Archive of Our Own ^beta

At least, when Alison goes, she knows what to expect.

That’s one hell of an ‘at least,’ though.

She’s only thirty-four years old. She and Mike have their entire futures ahead; they’d been getting a steady stream of event bookings, they’d been planning to resurrect the gate house after getting extensive repairs done…they’d been talking about trying for a baby…and then this had come along. She’d been complaining of tiredness and breathlessness for months, but it’s not until she feels faint and passes out on the stairs one afternoon she thinks enough of it to get it checked out. And the results they had optimistically assumed would come back normal had betrayed something far worse; the ominous sympathetic looks from the doctors had made their confidence come crashing down even before the death knell was delivered.

And now they’re staring a terrifying outcome in the face, trying to come to terms with the jumble of words thrown at them by the physicians, words like metastasised and should have come to us sooner and palliative care, trying to struggle to their feet after being hit like a tonne of bricks with the fact that it’s months they’ve got to play with, not years.

They come home as if in a fog, the world around them seeming unreal, frozen. They unlock the door mechanically, step shakily through the threshold, and it’s only when they’re inside they both let their tears fall.

It’s a blessed relief the ghosts are occupied when they get back, still where Alison left them, parked in front of the telly with a Carry On box set.

She doesn’t know how to face them, to deliver the news, when she’s still reeling from it herself. And she doesn’t know how to ask them the question that’s already burning on her brain.

Alison pauses at the foot of the stairs, reaches for Mike and crushes him into her arms, holding him as tightly as she can, feeling trembling and unsure whether it’s hers, his or a mixture of both.

Who’d have thought just six years after they inherited this house, stepped through its threshold full of excitement and hope for the future, that that future would be snuffed out just like that? That she’d been saved from death when she fell, only to succumb to its inevitability just six years later?

It’s not fair, it just isn’t fair, and yet, Alison thinks, in a burst of desperation, delusion or possibly clarity, it doesn’t have to be the end of everything.

After all, it’s not as if she’s the first to die young in this house, is it?

They get through every day, and then slowly, as the sun goes down, they fall to pieces, when they can no longer keep the horrific elephant in the room at bay.

The bookings have stalled; she doesn’t have the strength, nor Mike the emotional stamina to carry on.

The only thing that holds Alison together is the ghosts; is talking to them, planning as much as it’s possible to plan. She’s going to hold on; try to stay. Become the newest ghost of Button House. She’s sure she can do it.

It’s not the consolation she’d hoped for. Being a ghost around Mike won’t be the same as being alive with Mike; it doesn’t take away the sting, and while Alison clings to it as a shred of hope that something will still be okay, Mike himself is far less optimistic. He’s crushed, understandably so, and she gets why don’t worry, I’ll still be a ghost doesn’t really cut it.

She holds onto it all the same. Knowing what’s coming gives her something to focus on, something to aim for. Her doctors had given her some strange looks when she’d brought up her bizarre last requests—but Alison, insisting she was of sound mind and backed up by Mike, had been resolute. If she’s going to go, she’s going to go prepared—at home, not in hospital, no tubes down her nose, no cannulas in her arm, no hospital gown—nothing horrid attached to her that’ll follow her around for the rest of her existence.

She keeps herself busy, trying to prepare for it as though for a trip, choosing the clothes she wants to wear for all eternity (she considers looking her best, putting on her nicest dress, and veers off in the opposite direction at the last minute. Better to be comfy for all eternity, she decides, after hearing Pat and Julian’s lamentations about their lack of proper trousers, and so she lays out her favourite jumper and jeans to be donned when the day draws nearer).

‘Socks, check. Toothbrush and toothpaste, so I don’t have foul breath forever, check.’ She points to each item in turn, Pat reminding her of the next one, until Mike, handing her items listlessly, seems to snap.

‘Having fun are we? Gettin’ ready to go on holiday with all your dead mates?!’

 ‘Mike,’ Alison pleads, reaching for him beyond the layers of grief clouding his words. ‘Can we please not do this? Can we not just…make the most of the time we have?’

And then the tears comes to his eyes, and he falls forward into her arms.

‘I can’t get my head round it,’ he says, and she clutches him tighter to her. ‘You being gone.’

‘I’ll be here,’ Alison whispers. ‘I’ll still be here.’ It’s a promise. She’s not going to go anywhere. She knows she doesn’t have to.

But it won’t be the same, and they both know it.

Alison glances knowingly at the ghosts gathered around them. They’ll have forever—her and them; she’s got such little time with Mike left she wants to hold onto it.

‘Erm…can you give us a moment in private, guys?’

There’s some obligatory grumbling, and the ghosts get out of their faces—though Alison knows they won’t have gone far.

‘Mike,’ she murmurs again. ‘Let’s just…spend this time together, yeah? We’ve still got a few months—let’s not waste them arguing.’

She feels him sigh against her. ‘You’re right.’

And then a pause.

'Have they gone?’

'Yes,’ Alison says, nestling closer.

Of course, they're all still there.

But Mike doesn’t need to know that.

‘Do tell me, sweet Alison—I know it is a delicate subject, but after the…unfortunate event…’

‘—Thomas,’ Alison warns. ‘Please. We talked about this. My death doesn’t automatically mean wedding bells.’

He’s as bad as Kitty, really, with her this will be one long sleepover again and again. And it’s not as if she doesn’t appreciate that the ghosts, while feeling sorry for her, are pre-emptively accepting her as one of their own—but they seem to forget that she’s not actually looking forward to being dead.

‘Of course, I understand that—but some sort of timescale might be nice…’ clocking her face, he refrains from putting his foot in it any further.

‘Or, should it still be too tender, I would only be honoured to offer my services as your friend and companion to navigate these new waters…at least until you’ve become accustomed to them.’

She’s too devastated to crack a real smile, but the closest thing possible comes to her face.

‘You mean, hang around me until you think I’ve got over being dead and then make a move?’

‘You read me too well. Are you that in tune with my senses?’

‘Thomas,’ she warns again, ‘flattering as your unwavering devotion is, d’you think you could…give it a rest, for a while?’

‘You are right. Of course. How insensitive of me.’

She shakes her head as he turns to leave.

There’s a pause, and then his head pokes back round the door, an impertinent, teasing smile on his face.

‘We will have plenty of time for that later.’

Alison chucks a cushion through him and he meekly desists.

She’d felt prepared—as prepared as she’ll ever be, given the circumstances. She’s had six months to come to terms with it; she’s done everything she can to make sure she goes the right way.

But still, when it happens, it takes her aback, shocks and horrifies her, and no, she thinks, feeling herself start to go, she could never have been prepared for this.

She’d expected a gentle slipping away, waking up on the other side of her life.

The reality is bone-crunchingly painful.

She can’t breathe, can’t move, everything is crushing her and stretching her all at once—and then there’s a strange ripping; a detaching, and as though out of her control, she’s sitting up, feeling a grotesque peeling-away as she does.

‘Called it,’ says a voice she faintly recognises as Julian’s. ‘Today’s the day—you owe me a tenner.’

‘She is a beautiful creature even in death. Be still, my beating—’

‘ ‘ere! Someone lift me up, will yer? I can’t see!’

Is this…is she…

‘She’s staying! She looks like she’s staying!’

Beside her, Mike’s features contort in pain.

‘Alison? Alison!’

The voices blur together, her vision along with them—and then they unblur again.

As though silhouetted by an extremely bright light, she sees the murky faces of the ghosts, gazing up at her, mouths open in a collective gasp as they come back into sharp focus.

Silence for a moment, and then stillness. And then…

'Oh, hurrah!’ is the first thing she hears, and then Kitty is upon her.

Kitty’s hug is stifling.

She’s clearly making up for lost time—and it startles Alison at first to feel the solidity of her—warm, plump arms and the whisper of breath by her ear. Kitty has a physical presence now—or perhaps Alison doesn’t have one.

‘Oh, I did hope you would stay,’ Kitty exults, ‘now we can truly be bosom friends—and I can hug you all day, and—’

'Control yourself, Catherine,’ comes the commanding bark of the Captain. ‘The woman has just died, for pity’s sake! This requires treatment for shock, with further first aid on standby—’

‘Yes, yes, let’s bore the knickers off her, why don’t we?’ comes Julian’s drawl. ‘Don’t forget, you all owe me that hypothetical tenner. Or I’ll settle for an evening of entertainment of my choice in lieu…’

‘On behalf of my fellow ghosts—of whom you are now a member,’ Pat says cheerfully, ‘let me be the first to welcome you to your new…well, to your new death! Which isn’t quite as morbid as it sounds…’

‘Oh, my sweet love!’ and then Thomas’s hand seems to be everywhere—on her shoulder, on her arm, trying to wrap around her waist, ‘we are together at last!’

They’re all advancing on her now, all of them jabbering something at her, and Alison is overwhelmed, her head spinning from how…much this is. She’s scarcely been dead thirty seconds, and she’s unable to even process it, not when she’s being bombarded with comments and embraces left, right and centre.

‘Guys—please,’ she begins, but then the sobbing and whelping starts up, and everything around Alison, her new reality, is forgotten in an instant.

She’d thought she was prepared to handle her own death.

She isn’t prepared for this.

Watching Mike break feels like her death all over again, but intensified to the nth degree.

Grief, she’d always been taught, was supposed to be something the living experience when faced with the dead.

She’d never really thought about it the other way—that grief can be experienced by the dead, when faced with the living. Her grief mirrors Mike’s; the mind-numbing agony of seeing him and yet being unable to speak to him—unable to touch him—although she wonders if he’d notice her presence should she try. He walked through the others frequently—but this is her husband; they were connected in special ways; perhaps they have some level of spouse-ESP.

He’s sobbing, and all she wants is to hug him, remind him that somehow, on some ethereal plane, she’s still here.

And damn it, she’s going to.

‘Alison,’ Kitty warns, dark eyes wide with concern. ‘You shan’t like it.’

‘I don’t care,’ she whispers, and flings herself at him.

Her lungs clench. Every molecule of her where she's touching him is suffocating, filled with his molecules, as though she’s completely porous, and every pore is being bricked up with a solidity that shouldn’t be there, choking the fibres of her being until her being repels it, compelling her to leap backwards.

No wonder they all hate it.

She can't imagine how much worse it must have been for Mary, feeling razed to ash again on top of that.

It pained her to stay in the embrace, but it pains her even more when she steps back, resigned, and acknowledges that this is it now. Even if she wanted to experience that again, her spirit seems to actively reject it.

'I can never touch him again.’

She doesn't realise she thought the words out loud until Kitty is fiercely hugging her again.

‘You still have us.’

'Yeah,’ Alison rasps, feeling Kitty constrict the non-existent breath out of her for an entirely different reason, watching Mike clutch at the hand of her old body. 'Yeah.’

It’s several weeks before she can even comprehend being a ghost, can even begin to acknowledge it all: the frustration of not being able to touch things, the stupid inconsistency of what she can sit on and what she can’t.

 All she can see is Mike, pacing aimlessly round the house, sitting silently, lost inside his own head. She follows him doggedly, making sure that at every moment he has the opportunity to somehow feel her presence—standing beside him as he puts the kettle on, flicks light switches on and then forgets why he went into a room, turns the telly on and flips channels mindlessly, nothing holding his attention.

She still sleeps in their room beside him at night, hoping to reassure him, though he can’t see or feel her. Sometimes he rolls over in his sleep, rolling right through her, and Alison feels that unbearable pore-clogging again. She persists regardless, determined to stick it out.

It takes longer than she expected for him to try and communicate with her. Mike is unusually quiet, barely speaking except when he can be bothered to answer his phone, absorbed in grief—and so when it happens, it’s a shock.

‘Alison?’

Alison flinches at her name.  Mike is gazing in the direction of the ceiling, eyes wide and curious and nervous, chewing on the inside of his cheek.

‘I didn’t wanna disturb you, doing…whatever it is you ghosts do, but…’ he sighs, shoulders slumping in the defeated manner that has become his default these days, ‘I just…wanna know you’re there. I dunno if you’ve got any powers, but…if there’s some kind of sign? That’d be…great….’

Alison wills something—anything—to come to her, but nothing does. The only thing noteworthy she’s registered is that her chest still feels clogged; she still struggles to breathe, as she had for the last few weeks of her life. She’s not sure how the others discovered their skills, but nothing seems to be coming naturally. She’s going to have to make use of other resources.

‘Ghostly voice or anything?’ Mike goes on. ‘Or, I dunno… something moving…or…’ his eyes light up, and he leaps up, snatching up his laptop and setting it down on the coffee table.

‘I’m going to open my laptop,’ Mike says, as though conversing with a deaf person, ‘so—you—can—write—something.’

Yes. Why didn’t she think of this before?

Alison glances over at Julian, slouching in his favourite armchair, ignoring the scene unfolding in front of him.

‘Julian!’

Julian raises his head lazily. ‘Someone called?’

‘Mike’s trying to talk to me!’

He shrugs. ‘So?’

‘So,’ says Alison testily, ‘I can’t send him a message on my own!’

‘Oh, nooooooo,’ says Julian. ‘Oh, deeeeeeear. Whatever shall you dooooo?’

