In the Waning Light

by Loreth Anne White

But her so-called self-indulgence, her cutting everyone out of her life, had been an act of survival, not the act of a victim. It took courage. Not cowardice.

As she watched Blake, she wondered about destiny. If some things were just written into the cosmos. If Sherry’s murder had been like a weird blip in a time-space continuum that had bumped lives into the wrong groove, and she’d been meant to return here, to rectify the blip, rewrite the ending, and reset the clock.

Oh, the secrets we keep. How we deceive ourselves, often in the name of love . . .

. . . the ways in which we deceive ourselves . . . what misguided action we take in the name of love . . .

“Her ghost isn’t. She’s inside me. Ghosts don’t die. You can scrub people and places out, but you cannot destroy the ghosts.”

Charles Dickens once said that “Home” is simply a name, a word, but it’s a strong one; stronger than any magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration. And when I saw Blake again after we thought he’d died, as I held his son’s hand in that hospital room, I finally understood how, sometimes, “Home” is not a place. It’s a person . . .