Page 98 of Ghostly

“Don’t belittle me.” She stood. “We failed, but that doesn’t mean I’ve suddenly turned blind, or that I don’t know what you want. What you need.”

He stayed frozen to the spot, arms hanging limply.

“I’ll always be like this,” she said. “And this is no life. Literally, for me, but also not for you. While Wynona…” Ida swallowed hard. “I saw how you were with her. All the little touches. She made you happy once.”

“You’ve no idea what makes me happy.”

“Certainly not a ghost you can only fantasize about!” The window rattled. Ida clenched her fists and closed her eyes until the glass stopped shaking. “You can be happy with her. And don’t lie to me and say you wouldn’t be happy back in your old job, your old life.”

“I—”

“Don’t.”

He clamped his mouth shut. He couldn’t deny he loved his career, and that the melancholy of the last few days ever so faintly dissipated when he thought of returning to his former glory.

But not like this. Never like this.

“Why do you think the contract failed?” Ida said quietly.

“Surely you’re not hinting—”

“We weren’t strong enough. Maybe, because of what I am, nobody can connect to me in that way. It’s another trick of the book, like with the first contract. There’s always one condition you can’t fulfill.”

The suggestions—both Wynona’s and Ida’s—made logical sense. Reason tried to fight its way out of the numbness, make him realize he didn’t feel like moving on because he didn’t feel like doing anything at the moment… but it was still so damn hard.

Ida clenched her fists tighter than humanly possible. “I deleted Wynona’s messages.”

“You…” He shook his head.

“It wasn’t intentional. They popped up when I was researching on your laptop. She said…” Her voice trembled. “She said she missed you, couldn’tstop thinking about you. That she was all yours. And I got upset and crashed the website and deleted the messages.”

“But you remembered them. You could’ve told me.” Cold fury rose through the sorrow.

“I know. But we were in the middle of the first contract and I didn’t want you to leave.” Ida’s voice was near squealing. “That’s why you have to leave now. It was all wrong. Me keeping you here, the contracts—all of it was a damn waste of time. And of your life.”

If he hadn’t been so overwhelmed by the slew of emotions, made worse after days of trying to feel nothing, and an instinctive reaction at Ida’s admission— she lied, how could she have lied, when she knew how much his life meant to him—Gabriel might have deliberated more. Maybe he’d sit down and think it through. But he was tired of sitting down and tossing the same old thoughts around his head: failure, Ida being miserable, him being miserable, everyone giving up, failure, failure,failure…

When he was confronted with the scandal and the suspension back in October, he moped around for a few days, too. But he picked himself up and built something new. Maybe it was time to do that again; only the new would be the old, and a hurting part of him didn’t want to leave this new thing he’d built.

“I need some time,” he said to Ida. “I’ll be back later.”

“Go.” She faced away, toward the window. “And I mean it.Go.”

So he carefully shut the door, grabbed the keys to his car, and went.

***

Hours later, Ida was toying with the locket she’d brought to the living room. Up, down, up, down, up, it went through the air.

Steps outside announced Gabriel’s return. Panicked, she zipped into a book, and emerged after a minute when she didn’t sense activity in the living room.

She hid around corners and popped in and out of various objects to avoid Gabriel as he went around the house, packing. He hauled the coffee machine out of the kitchen. He spent a good hour in the bedroom, finally bringing down two suitcases. He took his laptop out of the living room.

It looked strangely empty, bare, without it on the coffee table.

With everything packed up, Gabriel paused in the hallway. Ida leaned on the other side of the wall in the living room.

He’s leaving.She told him to do so, but that didn’t make it hurt any less.