He’s being wilfully obtuse, and Alison glares.

‘Well, I sort of hoped,’ she says, raising what she hopes is a warning eyebrow, ‘you might help me out on that one.’

 ‘Mmmmm,’ Julian pretends to consider. ‘I mean…what’s in it for me? I don’t just play messenger boy for anyone, you know!’

‘I can’t believe what I’m hearing,’ Alison says dangerously. ‘All I want is to get a message to Mike—it’ll take a few seconds of your time, and it’s not as if we’re short of that…’

‘You see,’ Julian fiddles with his tie, ‘it’s not exactly as if…you’ve got anything to give now, is it? All those lovely movies and computer games and smart phones…now you can’t touch anything, your usefulness has sort of…dried up, hasn’t it? And how long is this supposed to go on, anyway? Because it won’t just be one message, will it?! ’

If she could still flush with anger, Alison imagines she would.

‘After six years of my life trying to make things as bearable for you as possible—you’re telling me now you can’t even send a few poxy messages in my hour of need?!’

‘Don’t feel like it. Sorry. You’ve got nothing to entice me, so I don’t fancy straining my fingerrrr without incentive. Not happening.  That’s what we’d call in my circles hard cheese.’

Mike shifts in front of the computer, murmurs come on, and Alison just sees red.

‘I may not be able to touch anything,’ she growls at Julian, ‘but I can touch you now. And if you don’t help, I’ll give you what we call in my circles a duffing up.’

‘Try it, Alison,’ Julian sneers. ‘I was boxing champion at Eton.’

Alison is furious enough she might actually go through with it. She steps forward, hands bunching into fists, saved only at the last minute by Pat’s sudden appearance in the room.

‘Steady on, Alison! Fisticuffs won’t help the situation! Now, in the Scouts, when we had an argy-bargy, a good cosy chat and a cup of tea could sort out any differences!’

Pat has always been well-meaning, but she can see why it irks the other ghosts sometimes. Mike is trying desperately to communicate with her, and Julian has chosen today of all days to have the poltergeist equivalent of PMT.

‘And come on, Ju—what’s one message among friends? Eh?’

Julian’s eyes narrow.

‘Don’t ever call me “Ju” again,’ he snarls, ‘what are we, Five Go Mad in Dorset?!’

 But he mercifully gets up and crosses over to where Mike sits with the open laptop.

‘Anything in particular you want me to say? Bit of a saucy one, or will a simple hello suffice?’

‘We’ll start with I am here, shall we?’

‘Start?!’

‘Get on with it!’

Julian strains, shoving his finger down on the keyboard with force until the letter i appears on the page.

Mike claps his hands, an almost ecstatic laugh falling from his mouth.

Alison looks at Julian expectantly.

‘More?’ Julian groans.

‘I—am—here,’ Alison repeats through her teeth.

‘My finger’s tired, Alison,’ Julian whines, grinding out the am on the keyboard. ‘It needs a break…a nice long hols, more like…’

Alison seethes at him, but it doesn’t seem to be having much effect.

‘I’ve got a sprain now.’

‘Alison?’ Mike asks, glancing around, his confusion turning to something resembling panic. ‘Alison?!’

‘Julian,’ Alison snarls, but the late MP does nothing but shake his head and cross his arms, and this is unfair—Mike’s—she can’ t believe—

It’s at that moment, thankfully, that Robin wanders in.

‘Robin!’ Alison all but falls on him. ‘Please—can you do your thing with the lights?’

 ‘Okay,’ he says without even questioning why, and positions himself under it, raising his hands.

‘Alison, are you still there?’

Robin strains, raising his hands even higher.

The lights flicker, and Mike slumps into his chair in a mixture of relief and agony.

‘You’re still here,’ he says, hugging a cushion to himself. ‘You’re still here.’

She thought she’d known what it was like to live with the ghosts. They’ve been front-and-centre in her life for six years now, after all.

Turns out, living with ghosts as one of them is far different. Being on their plane of existence adds whole new physical dimensions—the crushing in her chest, a remnant of her illness carried beyond the grave, the feel of the others, now solid and touchable, and…oh, God, smells.

Robin reeks, a horrible mixture of a lifetime being unwashed mingled with musty animal skins. The Captain’s pomade fouls up the room. Kitty has sweated through her gown; Fanny’s perfume, in which she had doused herself in liberally when alive, is vile. The Plague People…the less said, the better.

And being able to touch them is a fresh hell, because it means Kitty squeezing the not-so-living daylights out of her, Thomas finding every excuse to put his hand on her, Robin tapping her on the shoulder just to startle her when she’s not concentrating.

Pat’s optimism is too much in large doses; Fanny and the Captain each have a hundred rules or more about how the household is to be run and how the ghosts are to show ‘consideration’ for others.

Julian is tetchy, complaining she only ever speaks to him when she wants him to write messages to Mike, and so she reluctantly sits through his renditions of his favourite speeches to appease him.

And yet, in their own way, they’re doing their best to make her feel…well, not less dead, but very slightly better about it. Pat comes up with ‘icebreaker games’ the others reluctantly go along with. Kitty is clearly making up for lost time, trying to be the embodiment of the sister she never had (body being the operative word, now she can touch her). Fanny takes it upon herself to instruct her in carrying herself as the ghost of a lady should; the Captain offers to train her in the art of combat; Robin takes her on ‘hunting’ trips in the woods; Julian takes her on at chess to pass the time. Thomas makes good on his vows to shower her with obnoxious affection, but this also comes with some reasonably decent conversation, and company she’s glad of in those moments when her death hits her hard.

They’re a source of frustration and a source of solace all at once, contradicting themselves at every turn.

She’s considering this when Mike comes into the kitchen for a cup of tea, unaware of her presence.

Mike walks straight through her.

She stumbles backwards into Thomas, the solidity of him jarring.

Everything contradicts itself now.  

‘You can’t go on like this, Mike.’

Good old reliable Angela and Leila. Mike’s despondency hasn’t gone unnoticed by his family, and when he stops going to work, and stops ringing anyone, his sisters turn up at the house, the cavalry to drag him out of the slough of despair.

Thus far their attempts aren’t doing much. Mike’s emerged from his room and made tea, but has slumped on his usual spot on the sofa, resolute on not doing anything.

‘Where’s the little one?’ Julian asks hopefully, peering through the room. ‘Where is she?’

Julian’s special bond with Mike’s niece has continued throughout the years, Nancy taking a liking to him all throughout her babyhood. Even now, at four, when her ability to see him is waning, Julian still holds out for Angela’s visits, hoping for a glimpse of Nancy—a tenuous link to the daughter he never spent time with.

He scans the room, making a disappointed noise when he notices she’s not there and disappearing again.

‘I can’t leave her.’

‘She’s gone, Mike,’ Leila says gently. ‘And you’re putting yourself through Hell moping around here, putting your life on hold; you haven’t worked in six months, you barely see anyone—have you even showered?’

‘Yeah,’ Mike says defensively, giving his underarm a tentative sniff. ‘I mean…a few days ago.’

‘You need to get out of the house. This isn’t good for you.’

‘I don’t wanna leave the house!’ Mike snaps.

‘We get it. This was your home together—and your business. You made so many memories…you can feel her presence everywhere. Which is why you need to get out of here for a while.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Mike says desperately, ‘she’s here!’

‘I know it feels like that, really—but sitting shut up in this house isn’t gonna do you any good.’

Alison can see Mike muttering to himself, faced with the impossibility of explaining his late wife’s ghosthood to an outsider.

‘At least come out with us on Friday,’ Angela coaxes. ‘Take your mind off it.’

‘Get some life back into you,’ Leila adds.

Mike turns away from her, though his energy is so lacking it doesn’t even come close to qualifying as one of his classic Michael Cooper sulks.

‘Don’t feel much like it.’

‘Well, tough luck,’ Leila folds her arms. ‘Because what you need is some cheering up. And we Coopers are gonna make it happen.’

‘It’ll be good for him,’ Alison says absently, watching Mike gardening from her seat by the library window. ‘Getting out and about.’

His dad’s out there with him, helping him rake leaves and cut back some of the thorny tangles that might once have been bushes. Keeping him busy, reminding him that he still has a life to live. His mum’s made plans for him at theirs this weekend; he’s got a job, and is going into the office now. His family have been true to their word, sticking to him like glue to make sure no harm comes to him, and their efforts to bring him out of his shell are beginning to work.

It makes a nice change, watching him be active rather than watching him mope, and she sits for a while, observing, Thomas keeping her company while the others carry on with their weekly talk. It’s always Thomas keeping her company, if it’s not Kitty—and it’s not as if she doesn’t know why, though oddly enough, she likes having him here. His presence is a dependable, constant part of her day—at least until he inevitably makes a comment that crosses the line and ruins it.

‘In my time,’ Thomas says, ‘there were few professions deemed befitting of a gentleman—the regiment, the clergy or the law. My own friends rejected them all in favour of the pursuit of beauty and higher truth. And yet…’ he squints at Mike, as content as they’ve seen him these past few months, ‘there is something to be said for an occupation. To distract oneself with busywork would certainly be an escape from the torment of the mind.’

‘Especially now,’ Alison snorts. When you can’t touch anything, your mind can’t help but be occupied with its own torments.

‘Especially now,’ Thomas echoes melancholically as she turns back to the window.

Mike’s clomping across the yard, struggling to hold up one end of a felled tree. Alison watches him stumbling along, and something compels her to exhale.

‘ ‘Tis a good spot for sighing,’ Thomas says. ‘It was my own, for a while—but I found the intrusions most vexing.’

‘Where’s your sighing-place now?’ Alison asks, a wry smile on her face.

‘The east attic,’ Thomas says. ‘Alone among the damp and the dark, I can explore all the deepest, darkest recesses of my soul free from interruption.’

Alison hums thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps I need a sighing-place. Or a…thinking-place, anyway.’

‘My room is always open to you, should you need respite.’

Yep. Ruined it.

Alison rolls her eyes, shakes her head and gets up to seek companionship elsewhere.

‘’ere. Pick me up.’

Alison stoops and retrieves Humphrey’s head from the floor. It doesn’t unnerve her as it once did, holding a dismembered head in her hands. Once she learned to avoid touching the sinewy bits, and get over the whole…weirdness, it became part of her routine—get up, pick up Humphrey, take him where he wants to go, then wonder how to get through the rest of the day.

‘Where to, then?’ she asks him, tucking him safely in the crook of her elbow. ‘The library again?’

Humphrey tilts himself, which is the closest he can get to a shrug when his body is AWOL.

‘Yeah, go on. Let’s give it a go.’

Alison heads down the stairs with him, almost walking into Mike, pacing about on his phone.

 ‘Are you sure about this, Angela? It’s just…no, she’s great, and we did have a nice…it’s just… I’m not…yeah, I know what you said, not serious, just giving it a try, living life, blah blah blah…no I am not doing my Incredible Sulk face!’

‘He is, actually,’ Alison says to Humphrey. The moment should be making her laugh, but there’s something about the phone call that seems off. She has no idea what Mike’s talking about, what he’s arranged with his sister—but for some reason, the conversation unsettles her. She bites her lip, wondering if there’s some way she can put her ear through the phone, hear the other end of the line.

‘Um…don’t mean to be rude, but I was sort of hoping to see the inside of a book today, not the underside of your armpit.’

Alison apologises profusely to Humphrey and continues on her original quest, pushing the thoughts of Mike to one side. His family are helping him cope, that’s all.

That’s all it has to be.

Mike’s days out at work become evenings and weekends out as well; friends taking him for a pint or a slap up meal, his family coaxing him to stay over on occasion. And this is good, she supposes, great, in fact…it’s healthy for him.

God, but she doesn’t half miss him.

He was out all Saturday night, it’s two o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday now, according to the clock in the hall, and Alison finds herself pathetically waiting for his return, sitting out in the garden.

She can’t feel the sun on her skin, but she likes to imagine she can. It’s a balmy autumn afternoon— the sort she used to love back when she was alive, leaves withering and browning on the trees, sunlight poking out from behind the clouds.

‘Pray, what ails you, fair Alison?’

Alison startles slightly at Thomas’s presence, but she gratefully shuffles over to make room for him. Right now she could use some company. And he’s approached her without automatically trying to put his hands on her, which she takes as a good sign.

‘Oh, just…thinking,’ she hums. ‘I always loved autumn. The crunch of leaves and the smell of log fires…there’s a lot of dead stuff, if you think about it. The world’s getting ready to shut down and hibernate…but there’s…’

Oh, God, she sounds a bit too poetic, a bit too poignant, given whom she’s sitting next to.

‘There’s a beauty in it,’ she finishes anyway. The same could be said about death, she supposes. She doesn’t really exist anymore, and yet here she and Thomas are, two ghosts, lives snatched away but still able to appreciate a view.

 ‘The autumn leaves,’ Thomas intones, ‘they flutter in the autumn…breeze. And in the…trees.’

For someone who prides himself on poetry, Thomas’s poetic form is hit and miss. Half the time his rhymes are barely passable, his scansion non-existent. His best work seems to come when he’s not trying; when he isn’t forcing it. This isn’t one of those times.

Alison sighs and shakes her head.

