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I glanced around the room once more, checking to see if anything else was weird. Then I noticed a black envelope with silver lettering across the from with my name on it.

I slowly reached for it and opened the envelope. Inside was a black invitation. The moment I pulled it free and read the words printed across it, my entire body went cold.

Come Home To Me — Caspian

The invitation slipped from my fingers and landed near my feet.

“No!” That one word barely made it out.

I searched the bedroom.

“Caspian?”

Silence answered me.

My heart beat so hard I could hear it in my ears.

“Caspian, don’t…” I swallowed, fighting the tears already gathering again. “Please don’t do this to me.”

My attention moved between the dress, the roses, and the invitation. These were things nobody should have known about. Things that were supposed to be gone.

“Caspian, if this is really you…” My voice cracked. “I need more proof.”

A tear slipped down my cheek.

“Please. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep feeling you and then turning around and there’s nobody there.” I wiped my face with a trembling hand. “If this is you, I need you to tell me, but don’t scare me like this, baby.”

The room remained quiet for several seconds. Then the air around me seemed to shift, and that familiar presence settled over the room again. It was the same sensation I had felt beside me in bed, the constant feeling that someone was standing close enough to reach out and touch me, except that time it was stronger, almost impossible to dismiss as my imagination.

Then I smelled his cologne… not faintly or like some memory my mind had pieced together because I missed him so much, but strong enough that there was no mistaking it. The scent surrounded me and my chest tightened because I knew that smell as well as I knew his voice.

I closed my eyes. “Caspian?”

His voice came so clearly that it felt as though he were standing directly beside my ear.

“It’s me, baby.”

I flinched and hurriedly opened my eyes.

Nobody was there, but the warmth remained, along with his scent and the unmistakable feeling of somebody standing beside me.

I slowly turned my head. “Caspian?”

“Yeah, beautiful.”

A sob escaped me before I could stop it, and I covered my mouth.

Oh, my God.

That was Caspian’s voice, not some old memory replaying in my head or something my imagination had created because I wanted so desperately to hear him again. It was him, and after six years of wondering if I would ever hear that voice again, there he was speaking to me as clearly as if he had never left.

“Caspian…”

I reached toward the empty space beside me, and my hand met warmth. It wasn’t a solid body, not exactly, but it was enough to make my breath catch all over again.

I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him, and somehow, standing there in that bedroom with his voice surrounding me, the truth settled somewhere deep inside my chest before my mind was ready to accept it.

The man I had spent six years waiting for wasn’t alive somewhere choosing not to come home; he was gone from the world the way I had known him.