The apartment smells wrong without him, and I hate it. I hate how the walls seem to lean in like they’re gossiping about his absence. I hate how my keys sound too loud when I set them down because there’s no one here to tease me about always losing them.

Three days. It’s been three days since the accident. Three days of my mother making me tea I don’t like and looking at me with those eyes that say my baby is broken and I can’t fix this.

I step inside the apartment, and the door clicks shut. It sounds so final; I want to scream. Everything is exactly as we left it, and that’s the cruelest thing, isn’t it? Frasier’s coffee mug sits on the counter with my lipstick mark from where I stole a sip Friday morning—back when stealing sips was something I could do, back when he was alive and warm and here with me. The running shoes he never put away lay in their usual tangle by the door. That drove me mental. The way he always left his things lying around the apartment, but now I’d give anything—anything just to trip over those running shoes one more time.

The grocery list on the fridge stops my heart: milk, that bread S likes, flowers (surprise.) I press the palm of my hand on the list and close my eyes. “The flowers... he never got to buy me those flowers.” I pick up his coffee mug and hold it against my chest, thinking that maybe if I press hard enough, it’ll leave a mark, something permanent, something that says he was here, he was real, and this love affair did really happen.

A shadow flickers in the corner of my eye. “Frasier?” His name escapes my mouth before I can stop it, and my heart jumps and does this stupid, hopeful dance, quickening its rhythm in painful anticipation, but it’s just the curtain swaying in the breeze. I laugh out loud, but the sound feels wrong, like something precious breaking inside me. I’m such an idiot.

The atmosphere in the apartment, once filled with the warmth of shared laughter and witty banter, now feels cold and empty, a constant reminder of what is no longer here. The bedroom is sheer torture. I stand in the doorway to our bedroom for a long time before forcing myself across the threshold. Frasier’s pillow still holds the shape of his head, and I can’t decide whether that’s beautiful, devastating, or both—probably both. Everything about Frasier was always a complex mix of good and bad, light and dark. He was a walking puzzle, a guy who could totally annoy you but also charm the pants off you, and that’s why I loved him so much.

His book is still open, face down on the nightstand, marking page 237. The book is entitled “The Space Between Us,” and the sight of his book, of our book, just makes me cry. We picked out the book together, an intellectual journey we embarked on with so much excitement. My copy rests in my nightstand drawer, the same book, the same unfinished story. We were reading it together, a quiet ritual that spoke of the connection we shared, of how our minds often thought alike. Now, the prospect of finishing it alone, of going through its theories and insights without Frasier’s lively comments, without his knowing look as he ran his eyes across the pages, is a future irrevocably stolen. The words on its pages, once a source of shared discovery, now mock me with their unread promise. Though it may sound like a trivial detail, a mere matter of paper and ink, its weight feels immense—a total collapse of our world, a universe imploding into unread words and unspoken conversations. Each page unread is a moment lost, a potential discussion silenced forever, a shared journey abruptly halted.

I reach for his copy, my fingers trembling as they trace the broken spine. He was terrible with books, always manhandling them, cracking them open too wide, folding down corners of pages even though I’d bought him a stack of colorful bookmarks. My copy, on the other hand, is pristine—super well kept. I had carefully highlighted all the passages I wanted to share with him.

I remember Frasier would read passages to me before we went to sleep. “Listen to this, Sarah,” Frasier remarked one evening, commenting on a passage out loud in his terrible philosopher voice that always made me laugh. “About how two consciousnesses can become entangled, creating a third space of shared understanding.”

“Pretentious,” I said, but I was already opening the book, already lost in the first paragraph.

I look at his pillow that still holds the shape of his head and sit down on his side of the bed. I sink into the mattress, and for a second, I swear, I feel the mattress dip beside me as well. “Frasier, is that you?” No answer. Just imperfections in the mattress, I guess. I settle onto his side of the bed, clutching the copy of his book to my chest—page 237. We’d just started Chapter Twelve: “The Architecture of Shared Memory.” I can see his notes in the margins—his handwriting like drunk spiders, barely legible but so distinctly his. Next to a passage about how memories reshape themselves when shared, he’d written: S’s laugh when she first read this.

“I miss you,” I whisper to him. “I miss you so much, I think I’m actually going insane.”

The curtain moves again even though the window’s closed, and my rational mind (what’s left of it) whispers it’s just the air conditioner, but my heart says maybe it’s him. Maybe he’s still here with me. I bury my face in his pillow and breathe in his scent—shampoo mixed with that unique Frasier smell, something essentially Frasier that I never put my finger on because I thought I would have forever to figure it out. A profound melancholy settles over me, heavy with the echoes of all the intimate moments we shared on this bed in this bedroom.

