Page 116 of A Summoned Husband

I ran toward it. Never in my life had I so desperately needed the smallest hint of light. I needed to stand closer to it to remember what it felt like to be somewhere where the darkness wasn’t so thick and menacing.

Shadows rose up around me. Silhouettes in the dark as I got closer to the single star. No… not a star. A flame.

A candle.

The darkness lost its intensity as I looked at a familiar face.

“Olivia!” I reached out, wanting to touch her but my hand turned into brown smoke as it lost its shape before it once again became my hand. “What the?” I reached out again, watching myself quickly disappear before I came back together.

I wasn’t there. Or maybe… she wasn’t? I didn’t really know.

“Olivia?”

Candles cast a warm glow around the dark room. Olivia knelt over the table covered in a black cloth with all kinds of witchy symbols woven through with gold threads. Her hand held the dark spade and she pushed it across the board.

“Are there any spirits here in this room with me?” Olivia called out to the darkness.

I looked down at myself, kneeling on the other side of the table. “Vi, babe, what are you doing?”

After everything we’ve learned through our drunken mistakes, she should know better than to be doing all this. Sitting alone in the dark. Nothing but the eerie glow of candlelight around us as she called out to something. To anything.

This was a bad idea.

“Olivia?”

Silence was her answer.

“Are there any spirits in the room with me,” she repeated. Her brown curls were tucked behind one of her ears and she wore the earrings Imani had gotten her for her last birthday. Pretty dangly gold ones with leaf pendants at the ends. The candlelight made her light eyes look dark and her freckles look like constellations.

She couldn’t hear me.

My lip puckered as I watched her.

I loved her so much. She weirdly was the best of us. Sure, she never really seemed to fully understand what was going on. She tended to jump before she looked, and she had an argument for pretty much everything. She talked through the movies asking a million questions and whined more than her children, but she was also extremely kind. Olivia was the person who would give the shirt off her back if it meant making someone’s day. She was smiles through a rainstorm and happy secrets whispered in the dark when you were a kid at a sleepover. She was… Olivia.

I loved them all so much.

These past days had been so chaotic, I didn’t realize how much I missed them until right now. Sitting across from an Olivia I couldn’t talk to and wondering if I would get the chance to ever speak to her again.

My hand stretched across the table and I rested it on hers. My hand dispersed like blown smoke. A sigh inflated my chest. This was its own kind of torment.

The pointer moved, lifting to the Yes in the top corner.

She shifted on her knees. “Did you die in this house?”

The pointer moved. No.

“Are you friendly?”

The pointer dropped viciously to the bottom of the board, making me jump, before it shot back up. No.

Everything in me tensed. Why the hell did Olivia always have to mess with these kinds of things? There she was. Alone. Talking to evil spirits in the dark. She needed more to do. The housewife life was where she thrived but she was too good at it. It didn’t take nearly enough time, clearly, if she could get up to all this.

I tried to reach for her again, tried to rip the pointer from the board, but it was no use. I was as much a ghost or spirit or whatever as whatever she was talking to.

“W-what do you want?” Olivia asked.

Probably not to have a conversation, girl. The fuck? Say goodbye or whatever and chuck this damn board outside just like Imani did.