‘Mike always said spring was better,’ she says absently. She gazes off into the distance, watching the ripples on the lake, the dappled sunlight on its surface. ‘We always argued about that. It was one of those stupid things—you know, it doesn’t really matter, but it always ends up starting a row. Everyone has them—that was ours. You know how it is.’

‘I must confess, I do not.’

Alison bites her lip, feeling somehow that she’s put her foot in it. She knows about Thomas’s disastrous encounter with love, has always suspected that other than Isabelle, he hasn’t had many romances to boast of.

‘I even miss the stupid rows,’ she says, ‘I mean…yeah, we type a couple of messages, but it’s not…all those daft little things you take for granted…I wish I could go back to the last time we argued about the seasons and just…hug him and laugh it off.’

‘To be loved by a woman of such devotion…had Isabelle been so steadfast, perhaps I should not have met my untimely end.’ Thomas is wistful, his hand wandering towards the pistol wound on his abdomen. Knowing what she knows, feeling the crushing in her chest every so often, she imagines he still gets echoes of the searing sting of hot metal from time to time. She dreads to think what it must have been like for Mary.

‘Yeah,’ she says weakly.

‘Though, I suppose,’ Thomas says, looking fixedly at her, ‘then you would cease to exist. It is a double-edged sword.’

That’s a weirdness she’d rather not dwell on. Alison shudders, but he doesn’t notice, still off in his own head.

‘Bright star! Would I were as steadfast as thou art—not in lone splendour, hung aloft the night, and watching, with eternal lids apart…’

‘—that’s…Keats,’ Alison interrupts.

Thomas leaps back as if in alarm.

‘How did you know?!’

‘I did him at school.’

Thomas’s brow is furrowing, not quite understanding the meaning of her words, so she elaborates.

‘One year at school…we studied a bunch of Keats’s poems in English. And a few other poets from around that time—Wordsworth…Coleridge was my favourite. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree…’

‘Where Alph, the sacred river ran,’ Thomas recites reverently, ‘through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea.’

‘Like his work, did you?’

‘Of course not,’ Thomas harrumphs, and she cackles. Thomas’s jealousy of his contemporaries is predictably amusing; anyone who can successfully craft words into a whimsical description of unreality and his green-eyed monster comes out.

‘Did you…do…me…at school?’

‘Sorry,’ Alison gives him her best rueful smile.

‘Some day, pretentious fop,’ Thomas vows under his breath, ‘my words shall vastly eclipse yours—my name shall be on the books of pupils across the land.’

She shouldn’t, really, but Alison lets out a little laugh at that, and Thomas, though she was expecting indignant huffery, surprisingly laughs back.

‘And how are you gonna do that?’ she teases, unsure whether ghost jokes are considered acceptable when you are one—but Thomas is still smirking, and she knows they’re all right.

‘I shall have Julian transcribe it.’

‘You have got a sense of humour in there!’ Alison nudges him. ‘You’ve been hiding that side of yourself.’

‘I have many sides, Alison,’ Thomas says. ‘Not least the passionate lover, whose burning, fiery desire is as powerful as—’

Spoke too soon. Every time, just when she thinks her and Thomas’s friendship could move beyond his obsession with her…she shakes her head. Every time.

The crunch of gravel heralds the return of Mike’s car, and Alison scrambles up, grateful for the excuse to flee.

Of course, nothing stays as it was. It can’t.

And it isn’t as if she didn’t know being a ghost would be different, be hard.

But what’s harder is that, while she’s getting used to being with the other ghosts all the time, she’s also, in spite of her best efforts, getting used to being without Mike. Without her life, without everything she’d been used to. It becomes too painful to sleep beside Mike and be rolled into all the time, and she’s accustomed now to sleeping in one of the other chambers in the east wing. She can’t touch Mike, talk to him, and she’s starting to forget little habits, little teases they used to have—while ironically, everything she does with the ghosts is becoming far more real.

She writes to Mike when she can (and when Julian will play along)—but as the months wear on, and Mike gets out and about more, their regular ‘chats’ drop in frequency; Mike getting home late, crashing and murmuring night, Alison, and waking to whatever handful of words she can get Julian to squeeze out. She’s never been in a long-distance relationship, but she can imagine this is what it’s like (if you leave out the being actually dead part). You make a shedload of promises to stay in contact, stick to it for a while, and then life starts to get in the way, and it slowly drops off.

Mike hums more, cleans up after himself more. Stops wistfully staring at his laptop screen waiting for messages, and starts watching movies on it. Goes out a lot.

And Alison stops sticking to him like glue, because ghost activities, even if they are just food club and what I would wear if I could day, take up more of her schedule than she anticipated. Are more enjoyable than she anticipated as well.

And she looks at him now, and a horrible feeling knots in her stomach, that they’re…drifting apart.

They were in love, once. They danced together around these halls, hugged and kissed when they realised this place was all theirs (little did they know), made plans for the future, made the garden redding weddy and hosted Mike’s family for Christmas.  

She keeps telling herself they still are, but…it really isn’t the same.

And she feels an idiot for thinking it could be.

‘Alison?! Aaaaaalison!’

Alison feels guilty—oh, God, does she feel guilty, avoiding Kitty after knowing what Kitty’s sister put her through, but she just can’t cope with hours of playing tea party today. There are days when being dead really gets to her, when the weight of it all comes down on her, and today is one of them. It’s been exactly thirteen months, which for some reason feels worse than the one-year anniversary.

And Mike had gone out earlier wearing a tie.

Mike rarely dresses up outside of a work context; she can remember vividly the two occasions when he did, one of them being their wedding. The other was their first date, when he’d put on a button-up shirt to take her to Pizza Hut.

There’s something unsettling about it, and Alison wants to privately wallow in her neuroses—a difficult feat when you’re having imaginary cups of tea shoved in your face.

Hence, the avoiding.

Unfortunately, she discovers when she gets to the airing cupboard, her planned hiding spot is already taken.

Thomas tenses in alarm when he sees her, and then he’s putting one finger to his lips in terror and yanking her further inside.

‘Thomas—what are you—’

‘Shhhh,’ he hisses. ‘Don’t give me away!’

 ‘What are you doing?’ she whispers.

‘Hiding from the Captain. I was wandering through the grounds, inspired by nature’s glory, and I walked into him in the middle of his morning exercises and knocked him down. He threatened to give me a thrashing! And before you accuse me of cowardice, let me remind you that I have witnessed the Captain in life thrashing his lower-ranking officers for insubordination, and I would sooner take another musketball.’

Thomas is prone to melodrama and hyperbole, but Alison doesn’t push him on it. The Captain can be ferocious when angered.

He looks at her. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Hiding from Kitty,’ Alison admits. ‘It’s Tea Party Tuesday.’

‘I shall conceal your whereabouts,’ Thomas says with a knowing wink, ‘if you shall remain silent on mine.’

There’s not really enough room for the both of them. It’s rather like a game of sardines, the way they’re crammed in, squashed up against each other, almost at risk of knocking each other out through the wall or door.

Alison tries to adjust herself, but there’s no possible way of remaining in place that doesn’t involve having every part of her pressed close.

‘Might I suggest…’ Thomas murmurs, and then his arms are around her waist from behind, holding her against him.

And in other circumstances, she’d consider this a step too far, shove him off her—but it’s this, or put part of herself through the wall, and Alison would much sooner be encircled by Thomas’s arms than be filled temporarily with plaster and paint.

And in a way, this is somewhat…comforting. She’s loath to admit it, but being held, even by her slightly obnoxious nineteenth-century admirer while hiding from her loveable-but-obnoxious eighteenth-century friend, is just what she needs to calm her, make her forget for a moment that she’s dead and miserable and facing a nightmarish eternity.

She’ll regret it later, but she relaxes into him anyway, leaning her head back against his shoulder.

‘This is exquisite,’ Thomas whispers against her hair. ‘Heaven.’

‘Don’t push it.’

It takes her an hour to be sure Kitty’s given up on the tea party, and another hour before Thomas will allow either of them to move, citing the Captain’s wrath as his excuse not to ease his grip on her.

He’s really pushing it now, but Alison finds, to her surprise, that she doesn’t mind.

She does her best to ignore the signs—the smart clothes, the long chats at night, calls taken outside, as if he’s concerned she’ll hear. But they niggle in the back of her brain, until one day, she can’t ignore them anymore.

She’s playing charades with the others when the world comes down around her ears. Robin is off ‘hunting’ somewhere, Thomas upstairs trying to compose and asking not to be disturbed, but the rest of the gang have been going about their day as normal when Mike turns up, home earlier than expected—and not alone.

It could be anything, she tells herself—Mike organising a booking, starting events up again, hiring out one of the rooms for a group; that’s why he’s showing a woman around the house.

But then she slips her hand in his, and Mike squeezes it, and all Alison’s worst fears are confirmed.

And look, she gets it. She was always the connection to the ghosts, and without her, it all probably doesn't even feel real, the whole ghost thing. Like it was all dreamt up, imagined, like she doesn’t really exist. He can't see or hear her. Julian only cooperates about half the time, and even then, a couple of back and forth messages typed on a laptop don't really constitute a relationship.

And is that really what she's asking of him? To make tenuous communication with a dead person for the rest of his life, and satisfy himself that that's marriage? That that’s it, his only romantic companionship for forty, fifty years until he dies himself?

Alison watches her…is he her widower?...nervously showing a woman around the house, feeling a lump come to her throat.

‘Ah, yes,’ says Julian, coming and standing beside her. ‘The old classic. The rebound. The I need to get back on the horse girl. Seen it all before. Been there, done that—a few times at Cambridge, actually.  Quick poke and she’ll be history.’

She’s faintly aware that Julian, in his way, is trying to comfort her. And he’s probably right. This has Angela and Leila written all over it—a well-intentioned attempt to get him to stop moping and get on with  his life that Mike probably went into unwillingly, or with a resigned might as well attitude.

Even so, the sight of her fills Alison with a pain she didn’t think imaginable—and that’s including the constant squeezing and crushing in her chest.

‘The impertinence!’ Fanny manages to make an indignant utterance and inhale sharply at the same time.

‘Yeah, so that’s about everything,’ Mike concludes his tour, ‘what d’you think, Myfanwy?’

‘Myfanwy?!’ Julian snorts. ‘Is she Welsh?’

She could well be. Mike always did fancy Stacey from Gavin and Stacey. They’d joked she was one of his free passes.

‘It’s lovely, Mike…it’s got haunted house vibes, though, hasn’t it?’

She is Welsh.

She’s also, unfortunately, lovely. She stays for lunch (cooking it for Mike, because his go-to is still ready meals), and the ghosts look on as though it’s entertainment, or in Pat’s case, a bumper day for observing the sights and smells of good food. And they talk, and Alison listens, and it becomes clear that she’s been caring for him, helping him through this.

And then she reaches forward, taking Mike’s hand across the table, causing Fanny to shriek dramatically.

‘I appreciate you bringing me here. Showing me this part of your life. I know it can’t have been easy.’

And Mike looks at her—really looks at her, and Alison knows. He may have entered this thing reluctantly, or just to get back out there, but to some degree he’s caught feelings, whether he admits it to himself or not.

The lump in her throat threatens to choke her, and Alison gets up, making for the door before she can break down.

 ‘Alison, wait—’ Pat tries, but she gives him the brush-off. She can hear Kitty calling after her as well, but she ignores them all, fleeing the room, the sight of Mike and that woman, putting as much distance between her and them as she can.

And suddenly, though she’d had no destination in mind, she finds herself heading up the stairs with single-minded determination.

It’s not polite, even in ghost circles, but she bursts into Thomas’s room through the wall without announcing herself.

Thomas looks up from his contemplation, surprised at her intrusion.

‘Sweet Alison, whatever is the matter? You look about to swoon.’

‘It’s Mike,’ she begins, but she can’t get any further. She purses her lips as tight as they’ll go, shaking her head back and forth, because if she speaks, she’ll cry.

It wasn’t the best idea, coming to him. Pat would have been the most sympathetic ear; Fanny the best person with whom to bitch and moan about the insatiable selfishness of men.

But in the moment, all she wants is to feel his arms around her, the way they had been in the cupboard, to relive that surprising sense of comfort and calm she’d had then.

And she’s not disappointed, because Thomas reacts instinctively, clutching her to himself in a way that’s partly compassionate, partly opportunistic.

'How can he do that?’ she blurts. 'How can he just...forget me?! I mean... I'm still here, aren't I? I'm still here, for God's sake, and he knows that!’

He has no idea what she means, of course, and so she lets out a garbled summary of this afternoon’s events—of Mike’s mysterious phone calls and dressings-up that she was trying to ignore, but now she can’t, because there’s a real live woman in the house, and she wasn’t just paranoid he was moving on without her, because he really, actually is.

'A pox on him,’ says Thomas, his voice a low, dangerous rasp.

He grips her tighter, and yes, he's being melodramatic as usual, but right now it's what she needs. He's a Romantic poet, and she knows that means she, as the object of his passion, is not so important to him as the passion itself. Infatuation was part of the vital makeup of the regency Romantics, a key driver of their art. But right now, Alison doesn't care. Right now, dramatic outrage and obsessive infatuation are just what she wants to hear, if only to counteract what she's just seen.

