“Last night, after you fell asleep, I just laid there in bed trying to force myself to relax, when suddenly everything froze. Everything,” he said, trailing his knuckles down Susan’s cheek. “Including you. You had no pulse and you weren’t breathing. I thought that was it, that I had lost you for sure.” Pulling his hand away from her face, Justin brushed a tear from his eye. “I was…” he started, his voice choked with unshed tears. Taking a deep gulp of the hot coffee to clear his throat before continuing, he said, “I was getting ready to perform CPR, when a voice came from behind me.”

Justin looked at his wife with a stern expression when she made a sound that resembled a laugh, instead of the cough she tried to disguise it as. “Over in the corner,” he continued, “standing by the wardrobe was Archibald. I didn’t recognize him at first glance; he looked like a cross between the Grim Reaper and Charles Dickens’s, ‘Ghost of Christmas Past’. The sight of him was so horrifying that I slid off the bed and landed on my ass. As I stared up at him from the floor, his beef jerky-like flesh and exposed bones healed themselves.” Shaking his head, Justin chuckled. “Then, smug as you please, he wanders over, sneers down at me and said, ‘Get off your ass.’ Can you believe that? I’ve just had a huge shock and he tells me to get off my ass.”

Justin stood and walked to the small window over the sink. Staring out unseeing into the clear morning, he spoke quietly, as though he was speaking only to himself. “After I got up from the floor and he explained why he was here, Archibald just stared at you, as you slept, but I could tell that he wasn’t seeing you—he saw Emma instead. I don’t know how I know it, but Archibald loved his wife, in his own way.”

Unable to control her shock at that statement, Susan jumped to her feet and rushed across the room, roughly turning her husband around by the shoulder. “He loved her! What are you thinking?!” Clutching handfuls of his shirt, Susan shook Justin as she cried, “How could he possibly have loved her? He treated her like a possession, brutally murdered the only man she ever loved, then he gave away her child! And don’t forget that he also buried her alive!” Her tirade over and her rage exhausted, Susan slumped forward and rested her head on Justin’s chest. “Why would you think he loved her?” she asked, a bit more softly.

“Baby, I don’t know for sure,” Justin said, wrapping his arms around Susan and rubbing his hands up and down her back. “There was just something in the way he was staring at you. Archibald had this lovesick expression on his face and it just made me realize he truly did care for his wife.” Susan released an unladylike snort of disbelief into Justin’s chest and then broke into a series of hiccups. “Before you start on another rant, I think that in his own way, Archibald loved Emma. Let’s just leave it at that.” “Yeah, he loved her all right. Like a man loves his house or car,” Susan mumbled under her breath, then returned to the table, picked up her mug and drained the coffee in one swallow.

“What was that?” Justin asked slyly, “Did you say something?”

Looking into her empty mug, a slight blush forming on her cheeks, Susan asked, “What did Archibald want? I mean, he didn’t just show up to watch me sleep.”