Emotionally exhausted, I surrender to a sleep that is closer to passing out than falling asleep, and at 3 AM, our cat, Mr. Whiskers, starts meowing, and it’s not the normal feed-me-now meowing. It’s this low, mournful sound that pulls me from my sleep. As I awaken, I see Mr. Whiskers sitting on the dresser staring at Frasier’s picture. “Baby,” I whisper to the cat. He’s got one little grey paw planted right on the frame of Frasier’s picture, and he’s making this sound that’s somewhere between a meow and a question, like he’s saying, ‘Where’s Frasier?’ “I know,” I tell him. “I know, baby. I miss him too. He’s here, isn’t he?” I ask Mr. Whiskers. Mr. Whiskers is our cat, but he was always more Frasier’s. It was Frasier who found him as a kitten, shivering in a cardboard box outside the coffee shop. He was so small he fit in one palm. Frasier bottle-fed him every few hours and taught him not to attack toes under the blanket. It was Frasier who taught him to use the litter box and let him sleep on his chest, even when the cat got big enough to affect Frasier’s breathing.

As I lie in bed petting Mr. Whiskers, I suddenly catch a whiff of what smells like Frasier’s cologne coming from the bathroom, so I get up and walk into the bathroom. What I see freezes me in my tracks. The mirror’s fogged like someone’s just showered, and the sink faucet is running, and there, in the condensation, someone’s drawn the letter ‘S.’ My initial. The letter ‘S.’

“Frasier? Is that you?”

Nothing. Just the drip of the faucet we never fixed because we were too busy being young and in love.

Mr. Whiskers jumps onto the counter and starts meowing.

I can’t believe this is happening. A primal panic seizes me, and I rush back into the bedroom, collapse on the bed, and switch on the TV. I skip past the news, landing on a cooking show—the kind Frasier pretended to despise but always watched with me, his head in my lap, stealing bites of whatever I was eating, a playful tug-of-war for the last spoonful of ice cream.

Then I feel him—really feel Frasier’s presence in the room. Instead of being beside me, he’s sitting across from me in his chair, and something is warping around him—a visible distortion resembling heat waves, as if the very fabric of the universe is bending, rippling around him—so I turn my head slowly. The rippling waves solidify, and my heart stops—literally stops beating, I swear—because Frasier is there. See-through Frasier. Translucent Frasier. It’s Frasier, and he’s sitting in his chair wearing the blue shirt I bought him for his twenty-seventh birthday, the one he died in. But there’s no blood, no trauma, just Frasier looking at me with an expression of profound disbelief, as if he can’t quite believe it either. He seems to be as stunned by his own presence as I am.

His mouth moves. No sound, then barely a whisper: “Sarah?”

I can’t speak, can’t even breathe. I just nod. I can see right through him to the wall and chair behind him. His eyes open wider, and he leans forward, becomes slightly more solid, and speaks the words that undo me completely:

“You can see me?” Frasier asks me.

I sob—ugly, deep sobs, body-shaking sobs that have been festering inside me for three days. “Yes. Yes, I can see you. You’re here. Frasier, you’re here.“

He moves toward me, then stops just out of reach, and it’s so just like Frasier to be respectful of my space even when he’s dead.

“I don’t know if I can touch you. I’ve been trying for days, but my hand just goes through things,” he says.

“Days? You’ve been here for days?”

“Since it happened. Time’s weird now. I was in the car, and I lost control, and then I was here, watching Mom hold you.”

Frasier looks so confused, like a lost puppy, as he narrates the story of losing control of his car and crashing.

“I tried to tell you I was okay, but you couldn’t hear me.”

“But now I can... I can hear and see you,” I smile.

“Now you can,” he smiles back. Frasier has a smile that can melt any woman’s heart. It’s that same smile that hooked me six years ago. The smile he gave me at Lorenzo’s coffee shop when we first met.

I reach for him and he reaches back, and in the space between our hands, the air seems to thicken and pulse with something that makes my whole body light up with recognition. Our fingers meet, like touching cold glass, like the memory of static electricity, like pressing my hand into cold water that doesn’t quite break around my fingers. I can see his hand overlapping mine, translucent and glowing with an inner luminescence, and where they meet, there’s this sensation. Something we don’t have a word for because the living aren’t supposed to feel the dead.

“Oh,” I breathe, and I’m crying again because this is more than I dared hope for.

Frasier’s face crumples with something between joy and agony. “I can feel you. Not... not completely, but—Sarah, I can feel you.”