'Damn his eyes, the scoundrel! Damn the lothario who can forget so quickly the vision of beauty he left behind! For if it were I...why, I should never be able to keep you from my mind! And I would never forsake you...’ he's practically shouting, 'for another!’

'No,’ Alison says flatly. 'You wouldn't.’

And then it may be her rage and grief taking hold of her senses, or it may just be sheer stupidity, but she lunges forward and snatches his face in her hands, kisses him as if they're not ghosts, as if they're not hundreds of years apart in age, as if Mike isn't downstairs breaking her heart.

It's clear Thomas's attachment to Isabelle was predominantly from afar. He has no idea what to do. There's a lot of grasping and pawing and teenage-style nose squashing, an attempt to try it “as the French do" that she quickly veers him away from, a garble of half-stuttered declarations of love every time they break apart that she has to shut down. Alison couldn't give a toss how awful it is. When you're broken-hearted, being wanted is an aphrodisiac.

'At last,’ he gasps when she pulls back. She's almost made him short circuit; his eyes glaze over; his brain, she's quite sure, is halfway to space. This is going to complicate things, but she doesn't care, just wants, needs to forget...

'Thomas,’ she murmurs, one arm still wrapped around his neck, ‘can ghosts ... I mean,’ she laughs almost nervously, almost embarrassed, 'is it possible for ghosts to...I mean... can ghosts...?’

It turns out ghosts can.

It's not without its difficulty, but it's... manageable. They fall through most of the furniture, but inexplicably not the floor, so the floor will do. They can't remove the clothes they died in, but they can move them out of the way, as long as they don't totally leave their bodies, and so they can more or less make it work.

And if Thomas was something of a novice when it came to kissing, he's practically the village idiot when it comes to sex. For all his contemporaries may have been at it, the likes of Thomas Thorne didn't see much action in the torrid love affair department. There’s a lot of fumbling and uncertainty on his part, a lot of desperation and aggression on hers; it probably doesn’t last more than a minute or two before they’re collapsing on the floorboards, and Alison can’t tell whether the churning in her gut is positive or negative, or even which one she wants it to be.

‘So that is what it’s like,’ Thomas murmurs reverently, ‘the most carnal incarnation of love.’

‘Well, sort of,’ Alison says, righting her jeans. It hasn’t really hit her, yet, what’s just happened. It’s a bit surreal. ‘It’s different when you’re alive.’

‘How so?’ he looks almost miffed, as though he’s missed out on something—and Alison winces. It’s bad enough waiting two hundred years to get your end away, without feeling inadequate after finally achieving it.

‘It’s less…messy now,’ she tries to atone. This at least is true. In the physical sense, in the not having to clean up afterwards sense. Not in the sense of having just had it off in a fit of desperation with someone who’s openly besotted with you, because your widower is downstairs on a date with another woman. That sort of mess is beyond cleaning up.

‘Less messy,’ Thomas mutters, his eyes closed in what might be relief, or perhaps contentment. He’s still lying on the floor, hands behind his head, making no effort to move, as though trying to preserve the exact feel of this moment for as long as possible. Satisfied with this answer, he lets out a sigh, exuding post-coital fulfilment, a man basking in afterglow.  He just needs a cigarette in his hand to complete the image.

‘It is a curious thing to lose one’s virginity after death. It lacks so much of the fanfare given it by those who expressed it freely—my fellow artistic souls,’ he explains.

She can imagine.  From what she remembers from school, Byron’s multitude of lovers were as much part of his reputation as his work; Mary Shelley was Percy Shelley’s mistress for years prior to their actual marriage. Regency on the whole might have a reputation for chaste turns about the room and marriage proposals of convenience, but the Romantics were another story.  Well…the ones who had the opportunity.

‘And yet it also lacks so much of the scandal that would have accompanied it in high society. In the circles my beloved Isabelle would have moved in.’

‘The Ruination of Thomas Thorne,’ Alison says, snickering softly.

‘Quite,’ he says, though he’s still smiling, his eyes still shut.

She stays with him for a while, holding onto the inappropriate comfort being here gives her, swathing herself in the protection of this intimate moment until she’s sure she’s heard a car pull away.

And then she gets up awkwardly, murmurs she has to go, watches Thomas smile affectionately at her as she leaves the room, and lets the guilt and shame hit her like a tonne of bricks.

What have I done? What the hell have I just done?

It will never happen again.

As long as she has any haunting left in her, she is determined it will never happen again.

To have used Thomas the way she did…it leaves a nasty taste in Alison’s mouth. Yes, he was a willing participant in it, but that still can’t chase it away.

No more lapses. No more stupid mistakes. She’ll get her act together. They’ll move past it and get on with their…deaths. She’ll treat Thomas with the respect he deserves.

And she has every intention of sticking with this resolution—until she’s tested again.

Mike keeps making phone calls. Keeps leaving the house in semi-respectable clothes. Whistles when he’s doing housework.

And then another weekend rolls around, and Myfanwy is back, and they’re going on a ramble through the grounds and coming back to the kitchen for lunch, and Alison just can’t take it.

Everybody is on Alison’s side on this one (though she suspects they wouldn’t be, should they come to hear of her and Thomas’s assignation). Robin flickers the lights every time Myfanwy enters a room, just to unnerve her. Even Julian knocks things down, pushes her cup off the edge of the table when she and Mike aren’t looking.

‘Did you think about what we talked about?’ Myfanwy asks, as they’re sitting in the parlour later that evening with glasses of wine.

‘How long does she need to stay here?’ Kitty says disapprovingly. ‘All day?! All night?!’

God, Alison hopes she doesn’t stay the night.

Whatever they talked about must have been pretty heavy, because Mike downs a whole glass of wine in one go.

‘I thought about it,’ he begins, ‘but…moving in with you…you don’t understand. I know it looks like I’m clinging on, staying here but…it’s not as simple as that.’

‘Mike, what you went through…these things take time. I know that. And if you’re not ready…’

‘No!’ Mike, good old, typical Mike, gets up to rectify his mistake and nearly trips over the coffee table. ‘I mean, yeah! I am ready, it’s just…well, it’s not like I can erase her from my memory, is it?’

‘You’re still living in the past. Holding onto the memories of her. You might need more time, that’s all.’

 ‘Myfanwy—you don’t understand. This house…Alison’s here.’

‘I understand that, love,’ Mywfanwy says gently, though there is an undercurrent of frustration she’s not hiding well. ‘This place is full of your memories. You can feel her presence. I just wonder—’

‘No! You don’t get it— she really is here!’

‘Michael,  I get it…’

‘Look, she’s a ghost, all right?!’ Mike bursts out.

There would be an awkward silence, could Alison not hear the rest of the ghosts murmuring away.

Myfanwy recoils.

‘She’s a ghost,’ Mike insists, ‘she’s a real ghost, and she haunts this place, and when I say it’s like she’s here, I mean she is…actually here—’

‘Mike…’

‘I know it sounds insane, yeah? But she’s a ghost—and she can talk to me; here, I’ll show you…’ he stumbles towards the table where his laptop’s sitting open.

‘Yeah, not happening, mate,’ Julian says from the other side of the room, crinkling his nose.  

‘You’re drunk, Michael,’ Myfanwy sounds as if she’s hovering somewhere between disbelief and anger.

‘I’m not drunk!’ Mike insists. ‘Well…okay, yeah, maybe a bit drunk, but that doesn’t mean—’

Myfanwy’s already picking up her handbag.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? When you’ve sobered up.’

‘Good riddance!’ Robin grunts after her.

‘Alisonnnnnn,’ Mike moans, sinking into the sofa and putting his head in his hands. ‘What am I doing?’

Alison hesitates, hovers by his side, almost ready to put herself through physical torment and lay a hand on his shoulder.

And instead, she turns on her heel, the pang and pain in her chest driving her in near-tears upstairs and into Thomas’s far-too-willing arms.

Mercifully, she doesn’t see much of Myfanwy for a few months after that. But it’s a small mercy, because Mike spends more weekends out, leaving Friday night and not coming back til Sunday evening, and Alison knows, as they all do, that she’s still in the picture.

Mike is moving on, and there is nothing she can do to stop it. And she knows the inevitable is coming; it’s just a matter of when, not if.

‘Ha! Check and mate!’ Julian is saying, pushing over her king on the chessboard with some relish, Alison losing her third game in a row, when a voice interrupts them.

‘Alison?’ it’s Mike, entering the room tentatively, his gaze slowly swivelling towards the ceiling. ‘I don’t know…if you’re still around, or if…we can talk, but…’

Julian glances up. ‘On standby.’

Julian has been far more cooperative with the messaging since Mike took up with Myfanwy. Could be because of his own guilt, could be that, like all the ghosts, he feels sorry for her. She can’t be sure.

Pity, though, because it’s come at the wrong time. She barely gets messages from Mike anymore.

‘Look, it’s just…I’ve been thinking, and…well, Myfanwy and me…well, you’ve probably seen her. And in a way…I hoped you’d see her so you’d know.’ He swallows. ‘What she’s like…what kind of person she is. So you wouldn’t worry about me.’

Alison feels her breath catch in her throat, because she knows what’s coming next.

‘Thing is, I wanna know…find out…if it’s worth keeping on with. But as long as I’m here, I can’t really give it a go. Because I come home and…it’s painful, Alison. I can see all the things we did in front of my eyes and you’re kind of here, but not here, and…she asked me to move in with her a couple of months ago. And I didn’t think I was ready, but…I don’t know if I’ll ever be.’

Alison’s teeth grind together. Knowing it was coming doesn’t make it any easier.

‘I’ll keep the house; I won’t sell it. I couldn’t. I’ll use it for events or something, or rent it out as an Airbnb, make sure it still gets used and taken care of, but…I can’t live here anymore. It hurts too much. I think it’s the right thing, but…’ he turns around, his nose still pointing at the roof.

 ‘Tell me I’m not making a mistake, Alison.’

‘Well, I’m over here, not up there,’ Alison says, waving a hand in front of his nose that, naturally, he doesn’t see.

Julian snorts. ‘He’s blind, Alison. Ghost-blind.’

Mike’s still rambling. ‘I don’t even know if it’s the right thing or it’s too quick…I like her…I mean I really like her…and it’s not like I love her the way I loved you, I think it’s too soon to even know if I will, but in a way I’m sort of…not in a great big black hole when I’m around her…’

Loved. He used loved. Past tense. Like she doesn’t exist anymore. Like she’s dead.

Which, she supposes, she is, but still…

‘I feel like…I’ve got a second chance and…well I’d feel like an idiot if I didn’t do something about it. And I think…it’s what you’d want. But…’ he runs a hand across his forehead, still staring at the ceiling. ‘I just don’t know. You and them…the others. You might have seen something about her I’ve missed. And I don’t know, even if she’s all right…if you’re okay with this. I don’t wanna do anything if its gonna hurt you, Alison.’

With a shaky breath, he opens his laptop, sliding it across the coffee table.

‘Am—I—’ Mike says slowly into the screen, as if to an idiot, and as if the laptop were Alison herself, ‘making—a—mistake?’

‘Righty-o,’ Julian pulls up the cuffs on his sleeves, ‘I know just what to say to this one—’

‘Wait,’ Alison grabs his arm, staying his hand. ‘I can’t do that.’

She swallows hard, trying to chase down the bitter pill.

‘If Mike…has a shot at something good…I can’t stand in his way. I can’t be that…selfish.’

She still is, in her mind, hoping and wishing Mike will stay forever and come back to her and loving it when Robin frightens Myfanwy, and seeing Thomas in secret just to feel wanted again.

But when it comes to the crunch, when she sees Mike standing in front of her, hopeful and nervous and ambivalently sad…

She turns to Julian and dictates, watching as he forces the keys down and the words come to life.

go for it u have my blessing xx

Mike’s face seems to light up, to lift, a heaviness floating from his features as they soften into a smile.

‘Cheers,’ he whispers, almost reverently. ‘You’re the best, Alison. The best.’

She knows she did the right thing, giving him permission to be happy again, to ease his suffering. To live.

 And well. Logically, thinking about it, he's right. What's he supposed to do, after all, fritter his life away waiting to die and be reunited with her? It's far better he get out there, start living again. Stop feeling tethered to her, to this place.

And yet Alison feels a pang, a great, dirty, selfish squeezing of her chest. Because she knows it makes sense, and God, she doesn't want Mike to suffer anymore.

But it's not what she wanted.

Alison marches to Thomas’s room with unprecedented determination and almost knocks him off his feet.

Thomas always looks so contented after sex, a relaxed smile about his mouth that never appears any other time.

And it’s so nice, so refreshing to be desired so strongly, even if the act itself is still desperate and uncoordinated, that Alison finds herself basking today just as much as he is, letting it chase off the feelings of grief and finality surrounding losing Mike, holding them at bay for a while.

‘In the moonlight,’ Thomas says, ‘your beauty is illuminated. You are incandescent.’

‘Not bad yourself,’ Alison murmurs, soaking up the affection. A little of that goes a long way.

Thomas leans over, kisses her with his usual clumsiness, and Alison puts a hand on either side of his face, slows it down a bit.

