I honestly thought Ryan was having some kind of breakdown.
He kept backing away from me shaking so hard he knocked over the lamp beside the bed.
Then he grabbed his phone and started yelling for his mother.
Within minutes his parents came upstairs in pajamas looking terrified instead of confused, which made everything worse.
His mom took one look at me and started crying.
That’s when I found out Ryan had been engaged before me.
Her name was Hannah.
Same height. Same hair color. Same little scar near the collarbone from a childhood bike accident. Ryan’s mom kept staring at my chest because the scar was in the exact same place.
Hannah disappeared three years earlier driving home from work during a snowstorm outside Duluth. Car never found. Body never recovered.
Ryan met me almost a year later.
At first they all thought the resemblance was coincidence, but the longer we dated, the more it started frightening him. Same laugh. Same foods. Same habit of rubbing my thumb when nervous.
I asked why nobody told me.
His father finally said, very quietly, “Because for the first time since Hannah vanished, our son was sleeping again.”
The marriage lasted eleven months.
Not because he didn’t love me.
Because eventually I got tired of feeling like a woman haunting her own house.