I press harder, trying to make our palms meet properly, and the cold intensifies, spreading up my arm like frozen honey. It ought to be dreadful, but it isn’t—it’s him, it’s Frasier, and I would endure frostbite if it meant maintaining this connection.

“Your hand is so cold,” I whisper.

“I’m sorry—”

“No.” I shake my head firmly, keeping my hand exactly where it is. “Don’t apologize. Never apologize for this.”

He studies our almost-joined hands with wonder. “It’s like... remember that time we went swimming in Maine? That lake was so cold it made our bones ache.”

“I remember. You said you could feel the cold in your teeth.”

“That’s what this is like,” Frasier quips.

Frasier was always good at finding the perfect metaphors, making the ordinary feel sacred. I used to tease him about it, calling him my discount philosopher, but secretly I treasured every metaphor and typed them into my phone when he wasn’t looking.

“I miss you,” I say, and the words feel pathetically small for the enormous emptiness his absence has carved into me. “I miss you so much I can’t breathe properly. I keep forgetting how to do basic things. This morning, I put coffee grounds in my cereal bowl. Yesterday I wore two different shoes to your mother’s house.”

He gazes into my eyes, his forehead resting against mine, as his thumb traces soft circles on my hand. I can feel the ghostly touch of his thumb against my hand. He used to do that when I was anxious, trace these little circles that somehow made everything bearable. Our foreheads are still touching, and I swear I can feel him becoming more solid, like my need is giving him form.

“I miss how you’d hold my hand like this when I was feeling sad,” I tell him. “I miss you in bed, Frasier. I miss the way you used to read passages from books to me before we went to sleep.”

We’re both crying and laughing now, and where our hands meet, the sensation has changed—it’s less cold and more electric, like touching a battery with my tongue when I was a kid, testing whether it still had charge.

“I miss the weight of you,” I tell him, getting serious now. “Not just in bed, but... everywhere. How you’d lean against me when we were waiting for the subway. How you used to put your head in my lap when you were sad. The way you filled the atmosphere and took up space in every room, made it yours, made it ours.”

“Oh, Sarah—” Frasier sobs as he squeezes my hand tighter.

I press my palm harder against his ghostly one, trying to memorize this impossible sensation. “I miss knowing you were coming home,” I tell him. “That specific feeling every evening when I’d hear your keys. I miss having someone with whom I can share the boring parts of my day. I miss—” My voice breaks down. “You knew exactly how I took my coffee depending on my mood. You knew when I needed to talk and when I just needed to be held. You knew which Netflix movies I would like to watch, finding all the obscure indie dramas for me. You knew to leave me alone for exactly twelve minutes when I was upset before coming to check on me. You knew me, truly knew me, in a way no one else ever has or ever will.”

“Thirteen minutes,” he corrects gently. “It was always thirteen. I left you alone for exactly thirteen minutes. Twelve wasn’t quite enough.”

Of course, he’s right. Even dead, he knows me better than I know myself.

“I can’t do this without you,” I moan. “I don’t know how to be Sarah without Frasier. We were supposed to have decades. We were supposed to get married and fight about wallpaper and have babies who looked like you, but with my stubbornness. We were supposed to finish that stupid book together. Come back to me, Frasier,” I plead, knowing I’m asking the universe for something it can’t give. “Please, just come back, like the way you were before the accident.”

His ghostly fingers tighten around mine—I feel them against my hands, that almost-pressure, that suggestion of a squeeze. “Sarah, I’m here,” he says, and our hands are still touching, still conducting this impossible electricity between the living and the dead. “I’m here, Sarah. You’re the only thing that feels real. I can’t hear or see anything except you.”

I laugh through tears.

“I can’t even think about going anywhere or doing anything. I just want to be here by your side, Sarah.”

“I don’t want to hold you here, Frasier, if you need to go. If there’s something after—an afterlife.”

“There might be. I feel it sometimes, like a door I haven’t walked through. I’m not ready to go through that door yet—not when you’re here talking to empty rooms and crying into my pillow.”

“Frasier, am I being selfish in wanting you to still be a part of my life?”

“Maybe you are. Maybe we both are.” He tilts his head and looks at me the way he always did. “Does it matter?”

And no, it doesn’t. Nothing matters except the two of us together again.

“Everything’s different now,” I reply.

“Not everything.” He lifts his other hand to almost cup my cheek, and I feel it like a cool breeze, like a whisper against my skin. “I still love you. You still love me. That’s the same.”

“But I can’t really hold you the way I held you when you were alive,” I lament.

“You’re holding me now.”

“I can’t kiss you.”

“You can try,” he says, looking into my eyes.