‘Take your time,’ she murmurs against his mouth. ‘There’s no rush.’

 He still hasn’t grown past that youthfully exuberant approach to the physical; it’s still all new and foreign and thrilling to him, but today, she decides, she’s going to guide him. She’d vowed not to when once turned to twice; to make it anything more than a desperate release would complicate it, add meaning. She’d tried to avoid that, to cling onto perhaps a small shred of her conscience—but today, after everything, after a definite ending to her and Mike, her conscience is nowhere near the driver’s seat.

They kiss softly, then less so; Alison pulls him closer, pleasantly surprised to find he’s ready and responsive again.

‘Might we…’ he asks almost shyly, ‘partake again?’

And she smiles against his mouth.

‘C’mere,’ she murmurs. ‘I’m gonna teach you a few things.’

Thomas is quiet afterwards, pensive…she’d almost say sullen, but he can’t be, given what they’ve just been doing.

‘It’s never been like that before,’ his voice is almost inaudible, the faintest of whispers. ‘It was…it was…’ he can’t quite find the words, struggles to get it out.

He looks at her, or perhaps through her.

‘Is that a common occurrence? When passion and lust no longer inflame your loins, and are replaced instead with…’

‘With what?’

Alison waits, but Thomas can’t seem to bring himself to complete the sentiment.

And then he sits up abruptly, his outfit suddenly perfectly arranged again, tucked and buttoned and  neatly pressed.

‘What’s wrong?’

Thomas stares into space, eyes almost glazed.

‘I, er…I should like to be alone for a moment.’

Alison looks at him in confusion.

‘Why? Are you…okay?’

‘I’m tired,’ he says distantly. ‘That is all.’

Alison can’t help the strangled, disbelieving half-laugh that comes from her mouth. Something really is off here, though she can’t quite put her finger on what.

Thomas looks at her, then at the door.

‘Would you mind dreadfully?’

‘O…kay,’ she gets to her feet slowly, uncertainly, and leaves him to it.

They watch Mike move out a week later.

He wouldn’t have been expecting fanfare—and God knows, he won’t see any, either—but Mike gets quite a send-off when he goes, stumping out with a cardboard box full of DVDs under one arm, and under the other a plastic bag filled with clothes, because he inadvertently threw out his own suitcase when clearing out Alison’s things.

Most of the ghosts have come to see him leave (or in Humphrey’s case, see his feet walk away), making a melancholy but grateful guard of honour for him to unknowingly walk through as he goes out the front door, the Captain humming The Last Post.

Mike stops, the gravel of the front drive crunching under his feet as he turns back to look at the house.

He raises his hand slowly, giving a sad little wave, and then turns, getting in his car with a haste Alison is sure is born of sadness.

The car makes a clumsy arc, and then it’s bearing away, shrinking into the distance.

For a moment, all they can do is stand there, just staring at the emptiness where it was, silent and hovering somewhere between disbelieving and accepting.

‘End of era,’ Robin shrugs, scratching his head.

 ‘Oh, well,’ Pat says chirpily. ‘Back to darkness and quiet. I expect we’ll get used to it, right? I mean, we’ve lived for stretches with nobody in the house, haven’t we?’

If there’s one complaint Alison has about Pat, it’s his stubborn determination to look on the bright side—even when it’s clear there isn’t one.

The atmosphere among the others is decidedly gloomy. And Alison feels a pang, not just for herself and her own self-pity, but for the life she’d given them—the books and telly and internet, the news of the outside world—precious gifts they’ve had snatched away from them again now. It won’t be easy to go back to how things were, she knows. For a while, though they were dead, they lived. Now they’re back to existing, watching, waiting.

‘We’ll get through this, guys,’ she murmurs, squeezing Kitty’s hand, reaching out to pick up Humphrey’s head and return it to his body. ‘We’ll find ways to pass the time—Pat, you can organise us another food club, can’t you—and Thomas, you…’

She hesitates, looks around. He’s not there. Come to think of it, he’s barely been around for a few days now. Not since he acted strange after their last coupling.

‘Thomas?’

The other ghosts glance half-heartedly around and shrug.

‘I’ll go and find him,’ she says when it’s clear they’re not going to do anything, and stalks back inside.

‘Thomas?’ He’s not in his chambers, nor in the parlour, nor the kitchen, nor the garden, where he tends to sit nowadays when chasing his muse. In a fit of madness, she checks the basement – but though the Plague People are only too happy to stop and chat for a while (or an hour…or two, but then she puts her foot down or they’ll go on all night), they’ve got no helpful information on his whereabouts either.

And then she remembers—his ‘sighing-place.’  Where he goes to brood.

She hasn’t clambered up to the east attic in a long time—not even when she was alive, and Alison regrets not doing more to bring it up to code when she had the chance.

It’s filthy, cobwebs strewn around and across it like litter, and small, almost a crawl space. Thomas has made himself as small as possible to fit in.

She feels she’s intruded, invaded. Alison flushes, clearing her throat awkwardly to get his attention. And when he notices her, she realises instantly what’s wrong.

If looks could kill, and she wasn’t already dead…

‘I have no interest today,’ he says coldly, ‘on being on the receiving end of your advances. I may have little dignity, Alison, after the manner in which I died, but I flatter myself I deserve a modicum more respect than to be a mere receptacle for your stray surges of emotion and ego.’

Alison’s blood runs cold.

‘Thomas…’ she tries feebly.

‘Isabelle was the love of my life…and  I thought you to be the love of my death. What a fool I was to think that could ever come to be, that I could make it so just by wishful thinking. All that achieved was allowing myself to be hurt beyond measure.’

His hands bunch into fists. ‘O damn fool!’

 ‘I was grieving,’ she tries pathetically to defend herself. ‘And I lost control of my—’

But Thomas waves a hand, cutting her off.

‘You think I didn’t know?’ he’s accusing, insulted, ‘you think I did not know this whole time what you were doing?’

Alison is taken aback, feeling as if she herself has just been shot through the chest with a pistol.

‘I knew, Alison,’ Thomas says with feeling, but his dramatics seem almost warranted, ‘and I had accepted it for what it was. But that last time, it was…tender, and you…you caressed me as if I mattered. You took me, Alison, as though you loved me. And you must know what pain that caused me.’

Her mouth opens, but no words come out.

‘When I found out Isabelle had loved me, it was far worse than when I believed she hadn’t. Knowing what I could have had, but never could from that day forward.’ He looks right at her, and there’s an anger in his eyes Alison has never seen before, mingled with an agony she knows she’s the cause of.

‘And it’s the same now. I cannot bear it, knowing what could have been.’

‘Thomas, please, can we just—’ Alison doesn’t know what they can “just” do to make this right, only that she has to fix this somehow.

But then Robin's head pops up through the floor and hollers ‘they in roof!’

And next minute everyone knows.

No crisis can exist in this house without being compounded tenfold by the ghosts—and so naturally, they take sides, turning it into the soap opera of the year.

‘Heh. I tell you before. Monogamy not the way of beasts,’ says Robin, and gives it little thought. Kitty asserts that anything Alison has done must be noble, because her best friend Alison couldn’t possibly ill-use someone. As if her guilt wasn’t in overdrive already. Thanks a bunch, Kitty.

'It's unthinkable! A lady acting like some...tawdry, feckless harlot!’

Fanny's scolding doesn't take into account her own shenanigans with Humphrey's body, but of course she does not appreciate Alison mentioning that.

Fanny won’t speak to her after that; the Captain is cold.

‘Least said, soonest mended,’ says Pat, and tries to keep the atmosphere light, though there’s a mistrust in his eyes when he looks at her she can’t help but think she deserves. And she knows he’s thinking of Carol, of her years-long affair with his best mate Morris, all under his nose.

But hang on, isn’t she Pat in this situation? Isn’t Mike Carol?

Thomas, though. He’s been wronged, and they all know it.  For all he’s publicly shown her an infatuation bordering on inappropriate, he’s (comparatively) innocent in this. This was her doing. Her attempt to heal herself. Her taking advantage of someone’s affection for her.

And Thomas has been their friend, their fellow ghost for a long time—decades and centuries longer than she’s been around—and they’re in protective mode now.

 The one who surprises her the most is Julian.

Julian is angry, vastly surpassing the ignominy of the others. Julian, who never seemed all that close to Thomas in the first place, but seems to have taken offense at Alison’s actions as if she’d betrayed and used Julian himself.

‘Oh, what?’ he says, nose twitching when she walks in the room one day, even though she hadn’t been planning to say anything. ‘Planning to enslave me into writing more messages to Mike, are you, so you can pledge your fake devotion while you’re having it off behind his back?’

‘Hey—you don’t get to judge. From all accounts—including your own—you spent most of your marriage holed up in brothels in the Netherlands while pretending you were in cabinet meetings.’

Julian crosses his legs in his chair, angling himself away from her. There’s a derisive smile on his face that unnerves her—because Julian is a lot of things, but being furious like this is not usually one of them.

'Oh, but you romping around with Thomas in the attic is a completely different story, is it?’

‘It is different,’ Alison insists.  ‘I'm not you. I don't look for debauched fun for the sake of it. I don't—’

'Use people?’ Julian challenges, as though reading her mind. 'Because I'd say taking advantage of Thomas's...well, it's a bit of a creepy business, really, isn't it... more an obsession than a devotion, but still...’

Alison sits down with a bump, the weight of the realisation weighing her down. Just her luck she falls right through the coffee table.

Though she anticipates a bruise, nothing comes. It's been nearly a year and a half and she still isn't used to this. She wonders absently if you ever get used to it, if the others don't still occasionally try and grab doorknobs and expect they'll move, or try and shift blankets over themselves on the beds at night. If you ever really, truly accept the paradoxes that come with being a ghost.

‘You want to talk hypocriseeeeuh,’ Julian drags the word out in that Hooray Henry manner of his, ‘have a look in the mirror first.’

'I didn't mean to use him,’ she murmurs brokenly. ‘I just... wanted to numb the pain.’

'Oh, it's all just to numb the pain!’ Julian snaps. 'I spent half my married life in red light districts in Amsterdam and bringing call girls to my room on extended business trips trying to numb the pain! Yeees, feeling like an inadequate husband and a subpar father? Why go home and face up to it? Bury your nose in your career. Go out and drown your sorrows in booze and loose women—it’s far easier than facing up to reality!’

At some point, he's stopped sneering at her, and his words have become astoundingly genuine

‘You don’t know how many times I’ve thought about how I’d make it up to Margot, if I still could. And Rachel. But all my other women—they were paid for it, or they were using me just as much as I was using them. None of them loved me, Alison. I was a terrible husband, and an even worse father—but I never dragged my friends into it.’

Alison’s not sure she appreciates someone with confessedly loose morals trying to take a moral high ground, but she sort of takes the point. Thomas is their friend. He’s supposed to be hers, as well, and she’s used him.

And what she’s done, she realises, ricochets further than she’d thought. They all have to forgive her, not just the man himself.

She’ll gladly take a few steps in the direction of amends—but it’s going to be a hard slog.

With half the house refusing to speak to her, or only doing so to express disapproval, it’s weeks before she can so much as approach them, let alone talk this out.

She spends that time with Robin, mostly. Robin seems not to care all that much, responds with his usual noncommittal shrug when she asks if she can sit down beside him, and so Alison takes what she can get, plays hypothetical chess with him, follows him when he goes sniffing into the woods, ‘hunting’, and lets him show her the array of voles and mice and creepy crawlies that live in the undergrowth.

‘Does it ever get easier?’ she asks him one night, the two of them sitting on the roof, watching the clouds move across the night sky. ‘Seeing people you love separated from you…getting older and going on without you and eventually…going?’

'People come. People go. Nothing constant.’ Robin raises his eyes to the sky. 'Only moonah.’

‘C’mon,’ Alison nudges him. ‘You don’t believe that—not really. Under all that Neolithic instinct, there’s a heart in there.’

‘Sure, is heart,’ Robin says. ‘Make blood go boom boom in veins.’

There are moments when all you can do is laugh, unsure if it’s in amusement or fondness. This is one of those.

‘Don’t tell me there’s no-one from your life you miss.’

‘Nope.’

‘Your sister?’ She grins. ‘The one we’re all descended from?’

‘Nope.’

‘Nobody at all? Not one friend? No-one you’d give anything – even the…’ well, she’s not going to say moonah, ‘…moon…just to have back for one moment?’

Robin furrows his sloping brow, biting on his filthy fingernails. And then Alison sees it—a light in his eyes, flickering and then dimming just as quickly as it came, replaced by the rawest, most basic expression of sadness she’s ever seen.

‘Who?’ she asks gently.

Robin looks at her, and Alison isn’t prepared for the response that leaves his mouth.

‘Mary.’

‘Mary?!’

He hadn’t even seemed that upset when she was suck—moved on. He’d seemed more interested in the kids’ party at the time, and when he’d chosen a star for her, he’d seemed, out of all of them, the most easily at peace with the situation.

He nods vigorously, and there’s a wistfulness in his face Alison hasn’t seen before. ‘We has fun, me ‘n’ Mary. Does games. Laughs sometimes. We cool.’

