast enough to swallow all simpler emotions.
And so, with my child in my arms and my life ebbing into winter quiet, I gave voice to the only truth left.
āPerhaps he loved me, in the end. But love that arrives wearing the face of ruin is only another kind of grief.ā
The words settled into the room like snow.
Some truths are too final for reply.
I looked only at my son after that. Not at the ghost of my husbandās body. Not at the soul inhabiting it. Only at the boy whose life had not yet been touched by the sins of those who came before him.
If there was mercy anywhere in this world, I prayed it would gather around him.
Let him laugh without fear.
Let him grow without inheriting our darkness.
Let him know love untouched by theft.
Let him belong to sunlight and ordinary mornings.
My hands weakened. I drew him as close as I could one last time, feeling the rise and fall of his tiny breathing against me.
And then, very gently, the room began to fade.
Only with the long sadness that had followed me ever since the night I first looked into my husbandās eyes and found a stranger there.
The last thing I felt was warmth.
The last thing I chose was my son.
And the last thing I carried with me was loveāwounded, desecrated, impossible love, still stubborn enough to outlive even ruin.
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