Val

It had been a few days, but nothing else crazy happened. Val was starting to truly believe that what she saw was either a ghost or a figment of her troubled mind. Valorie had horrible nightmares that haunted her whenever she closed her eyes. To battle this, she started to simply not sleep unless absolutely necessary. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked decently; while doing this, she had accidentally also managed to give herself insomnia. Which, in this case, helped more than it hurt. 

There were times when she was either so tired, or so plagued by her dreams that she would begin to hallucinate. She was a heavy caffeine addict and would get headaches when left without it for too long. So she began to drink coffee instead of sodas because it “seemed slightly more healthy”. 

Ross hated it and always offered to simply pay for her therapy or look into options that might help her nightmares. He had been around a few times when she was seeing things that didn’t exist. 

It had scared the living daylights out of him to watch his girlfriend sitting at the table conversing with what she claimed to be “a puppy made of shadows” that was supposedly sitting on the chandelier. Right then and there he took down all of the chandeliers in the house and sold them. He only had lamps or lights that were set into the ceiling after that.

Valorie sat down at the island counter in the kitchen and sipped on a mug of coffee as she stared into space. She’d only ever hallucinated things that she’d seen in her nightmares already. Which made her question the shadow she had seen earlier, as she had never had anything of the like appear in her sleep.

Her eyes drifted to the right, towards the window seat that sat in a rounded nook near the kitchen; it was one of Ross’s favorite places in the entire mansion. Valorie pictured Ross sitting there at ridiculous hours of the morning. The sun would slowly bring life into the sky, dusting the shadowy sky with soft shades of pink as the golden rays slowly warmed the birds up enough to sing. as he sat there wrapped up in a blanket with a mug of black coffee and his favorite book. 

Valorie sniffed at the memories that flooded her mind of every morning that he started the day like that. But she had decided that she’d try to not cry too much, Ross wouldn’t want her to waste her life trapped in this giant mansion. She wiped her eyes and suddenly paused in the middle of getting up.

She had thought that she was simply imagining or hallucinating Ross.. But as she moved, she realized there Ross was, sitting in the window nook. His dusty blonde hair was uncharacteristically hanging down, out of its usual, stiff look. His hard, gray eyes looked slightly soft as the golden morning sun rested in his eyes. He sat with his legs crossed across the soft, cushioned seat.

Valorie unfroze and stood up, her eyes leaking slow, silent tears. She really wished that she wasn’t seeing things for once; she walked over to the seat and considered placing her hands on the sides of his face. He continued to stare out of the window and she decided against it. She didn’t want to have to feel it when her hands touched nothing. A thought that had been buried since the funeral arose out of its shadowy nook. 

“I wish I had died instead of you.” She murmured.