It astounds Alison, but looking back, she realises there were always glimpses. Mary and Robin, and the longing looks and stolen glances after Alison and Mike’s rager of a party. The two of them, striding into her room repeatedly. Mrs Cooper…Alison…trying, in some endearingly daft way, to get her to sign over her house to Robin. How many other harebrained little escapades, Alison wonders, have they got up to over the years?

And she realises, once again, just how little she knows of the ghosts she calls her friends. They’ve told her stories of their pasts, of course, and she’s interacted with them daily for seven years now— but she’s only really scratched the surface of who they are. In life and in death.

Robin isn’t just a foul-smelling caveman who can barely speak. Mary wasn’t just a superstitious simpleton with a completely justified pyrophobia. When it comes to it, she’s boiled all of them down to the façades they all put on and their idiosyncrasies, to the most annoying parts of themselves, but she’s never thought to delve deeper. In some way, they’ve always just been the ghosts, when really, they’re bottomless pools of complexity, same as everyone.

No wonder it was so easy to use Thomas—she’s never really known him. She’s always written him off, filed him under her own headings—the pompous poet, the hopeless romantic, the obsessive stalker. He’s more than that. He has a whole life she knows nothing about, facets of his personality she’s undoubtedly never seen. That she’s never let herself see, because there’s something about getting too close to Thomas that unnerves her.

She needs to talk to him, to get to know him.

She needs to get to know…all of them, really. The Captain makes being in the army his entire personality—but surely there’s more to him than that. There’s a wild side of Fanny itching to get out; Kitty represses a deep emotional wound; Humphrey is a man, not a head.

It might take a while to put this right, but…hey, she’s got forever, right?

He's sitting alone in the attic again, turning his fateful forged letter from “Isabell" over and over in his hands. It pains him, she knows, that he can never get rid of it. That he’s tormented by her loss, and his cousin’s betrayal, for the rest of eternity.

Thomas doesn’t realise anyone’s observing him, and lets out a theatrical sigh.

Alison moves closer, suddenly gripped by nerves as the time approaches to make her presence known, but she powers through.

‘Penny for them.’

Okay, so the light and friendly approach probably wasn’t the best idea.  The look he gives her isn’t accommodating.

‘This is my sighing-place,’ he says coldly. ‘I’ve told you time and time again.’

‘Look, I just want to talk to you. Clear things up.’ She doesn’t like resorting to this, to manipulating him, but she puts on her best damsel in distress face. ‘Please?’

‘I’d try and resist you, but…what choice do I have?’ Thomas throws up his hands. ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci hath three in thrall.’

 ‘You’re not passing that off as yours,’ Alison says, shuffling in next to him, ‘that’s just Keats again.  Budge up a bit.’

Thomas rolls his eyes, but he shuffles over, and Alison squeezes into the space next to him, wrapping her arms around her knees. Thomas leans back against the wall, in that way that doesn’t quite make sense, sighing again.

‘I’ve…loved Mike for…well, most of my adult life, really. I mean, there were other boyfriends, of course, but I met Mike when I was twenty-two, and…’ she’s rambling now, hoping he keeps up— and for all she knows he is, but for all she knows he’s also just nodding along, because let’s face it, Thomas would pretend to be interested in anything she’s saying.

Except maybe he wouldn’t. She mentally kicks herself—after her realisation she’s got to stop thinking of the ghosts as one-dimensional, she’s doing it again. It’s so easy to do with Thomas—safer to do with Thomas, to reduce him to a caricature of himself—because to acknowledge him as a man with deeper levels of being…it frightens her more than it does with the others.

 ‘It’s just, I…it’s gonna take some time for me to accept he’s gone, after everything. And when I was sort of forced to, I didn’t…handle that very well. And you…I felt…loved, and, like I existed again, and that doesn’t excuse it, and I don’t expect you to understand, because it isn’t…’

Thomas holds up a hand abruptly.

‘You think I could not understand?!’ the offense in his voice is palpable.

‘I didn’t mean…’

‘You say I could not understand,’ he says, sounding wounded, ‘and yet you forget that I haunted this house for two centuries after my death. I watched Isabelle—my Isabelle—with that cad Francis. They inherited this house, when her father died. Their children played in the grounds. I watched the love of my life grow old with another man—and you think I could not understand?’

He gazes at her earnestly.

‘When perhaps I might be the only one who could.’

 ‘Thomas, I’m…so sorry.’

‘I understood you perfectly, Alison. Why you came to me. I understood it all too well. And I’d contented myself with that, with being your comforter—if my heart could not have what it truly desired, I could settle for what it could have, what you would give. But on that last occasion, when you treated me with such…care, with such gentleness and tenderness, and I saw how it could have truly been…I could not pretend anymore…’

‘—that it was enough,’ Alison finishes knowingly. 

‘I want to be…’ he raises his hand towards the ceiling, curls the fingers in on themselves and brings his fist downwards, in a dramatic, showy gesture that probably meant something at the time, ‘loved. The object of desire, not…’

And Alison swallows (not that she has saliva to swallow) because she knows what’s coming next.

‘Not…ill-used.’

‘I know,’ she says, sufficiently shamed, ‘and I’m sorry. I…I did use you, and there’s no excuse for it. I know how you felt, and I still…’

‘I know now it was not to be. That I—o hapless fool— could never be a man a woman such as you could love.’

‘Thomas, that’s not…’ Alison swallows, unsure if she can go on. She’s repressed the thought long enough, hasn’t really admitted it to herself, let alone proclaimed it out loud. It’ll have repercussions, she knows.

After all the damage she’s done, she may as well own up to the truth.  

‘Thomas…when I was drunk that night—that night of the party—you know the one, the one with Dante…’

He nods.

‘And I said—well, you know what I said.’

‘By heart,’ Thomas says softly, almost breathlessly.

She’d thought she hadn’t meant it at the time. Never even crossed her mind she might have meant anything by it. It had always been Mike for her, from the moment she’d realised in her youth that he was more than just a rebound. The idea of anyone even being in her peripheral vision was unthinkable. Except…

Except.

Except when her inhibitions had been lowered enough to let her subconscious through.

She’d thought she hadn’t meant it at the time—but looking back, that hadn’t been a drunken mistake, it had been drunken candour.

If she hadn’t been with Mike…if Thomas hadn’t been dead, or she’d been two hundred years older…

If she confesses this now, out loud, she could unleash a monster, renew Thomas’s infatuation a hundredfold. Or intensify his pain, his resentment.

But she’s come this far.

‘I meant it, Thomas.’

His eyes widen.

‘I really did. Mike is…was…my whole life. But if he hadn’t been… and obviously if our timelines had matched up a bit more… I don’t know.’ She looks at him earnestly. ‘Maybe it could’ve been different.’

She gives him a weak smile, reaches for his hand— and he takes it with more warmth and gentleness than she deserves.

‘Had I but been born in the right century,’ Thomas says ruefully, ‘sought you out at a ball…’

‘—yeah, we didn’t really have those in my time.’

‘…and asked for the first two dances,’ Thomas goes on, ignoring the correction. ‘Had I asked your father’s permission to court you and to chaperone…’

‘—er, Thomas, if you want this analogy to work, you’ll have to update it a bit. Maybe, you know, replace saw me at a ball with bumped into me at work, and asked me to dance with asked me out for coffee, and asked my father’s permission with…well, nothing, because my dad died when I was five, and in my time, our parents don’t decide for us once we’re adults anyway.’

‘Very well,’ says Thomas – and is that an eye-roll she’s seeing? A bit of cheek? She wants to see more of this; roll back the shutters of his shop-front, the flair of the persona he puts on, and coax out hidden facets of the personality beneath.

‘Had I but been born in the right century…and bumped you at work…’

‘Not quite,’ Alison murmurs.

‘And had I asked you to accompany me to the coffee house… perhaps…I could have wooed you. Won your heart, and your hand.’

The thought of a modern day Thomas wooing her with Regency words makes her giggle—how very Kate and Leopold—but then again, had he been born in her time, perhaps some of that pomposity and temperamentally artistic nature might have been toned down.

She can picture it. He'd look great; get him out of those knee breeches and into a pair of jeans and a fitted jumper, and he'd be one of those knitting pattern guys—handsome yet sensitive. He’d have been the sort of bloke, she thinks, that would have probably caught her eye, that she might have gone for, that she might have got serious with quickly.

She can picture it all far too easily.

Because at times, she gets glimpses of a man who, if different stars aligned, if they’d both been partaking of different lives, could have easily taken centre stage in her heart. A man who’d sat with her on Christmas day when she, alone and disappointed, had sung her carol without Mike’s family— and had sung along with her. A man who’d shown the patience of a saint trying to teach her elocution, when she’d been frustratingly abysmal at it.

Thomas Thorne has always been a better man than she’s given him credit for. And staring him in the face now, she sees what she so often tries to deny—not just an obnoxious romantic who’s taken a fancy to her, but a man who’s in love with her. And she could brush that off when he was a paranormal being and she wasn’t, when she could convince herself he wasn’t really real.

But in death, reality is turned on its head. In some strange twist of fate, he seems real now—and Mike does not. He can be touched, felt; Mike has become a phantom; untouchable.

And acknowledging that—accepting that—frightens Alison to bits.

‘Thomas, look,’ she says cautiously. ‘I didn’t just come to you because I needed to forget Mike. I did feel something…I think I might have for a long time.’

Something comes to life in Thomas’s face; he fairly lights up.

‘Alison,’ he says softly, ‘to hear you say you care…that is the greatest joy any man could ever experience.’

Alison hastens to explain further, before he puts the cart before the horse.

‘But…the way I went about it, Thomas…there’s no excusing that. You deserve for me to have approached you on your own merit, not just because I was trying to get over someone else I cared about. I’m not…I’m not in any state to be offering you anything. Or anyone, for that matter. I still love Mike, and that’s not just going to disappear. You need to know that.’

And she shouldn’t really be saying this, but she seems not to know when to shut up.

‘I’m not saying never. I’m just saying now…now’s not the right time.’

He goes to speak, but she puts a finger against his lips.

 ‘I don’t want to give you false hope, Thomas. Everything with Mike…it’s so raw, and I just…I haven’t been able to let go. I might never be able to, so I’m not going to promise you anything.’

Thomas nods.

‘So don’t make any declarations that you’ll wait for me, nothing like that…if it’s meant to, it’ll happen one day. But right now, I need to heal, and learn to cope without Mike, and…see if I can love someone on their own merit, not just reactively. Know what I mean?’

And she can tell, from the look in his eyes, that he understands.

‘I don’t ever want to use you again, Thomas. If anything happens between us again, I want it to be because it’s real.’

‘I dream of such a day. But of course, these things can’t be rushed.’

‘But in the meantime…I want to get to know you. Properly.’

‘And I you,’ Thomas says fervently.

Alison holds out her hand.

‘If that’s…okay.’

And they may not be fully all right, not yet, but when Thomas takes her hand, she knows they’re on the right track.

‘I don’t say it enough, Thomas, but… you’re great. You really are.’

Not the most romantic declaration, or the most apologetic, but judging by Thomas’s genuine smile, for now, it’s enough.

Things settle with the others quicker once Thomas speaks to them, assures them he holds no ill-will, that it was a mere misunderstanding and everything is fine.

‘We all make mistakes,’ says Pat, hugging Alison as he’s clearly been itching to do for a while. ‘And every day is a fresh start.’

‘Well,’ says Julian, shrugging ‘it’s not like I can’t see the appeal. If I’d had a saucebox of a woman throwing herself at me, I'd have had trouble resisting...’

‘Yes, thank you!’ Alison cuts him off.

Kitty is relieved; she just knew her best friend Alison was above all that.

‘Well,’ Fanny says with a wry smile, ‘when one realises one’s going to be alone forever, one can lose one’s senses—so I suppose I can forgive you that lapse in judgement. But heed this warning—it is unbecoming for a lady to cavort about that way!’

Alison smiles gratefully at the return to normality. ‘I’ll remember.’

They aren’t alone for long, though.

Mike rents the house out as an Airbnb, and it does surprisingly well with hen and stag weekends. Soon enough, every other weekend night is filled with the thump of music, and the screech of Fanny discovering another amorous couple in her bedroom—this is my room, I tell you, MY ROOM!

The Captain is outraged, though Alison catches him coming downstairs to observe, at times—particularly if it’s a stag do—and gets frightfully uppity when she teases him about it.  

Julian plays with all the guests’ smartphones and downloads hundreds of pounds worth of apps, getting away with it when the victims wake up and think they were just so drunk they couldn’t remember doing it.

It gives them all something to do, parties on an almost weekly basis to enjoy, a bit more to their existence again than just meaningless haunting. It’s made things a bit brighter, Alison thinks, having something to look forward to.

That, or things they seem to be brighter because of the time she’s spending with Thomas.

With the weight between them lifted, and having settled into a comfortable companionship  these past few months, it’s become natural for them to spend more and more time together, with no ulterior motives, clear where they currently stand.

They’re sitting at the foot of the stairs now, watching an absolute rager of a party taking place in front of them, the music loud and the alcohol flowing freely. The chaos is insane; Julian and Pat are enjoying it immensely (the Captain and Fanny pretending not to), and Alison knows Mike’s cleaners are going to have to work overtime to clear up the resulting mess, but it’s still an enjoyable evening.