I lean forward, and time does this thing where it stretches like taffy, like the universe is holding its breath, like every atom between us is rearranging itself to make this possible. He leans forward, too, and I can see through him to the wall behind him, but I don’t care; I don’t care about the fact that this shouldn’t be possible. All I care about is the way his eyes—his beautiful, translucent eyes—are looking at me like I’m the only person in the world.

The space between us shrinks. Six inches. Three. One.

Our lips meet.

It’s nothing like kissing when Frasier was alive—there’s no warmth, no pressure, no taste of morning coffee or mint gum or the cherry chapstick he used to playfully steal from my pocket. Instead, it’s like breathing in crisp, cold winter air or swallowing starlight that’s been traveling for a thousand years just to arrive at this moment.

“Sarah,” he breathes against my lips, as if holding something sacred, and I can feel and taste him.

And then—

Something shifts.

The cold that’s been defining his presence suddenly flares into something else, something that isn’t warm but isn’t cold either. It’s like temperature stops mattering. My muscles relax and I let go and a bright light begins expanding from the center of my chest, like someone’s reached inside me and grabbed hold of whatever makes me me—not my heart, but the light that lives behind it, the part that loves Frasier. It’s like touching the place where love lives, that force that makes hearts beat and flowers turn toward the sun, and enables people to find each other across impossible divides. That light from inside me winds around the light from inside Frasier, and for one perfect moment, we’re not two people separated by death. We’re one. One light. One heartbeat.

“Oh, Frasier, I love you,” I say, lost in the light. “Please don’t leave; let’s stay as one.”

“I love you too,” he replies, and the lights pulse again, brighter, and for a second I think maybe all those songs and poems and stories were right and death isn’t the end but just a really inconvenient middle.

But then I feel it starting to fade.

The warmth begins to cool. The pressure of his lips lightens. The solid realness of him starts to go translucent at the edges, like a photograph dissolving in water.

“Noo!” I lament, trying to hold on, trying to keep the lights wound together. “Please, no.”

“Shh,” he soothes. “It’s okay. We did it. We broke through.”

“But you’re leaving again.”

“Not leaving, Sarah. Just... returning to how I was. But Sarah—” he kisses me once more, soft, barely there but somehow infinite. “Now we know. Now we know it’s possible. The boundary between us isn’t solid. Our love for each other makes it permeable. Death isn’t the end, Sarah. It’s just a change in frequency, a shift in visibility, a move to a different plane.”

Mr. Whiskers jumps onto the couch between us, purring like he’s proud of us, like he knew this was possible all along and was just waiting for us to figure it out.

After a few minutes, we return to normal and sit together on the sofa. I tell him about the funeral and how his brother chose the best coffin. He tells me about watching me sleep and wanting to fix the worry lines on my forehead. We’re crying and laughing, and it’s horrible and perfect because here we are, against all odds, together again.

“Will you stay tonight?” I ask him.

“Every night. Until whatever comes next.”

We walk to the bedroom, and for a moment it’s like it was before, and he’s watching with the face that says I love you and I’m sorry for dying and leaving you.

We lie facing each other, inches and infinites apart.

“I love you,” I tell him.

“I love you too. That doesn’t change. Death doesn’t change that.”

“Frasier?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t disappear while I’m sleeping.”

“Never,” he promises, and we both know promises are different now, fragile as moth wings.

I close my eyes and stretch my trembling hand across the ghostly chasm that separates our worlds, feeling a tingling sensation where his ghostly fingers touch mine. We stay like that, hands pressed together, and I tell him everything I didn’t get to say when he was alive—every unspoken sentiment, every regret—how he made me brave, how he made me better, and how his unwavering belief in me had been my sole support for all these years. He made me believe in forever, even though forever turned out to be so much shorter than we planned. He tells me about the spaces between seconds where he exists now, how he can feel my love like a tether, and how being dead is like being homesick for a place made of flesh and blood and heartbeat.

“Frasier, promise me something,” I say finally.

“Anything.”

“Promise you’ll stay as long as you can, even if it’s selfish of me to ask, even if there’s somewhere else you’re supposed to be.”

His ghostly hand squeezes mine tighter, and I memorize the almost-feeling of it, this new language of touch we’re learning.

“I promise,” he says. “Until you don’t need me anymore.”

“So forever, then.”

“Forever,” he agrees, and our hands stay pressed together as I drift off to sleep.

In my dreams, Frasier is solid and warm, and he’s breathing. In my dreams, he never left at all. In my dreams, we get to grow old. But I’ll take this. I’ll take whatever this is. Because the alternative—a world without him at all—that’s the real ghost story.

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