The Only Man Who Could See Me Was the One I Was Destined to Love

Part 1

The last thing I remember is rain.

Cold rain and the sound of my own heartbeat going very, very wrong.

Then nothing.

Then — a bedroom I had never seen before, moonlight slanting through tall bay windows, and a man asleep in a bed I had absolutely no business being near.

I did not know how I got there.

I did not know where “there” even was.

What I did know, the second my eyes adjusted to the dark, was that the man asleep in front of me was someone I despised.

Dr.

Ethan Graves.

My university professor.

The most arrogant, condescending, effortlessly gorgeous man I had ever had the misfortune of arguing with in a departmental hallway while he looked at me like I was a mildly interesting insect.

I should have left.

Every reasonable impulse I possessed told me to turn around and walk out.

Instead I stood there staring at him for an embarrassingly long time.

That is when the first strange thing happened.

A woman with red hair burst through the door and walked straight through me.

Not around me.

Through me.

Like I was made of smoke.

I will spare you the full dramatic sequence of events that followed, but the short version is this: I was invisible.

Every person in that house moved through me, past me, around me, without so much as a blink.

I screamed.

Nobody flinched.

I waved my arms.

Nobody turned.

I tried to leave.

I couldn’t.

Every time I stepped outside the walls of that estate, something yanked me back — like a rope tied to my sternum, the other end fixed somewhere deep inside that house.

I spent the night wandering the halls of a mansion that felt older than it had any right to be, past a courtyard of tombstones half-swallowed by ivy, past children who snuck out after curfew and adults who spoke in low tones about things that made no sense to me.

By morning, I had concluded two things.

One: I was dead, or close enough that the difference was academic.

Two: I was in serious trouble.

Then Dr.

Ethan Graves woke up, looked across his bedroom, and said my name.

Not Mildred.

Not Rita.

Not the parade of wrong names he had spent an entire semester calling me just to watch me grind my teeth.

My actual name.

Emma, he said, and went pale.

I could have kissed him.

I didn’t.

I was too busy demanding answers.

He gave me some of them, and the answers were, frankly, unhinged.

The household was a wolf pack.

His household.

He was their Alpha.

My best friend Iris was one of them, which explained approximately three years of strange behavior I had chosen to ignore.

And I — apparently — was something between a ghost and a girl, a soul unmoored from her body, tethered to the one place it had decided to haunt.

His home.

Him.

I told myself the tether was random.

I told myself the fact that he was the only person on earth who could see me was a coincidence, a quirk of supernatural bureaucracy, nothing more.

I told myself a lot of things during those first few days.

Then he took me to see a witch.

She sat across from him in a field that had no business existing behind a bookstore, and she looked at the space where I was standing, and she smiled like I was the punchline of a joke she had told before.

Your spirit’s time is almost up, she told him pleasantly.

She explained that every time I reached for him — every time I made myself real enough to touch or be touched — I was burning through what was left of my soul.

A candle, she said.

Burning from both ends.

I stood in the car afterward and I did not cry.

I was very impressive about it.

Then I overheard him talking to his second-in-command that night.

I was not supposed to hear it.

He thought I was elsewhere, tucked away in whatever corner a ghost retreats to when she has run out of places to be.

But I heard him.

I heard him say my name.

I heard him say the word soulmate.

And then I heard him say that having me as one was a disaster.

I left before I could hear whatever came after.

I went somewhere quiet, somewhere far from his voice, and I decided I was done hoping for things I had always known better than to want.

The next day Iris was in trouble.

The next day everything went wrong in a very permanent-feeling way.

The next day I did something reckless and stupid and probably shortened my own existence considerably.

But I also finally cornered him.

And he finally said the part he’d left out.

He said I was a disaster — but the look on his face told a completely different story.