‘I suppose parties were a bit different in your time,’ she says absently to Thomas.

‘It depends,’ Thomas says thoughtfully. ‘On who was hosting, and for whom.’

A pair of drunkards whoop and dash through with armfuls of books, which they proceed to toss about for God-knows-why. Alison ducks to avoid one going through her head.

‘Oh, God, they’ve got into the library.’

The book lands open, face-down, and skitters across the floor. Thomas leans over to inspect it, recoiling with annoyance when he sees it’s Lord Byron’s Selected Works.

‘Byron,’ Thomas snarls. ‘Damn his impertinence! I will defend to the death that those were my verses.’

‘Bit late for that, mate,’ Alison snorts.

‘Yes, well…you understood the sentiment.’

It’s at that moment that a familiar melody hits Alison’s ears, the opening of a new track filling the room.

We get it on most every night
And when that ol’ moon gets so big and bright

A grin splits her face in two. ‘God, I haven’t heard this one in years!’

‘I have never heard “this one”,’ says Thomas.

‘I used to love it back in the day.’ She’d always found it a pretty romantic kind of song, not that she’ll say too much right now. Not when she’s promised not to make any moves unless she’s sure, lest she hurt him again.

‘Tis inspiring,’ Thomas says thoughtfully, paying attention to the lyrics.

 ‘What, more than Kylie Minogue?’

Thomas glares at her, and she can’t help but snicker.

‘I’m not going to steal its verse.’

‘I was just teasing, Thomas,’ she bumps his shoulder with hers, leaning against him.

Dancing in the moonlight
Everybody’s feeling warm and bright
It’s such a fine and natural sight…

Thomas is still listening intently, and then he turns to her.

 ‘Forgive me, Alison—I should not wish you to presume I am prematurely asking anything. I will keep my word, as, I trust, will you.’

Alison’s mouth quirks. ‘Go on.’

‘But…’ and he’s smiling at her almost slyly, ‘would it be in order for me to ask for this dance?’

And Alison finds herself smiling back without hesitation, taking his proffered hand and letting her pull her to her feet.

‘I think it just might be.’

(Their dancing styles clash horribly, a product of their different eras, and they end up stumbling about in each other’s arms with no real structure to it, but it’s still the most fun she’s had since this whole death thing went down).  

Mike may be moving on with his life—moving away from her and into a different future—but he leaves her with one parting gift.

A new group of guests has just stumped up to their rooms, bags in tow, when the Captain comes thundering down the stairs, his face alight.

‘I say!’ the Captain is in raptures— as much as he shows raptures beneath his façade of military severity—‘by Jove, the television is on!’

They race upstairs to see—and he’s right, it’s playing, the remote control left conveniently where they can use it.

There’s a leather-bound binder open in front of it; they crowd round to read it, the Captain getting there first.

‘As part of the terms of this lease,’ he reads, ‘the Airbnb renter also agrees to leave the upstairs bedroom television switched on for the duration of their stay, and turn the pages of each of the open books in the library once a day. Well, I say!’

‘What does that mean?’ Kitty asks.

‘Can’t you infer anything, girl?’ Fanny shakes her head in disbelief. ‘It means as long as Michael has regular guests, we’ll still have our entertainment!’

Cheers erupt from the assembled ghosts, and they scramble to decide on the evening’s film show.

‘Michael Cooper,’ Alison says, her face stretching into a grin. ‘You son of a gun.’

Of course, the joyous moment only lasts a minute or so, before it devolves into bickering over what channel to watch, but still. It’s the thought the counts, and all that.

Time moves slowly, when you haven’t got much to do—but it moves.

Guests trickle through the house like rain, sometimes in ones and twos, sometimes in large, rowdy groups.

The telly upstairs dies, and they spend a gruelling few weeks playing endless rounds of charades of an evening until Mike comes round for his monthly inspections and replaces it.

The stove in the kitchen catches fire, after one of the Airbnb guests leaves a pan of oil on all night, and they’re all thankful Mary wasn’t there to see it.

A rowdy youth at a stag do drunkenly falls down the stairs one night—which means a bit of a crisis for Mike, PR and legal-wise, and a new ghost to join their motley crew in the form of Jez, whose arm is permanently bent at an odd angle from the way he landed.

A lunar eclipse comes around, and Robin hosts another Moonah Ston ritual, with the help of the Captain (Thomas is indignant he’s been outvoted yet again to do the recital), and Alison, instead of complaining they’re interrupting her peace, joins in this time. There’s something liberating about letting your hair down, leaping about to an imaginary beat like a caveman.

Mike brings Myfanwy for the odd weekend, and they get repairs and cleaning done, taking care of the tasks the cleaner Mike pays hasn’t got round to.

And Alison realises, after they leave one Sunday afternoon, that it doesn’t rip a hole through her heart.

Mike has moved to Cardiff.

Alison can’t really picture him in Cardiff; he doesn’t like to venture too far, but here’s proof; a letter left on the table telling her as much. And though she does feel a grazing pain in her chest, it’s not as sharp as it would have been, once.

In part, because of Thomas.

Maybe…quite a large part because of Thomas.

She’s no longer filling a void, an emptiness left by Mike. She’s spending time with him for its own sake, and maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but it really seems something is beginning to fall into place.  Thomas’s amorous advances have been toned down, but she can still feel his desire there, bubbling below the surface. And the more they talk, the more time they spend together, day by day, the more that little ember in her chest grows.

She really shouldn’t be thinking of that now—she’s got Pat’s Christmas quiz to get to.

They’d only realised it was Christmas when some of the Airbnb guests had brought presents with them and hung mistletoe, but the festive atmosphere has sent them all into a frenzy, Kitty looking out for Father Christmas (well, he came once!), Pat reminiscing about various puddings he remembers eating before organising what he’s been calling all week a ripper of a quiz, which he can’t wait to present at seven o’clock.

Oh, God, and it’s seven fifteen now.

Alison sprints out her bedroom, nearly colliding into Thomas on the stairs.

‘I too am late,’ he says, dashing down with her in tandem. ‘I was composing a sonnet about the frost, and time escaped me.’

They can hear voices; it’s already started; to interrupt would draw attention to their lateness.

That’s what Alison tells herself is the reason for hesitating at the door, anyway.

It’s more likely the taunting sprig of mistletoe above their heads. She sees Thomas’s eyes follow hers, alighting on it, and then they’re eyeing each other with apprehension.

 ‘I, erm…’ Thomas brushes something non-existent off his waistcoat.

‘Yeah,’ Alison murmurs awkwardly.  They’re not really supposed to; Alison is still supposed to be working things out, letting herself recover from Mike, working on herself, working on making good the harm she’s done Thomas before plunging in—and yet the want in this moment is overwhelming.

They want to.

They’re still hovering in an ambiguous space between friendly and something else, unsure what the rules are, hesitating and leaning in uncertainly and deciding in the end that a peck on the cheek probably isn’t crossing any lines.

Alison pecks Thomas, Thomas pecks her, and this is all above board, surely.

But then, because the atmosphere is irresistibly perfect, they lean in for a third time, letting their lips join for the just the briefest of seconds.

 ‘Oh, get a room,’ comes Julian’s nasal disapproval from behind them, and they jump apart as he pushes past them to join the quiz, the moment gone.

On a particularly dull day, on a down week, Pat organises a foraging expedition for them all.

Well, technically they can’t actually forage for anything, given they can’t touch the soil to dig—but the former Cub Scout master is undeterred. He leads them out into the woods anyway, gives a seamless lecture on what to look out for, and has them all doing the best they can with only their eyes.

Robin abandons the effort immediately, running off to ‘hunt’ or howl along with Barclay Beg-Chetwynde’s dogs, but the rest of them, no matter how much they grumble, stick it out, the Captain barking at them to follow instructions while Pat guides them as he would a troupe of ten-year-old boys.

‘Now who can tell me how to tell the difference between a mushroom and a toadstool?’ Pat’s in full sail this morning. ‘Remember—one makes a delicious meal, one’s a deadly poison, so you need to choose wisely!’

‘Mary would’ve known this one,’ Alison murmurs to Thomas as they all trudge along.

‘I do see a use for her particular field of expertise, I must say.’ He leans down to inspect what turns out not to be a mushroom, but a fallen chestnut.

 ‘A pity I can’t touch it. Forgive me my vaingloriousness, Alison, but in my boyhood days, I was a master at conkers.’

She’s not sure why, but the comment, said in his air of poetic reverence, but about something as stupid as conkers, has her all but rolling about with laughter. Thomas’s face, bewildered and bemused, only serves to make her laugh harder.

‘What have I said to amuse you so?’ Thomas’s surprise makes way for mild indignity. ‘It’s true, you know!’

‘Oh, I’m sure it, is,’ Alison says, steadying herself against him, though the laugh is still trapped in there, having to be forced down to keep it at bay.

‘I must admit,’ Thomas says after a while, ‘it brings me joy to see you so.’

‘So what?’

‘Merry. It’s not a sight I have seen since…’

Since she died. Makes sense.

It astounds her, though, that here she is, dead as a doornail and…well, Thomas is right. She is…kind of…sort of…happy. Ish.

She squeezes his fingers, and it’s only as she does so that she realises this entire time, her hand has been in Thomas’s.

She says nothing about it, and neither does he. They just go on foraging, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to be doing with fingers entwined.

‘And what have you two got over here?’ and suddenly the moment is broken, and Pat looms large between them, a winsome smile on his face. ‘Now that there is an impressive bit of moss. Not exactly part of the assignment, but that’s such a specimen I think it’s worth a few points.’

‘Um, yeah,’ Alison says hastily, and they let go of each other’s hands, Thomas muttering awkwardly about seeing some growth of interest and shuffling off to examine it.

‘Moss. Right.’

 ‘So, er, Alison. Now we’ve got a moment, I’ve been meaning to ask yer…how are you holding up?’

She blinks. ‘Holding up?’

‘In general. I like to check in, every now and then. I do it with all the others, when I get the chance. Ask how they’re coping with their deaths. It’s what I would have wanted someone to do for me, anyway.’

Alison resolves to take him aside sometime next week and return the favour.

‘Now, I may be going doolally, but it looks to me as if over the past few months you’ve turned a corner.’

‘Yeah,’ she says, unsure where Pat’s impromptu therapy session is heading. ‘I suppose in a way, I—hang on—I think I’ve found one!’ she points triumphantly, and Pat’s face nearly glows when he hones in for a closer look.

‘Well done, Alison! She’s found one! Give her a clap!’ This is shouted for the benefit of the others, who roll their eyes and give a smattering of half-hearted applause before turning back to their own conversations.

‘We’ll make a Scout of you yet,’ Pat says proudly. ‘Or…a Guide, anyway.’

There’s a pause, Pat’s eyes darting back and forth, clearly revving up to saying something but not working up the nerve.

‘It’s all right, you know,’ he says at length.

Alison’s brows knit together. ‘What is?’

‘It’s all right to move on. To accept that things change. I mean, I’ve tried tellin’ the Captain that, but he won’t be told, will he? He’ll be living in the war forever, that one.’ He laughs uneasily, and Alison smirks in return.

‘But sometimes…’ Pat goes on, ‘things don’t stay the same. You don’t stay the same. Things aren’t constant—and …and you’re not constant, and sometimes you realise that the person you once held dear in your heart is…sort of in a distant corner somewhere at the back. Not gone, but… there’s room at the front for other things.  And that’s nobody’s fault; it’s just the way things go.’

Alison nods uncertainly.

‘So it’s all right, you know,’ Pat says solemnly, putting a hand on her shoulder. ‘To move on. To let yourself love somebody new.’

‘I know,’ Alison says, gazing out at the trees and letting out a sigh that could put some of Thomas’s theatrics to shame. ‘I couldn’t expect Mike to hang around pining forever. And Myfanwy’s not who I’d have pegged him for going for, but…least he’s happy. And I think…’

She chews on her lip.

‘…yeah. I’m okay with it. It’s taken a while, but I think I’m there.’

Pat just looks up at her, that innocently honest face on him that suggests he’s seeing into her soul. He’s perceptive, is Pat, hidden behind the façade of a simpler glee.

‘I wasn’t talking about Mike, love.’

Alison falters, stuttering, though no actual words come out.

‘Alison,’ he pats her on the shoulder, an almost fatherly gesture, ‘it’s all right, you know. If you and Thomas—I mean, if you did,’ he holds up a hand when she tries to protest, ‘it’d be all right to let yourself.’

‘Pat,’ she tries a smile, but it’s unconvincing, and it freezes on her face. ‘I’m not…’

Pat cocks his head to one side. ‘We’ve all seen how it is, Alison, love. You’re joined at the hip, you two. And I know what happened before, and well…we’ve all forgiven yer for that, and put it in the past and we’re all friends again. And we’ve all seen how things’ve changed now.’

‘I’m not worried, not about that, it’s just…’ she’s no good at lying to Pat; there’s a kind-heartedness to him that makes her feel guilty even trying. She bites her lip, comes out with the truth.

 ‘I’m not ready.’

