PART 2 — The Woman in the Blue Room

The locked door in front of me no longer looked like painted wood.

It looked like the lid of a coffin.

And somewhere behind it, the past had just started knocking back.

My phone shook in my hand.

Unknown number.

If you’re outside the blue room, don’t let Tessa hear you. She told them I was dead.

I read the message once.

Then again.

Then a third time, because the mind does strange things when the impossible arrives in a format as ordinary as a text bubble.

My wife had been dead for three years.

I had stood beside a closed casket with my hand on Ellie’s shoulder while rain fell against the funeral home windows. I had signed papers with numb fingers. I had accepted condolences from neighbors who said Caroline was “in a better place” while my two-year-old daughter kept asking why Mommy wouldn’t wake up.

I had buried her.

At least, I thought I had.

Behind the door, Tessa’s voice cut through the dark.

“You don’t get to ruin this now.”

A pause.

Then that weak, hoarse whisper again.

“I want my daughter.”

My knees almost gave.

Caroline.

Not a memory.

Not grief.

Not some hallucination produced by exhaustion and rain.

Caroline.

The woman who used to hum while she painted.

The woman who called me Mick when everyone else called me Michael.

The woman who had once pressed Ellie’s newborn hand against my cheek and whispered, “This is the only masterpiece I’ll ever need.”

I reached for the doorknob.

Then stopped.