 ‘There’s not many opportunities for happiness when you’re a ghost,’ Pat says. ‘Take it from me. The highlight of my day is reminiscing about the full English breakfast Carol used to make me of a Sunday morning. Black pudding, beans…the lot.’

He licks his lips.

‘God, she had the gift. And her bacon sarnies...’

‘I think you’re veering away from the point.’

Pat smiles. ‘Well, the point is…if summat comes your way that can give you a little taste of happiness again…my advice is to go for it.’

And Alison smiles back, meaning every ounce of the warmth in it.

‘Thanks, Pat. I’ll, er…I’ll bear it in mind.’

It doesn’t happen right away.

Alison had meant what she said to Pat; she isn’t ready. He was right; she and Thomas are more or less inseparable these days, and the more distance she puts between herself and her past with Mike, the more she can see—genuinely—a future laid out before her that has Thomas in it. But she’s still going to need a while.

It takes another eight months.

Eight months of life moving forward, and death.

Of the house falling into disrepair. Of the whole lot of them ganging up to watch the builders bring it back up to code.

Of arguing with the others over charades, and what Robin is actually trying to act out.

Of Jez moving on before any of them, sparking fits of jealousy among the longer-established ghosts waiting their turn.

Of her and Thomas seeking refuge by the lake, he to soak up inspiration for another poem he’ll never complete, she to escape, for a few hours at a time, the chaos that is life with seven other ghosts, all of whom bicker with alarming frequency.

Of Mike and Myfanwy turning up for the odd getaway, Mike always stopping by their old room to leave a letter with updates on his life.

Eight months of realising, bit by bit, that the love she felt for Mike is becoming, as Pat said, something distant, filed away on a shelf in the back of her mind, a bygone, and that the glimmer of whatever she feels for Thomas is slowly glowing brighter, flickering more and more into life each day.

She hangs back, again and again, testing herself, trying to make sure. Trying to determine whether it’s real, or still a remnant of her insecurity, her heartbreak. She can’t make another mistake. She can’t afford to—and she knows full well it’d destroy Thomas this time.

After eight months, though, it’s becoming harder to keep it inside. Every interaction, every minute in his company is skating dangerously closer to her losing her self control, just saying sod it and going for it.

‘If I were to call on you,’ Thomas says one day, when they’re wandering aimlessly through the grounds, ‘should you have been alive in my time, of course…’

‘Of course,’ Alison can’t resist a fond eye roll.

‘Would it…be welcome?’

‘What’s brought this on?’

Thomas jerks his head downwards, at her arm, linked with his.

When did that happen? She can’t even remember, and it hits her that they’re heading for the inevitable conversation, the one that’s going to be death-changing.

‘Thomas,’ she says, because why delay it, if it’s inevitable? ‘If I’d been alive back then, and you’d have called on me, it would have been more than welcome.’

A bit of colour comes to his cheeks; a small smile comes to his face he can’t force down.

They’ve looped back to the garden of Button House, coming to rest in the stone archway at the side of the house. It’s a good place to sit and discuss this, away from any prying eyes of other ghosts, in the silent presence of Florence.

‘Alison,’ Thomas says at length. ‘Forgive me my impertinence, but I must ask you a question.’

She exhales sharply. ‘Okay.’

‘What you told me, that day in the attic…is it still true…now?’

‘It is,’ she says slowly.

‘And if that is so…could you be sure…in the depths of your soul…that if Mike were to return you would not immediately rush to his embrace?’

And well...no, she couldn't promise that. Mike's not coming back, though, apart from the odd visit, and Heaven forbid, were he to be taken too soon, it’s unlikely he’d end up dying here. Not anymore. So the point is moot.

'Could you say if Isabelle showed up you wouldn't rush to her embrace?’ she counters.

Thomas falters. 'I cannot say. I could not be sure... how my heart would respond. Caught twixt two possibilities.’

'Exactly.' Alison raises her hands, then slaps them against her sides. 'There you are, then.’

‘It is a puzzle indeed.’

‘They’re gone, though,’ Alison says, putting a hand on his arm. ‘So we’ll never know. But we know what we’ve got here. Don’t we? And maybe it’s time we…see if…you know.’

 ‘Alison, are you saying…do my ears deceive me, or are you…’

‘I am,’ she swallows. ‘I am saying that.’

Thomas’s face does more than light up—it’s an incendiary, his happiness reaching almost catatonic levels, and she feels she’d better say something, actually hash things out properly before she loses him inside his own head.

'Could we...’ Alison takes a breath, 'start again? Properly. I'll woo you right this time, I promise.’

‘Surely, the honour of wooing shall be all mine.’

'Ah,’ says Alison with a wry smile, 'but, seeing as how you had to wait over two hundred years for it, you deserve to be on the receiving end of the wooing.’ It’s a bit of a struggle to get down onto one knee, but she manages.

‘Thomas Thorne, will you do me the honour of…okay, you’ll have to help me out here. How would you go about asking someone out in your time?’

‘I? I would pen a note declaring my undying love.’

‘I forgot,’ Alison says, shaking her head. ‘You’re a Bohemian. What would the normal people of your time do? Hang on…Austen was around your time, wasn’t she?’

‘Speaking for myself, I did not think much of her work. A medium such as the novel should reflect man’s neverending pursuit for truth…not mere satire of the gentry and their marriages. Mary Shelley was far superior—The Modern Prometheus was a masterpiece of gargantuan—’

‘So she was around your time,’ Alison smirks. ‘Give or take. So I think it’ll do to borrow one of her lines, for the purpose of this.’

‘I beg that you do not.’ Thomas cringes.

Alison clears her throat ostentatiously, but it sort of kills the moment seeing Thomas covering his ears, and so she relents.

‘All right. I’ll make up my own. Thomas, will you do me the honour of…letting me…be…your suitor?’

She knows how pathetic it sounds, and judging by Thomas’s raised eyebrow and the twist of his mouth, barely concealing a laugh, she hasn’t quite hit the mark.

'It’s not the proper way of things, but I would be delighted to accept your suit.’ And then he smiles up at her, his amusement melting into the warmest, most natural smile she's seen to date. ‘Dearest, loveliest Alison.'

'Okay, okay. You don't need to get all Mr Darcy on me.’

‘Pray, kindly do not compare me to that grotesque mockery of a gentleman! That work of fiction! That—’

‘Okay,’ Alison laughs, ‘no need to get jealous.’

She reaches out and straightens his cravat, a move which comes oddly naturally now.

‘He’s all right, but he’s no Thomas Thorne.’

It goes down better among the crew this time. Pat lets out a wahey! and congratulates them both; Julian makes a slyly innuendo-filled comment; the Captain mutters something that sounds suspiciously like about bally time.

‘A courtship?! Oh, but that’s wonderful!’ Kitty is overjoyed, flinging herself at them and crushing them in one of her overly enthusiastic hugs.

 ‘Oh, please, please, please could I be a bridesmaid?’

Alison can’t help but smile at her exuberance. ‘I think it’s a bit early for that, Kitty.’

But, of course, her mind has gone sailing away, conjuring up more Regency visions, her in a bonnet and gown and a flower-filled church.

That can never be, of course. The closest they’d get—should they ever get there, should they ever even want to—would be a fake ghostly ceremony, nothing official or legal, Pat and the Captain arguing over who got to officiate.

Too soon, she tells herself, shaking her head.

Too soon, but it doesn’t hurt to dream, even when you’re a ghost.

They start slowly, take things as they would have done in Regency—at least, how the gentry might possibly have done things. Thomas being of the same ilk as Byron and Percy Shelley means they can undoubtedly bend the rules in future, but for now, Alison likes it this way. The talking, the waiting— it takes longer to build things up, but after everything they’ve been through, the shambles of their earlier tryst, this is just what they need. They have plenty of time—why rush?

Besides which, Thomas deserves a Regency-era courtship, and a proper, Regency-era courtship he shall have. He waited long enough for one, after all. After two hundred years, he deserves the works.

They ask Fanny to chaperone, and she is only too delighted—and takes her role far too seriously (too close! Step back! Remove your arm from around her—good gracious, this will never do!)

They take turns about the grounds, sit by the lake and talk; Thomas teaches her some of the dances of his day, and they dance in the empty parlour as if there were a ball taking place, Kitty and Pat making up a four for some of the more complex routines. And then, because Regency era activities can only take them so far, Alison introduces Thomas to some modern courtship activities, and they club dance (Thomas is terrible at it) and watch a film with Julian’s help, and sit and look at the clouds, because when you’re a ghost and your abilities are limited, eventually any activities can only take you so far.

That’s what they’re doing now, lying on their backs in the grass and imagining they can feel it around them, gazing up at the sky. Alison is sure, if he could, Thomas would have a long blade of grass between his teeth, and then another of her visions blurs into her mind—of the two of them, two hundred years ago, Alison in a gown and bonnet with a parasol propped up behind her, Thomas with a book of poetry in his hand, reading to her.

It’s strange, somehow in two years of time passing forward after death, it feels as if she’s been transported back two hundred, into Thomas’s world. She’s in an existence so different to her living one, she almost can’t remember things ever being different from how they are now.

And maybe it’s the moment, or the fact that Fanny is distracted at present and is surreptitiously ogling one of the gardeners Mike hired, or maybe it’s just the culmination of all these months of realising, bit by bit, that it is possible to love after death, but it seems right. Right to move in closer, right to let out an uncharacteristic sigh when he takes her face in his hand, right to give him the first kiss they should have had, if the circumstances surrounding their original affair hadn't marred everything in the first place.

Thomas never ceases to surprise her—she’d thought she’d known what to expect, but it’s vastly different this time, soft and sweet and not as ravenous as before, the right balance between gentleness and intensity. It’d be hard to believe it was the same man, had they not grown over these past few months, and were he not so solid, so real in her arms.

Her astonishment must register on her face when they break apart, because Thomas smiles, then flushes.

‘I’ve…been practising.’

Alison raises an eyebrow. ‘Please don’t tell me you got Julian to give you lessons.’

‘Oh, God! Even the notion!’

The horrified look on his face is worth the jibe, and Alison collapses into the grass in stitches, her laughter echoing through the grounds.

‘Oh, that does it,’ and then he’s pounced on her, and he’s got her pinned in the grass, ‘I’ll teach you to make a mockery of me, Alison!’

‘Oh, will you, just,’ she challenges his teasing chastisement, and he’s leaning down to kiss her again when a shriek alerts them to the fact that their chaperone is no longer occupied.

‘Stop that at once!’ comes Fanny’s shrill command. ‘Quite unsuitable!’

Alison can’t help but giggle, and she can hear Thomas snickering beside her as well.

‘You know, I think we might’ve outgrown being chaperoned.’

It’s autumn again.  It seems to have come around quickly this year, fallen leaves and dust motes swirling through the grey sky and taking the days with them.

It’s hard to imagine it’s been two years since she stood in this spot, her mind in turmoil over Mike’s grief and simultaneously over him getting past it. Everything couldn’t be more different now. Surprisingly, though she still misses her life, her death has surprised her in ways she couldn’t have predicted.

The Regency-era gentleman standing beside her, for instance. He’s gone from being a friend, with a penchant for crossing a line with his advances, to a source of comfort, to someone who has brought unexpected love to her existence.  

‘What sullies that lovely face of yours?’ Thomas asks.

‘Oh, just thinking,’ Alison says. ‘About time. You know. So many things happen and change, one minute you’re alive, the next you’re not, and you think it’s all over, but…it’s not, and, you can’t really imagine what comes after.’

She smiles up at him.

‘And sometimes, it’s better than you imagined.’

She sees him swoon a little inside.

‘Everything has changed, has it not?’

‘Yeah.’  And that doesn’t unnerve her as it once did.  ‘And even if we’re stuck like this forever, and…you know, dead…it’s still nice to be sitting here, you and me, and admiring the beauty of it.’

Oh, God, Thomas is rubbing off on her, to be waxing lyrical like that.

‘Beauty is truth,’ Thomas intones, ‘truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

And it fills her with a strange happiness—as happy as you can feel as a ghost, stuck in perpetuity and forever sick—the poetic lilt of his voice, the soppiness intertwined with it that comes from his artistic passion…the daft way he really can’t think up good verse on his own.

‘Yeah, that’s just Keats again, though, isn’t it?’ Alison rolls her eyes, bumping his arm with her shoulder.

Thomas huffs indignantly. ‘Must you delight in vexing me on that subject until the end of time?’

‘Mm,’ she cocks her head to one side, smiling wryly. ‘Not necessarily until the end of time. We’ll see. That’s assuming we both make it to the end of time, and neither of us gets—’

‘—sucked off?’ Thomas volunteers, and she cringes at Mary’s unfortunate expression.

‘Remind me to explain to you what that actually means sometime.’

 She’s surprised Julian hasn’t beaten her to that punch—but she won’t push it just at this moment. With his general lack of experience in the love affair department, Thomas would probably have the ghost-equivalent of an aneurysm if she told him this early on in their courtship.

‘But I promise,’ she says, returning from their digression, ‘not to vex you about Keats until the end of time, or until we move on.’

Her hand finds his, fingers linking against the fence rail.

‘We’ll give it a couple of hundred years—see how it goes.’