My wife wanted to keep her room the same as when she was alive. Jessica. She died too young. Way too young. We kept her room full of all her belongings, which meant the shelves were full of dolls, the closet full of clothes, and the bookshelves full of books for a little girl. I wasn’t sure if that was the best way to move on, but my wife insisted.

The first months were a blur of grief and family gatherings. Christmas was the worst. I drank too much and passed out early, waking on the couch around two in the morning with a dry mouth and a pounding headache. 

Stumbling to the bathroom to get something for my headache, I noticed a light coming from underneath the door of Jessica’s room. I opened the door to turn it off, when I saw my wife sitting on the edge of Jessica’s bed, holding one of Jessica’s dolls.

“Samantha?” 

My wife didn’t look up at the sound of her name. She just said, “Her eyes are wrong.”

Holding my hand to my temple as if to hold back the pain in my head, I said, “Samantha, let’s go to bed.”

She looked at me like she hadn’t heard me and said, “These are like doll’s eyes.” Then she blinked and got up. “Let’s go to bed.”

I started watching for the light under the door after that night. Most nights, Samantha stayed in bed with me, but at least once a week, I would wake up to an empty space next to me. Sure enough, the light would be on in Jessica’s room.

“These are not her eyes,” my wife would say. “These are just buttons.”

She was never holding one of Jessica’s newer dolls; it was always the oldest doll, a gift from Samantha’s mom, with buttons for eyes and clothes sewn on out of scraps of fabric. As far as I could tell, the doll was older than I was. 

“My baby had real eyes, not buttons.” 

Wy wife was getting more insistent, and sitting up in Jessica’s room more often. It got so that I couldn’t fall asleep until the morning, waiting most nights for my wife to get out of bed and go to Jessica’s room. Every time I slipped off, I would wake up to an empty bed, and Samantha staring at the doll, raving that it had the wrong eyes.

I had put off going to work for a long time after Jessica passed, but I finally had to go back if we wanted to keep making house payments. I didn’t want to leave Samantha alone, despite her insistence that she would be fine. 

Every day I came home from work, she would be staring at the doll. And every day, she would insist that she hadn’t spent all day there. She’d gone out; she’d done yoga; she’d gone to the store. And I believed her. I believed her because I wanted to believe her. Despite the fact that her car never had any more miles on it; her yoga equipment had dust on it; we never had any groceries that I didn’t pick up.

And because I believed her, I didn’t turn down my next business trip. I’m not sure I had a choice, if I wanted to keep my job, so I went. I had a feeling of dread the whole trip: driving down the street, parking at the airport, the flight, the hotel, where I called Samantha and tried to act normal on the phone with her, feeling the dread rise up my throat like cold acid, a sleepless night in the hotel, the presentation at work the next day, the plane trip back, the car ride home. My hands shook as I opened the door into the house from the garage.

“Samantha, I’m home!” 

She didn’t respond. 

I knew where she was, but I still looked around the house like I didn’t, checking empty rooms and calling her name. Finally, the only room left in the house was Jessica’s. I took a breath and steeled myself. All this worry was for nothing, I told myself. Everything will be fine.

The first thing that hit me when I opened the door was the smell of blood, and I felt my soul drop through the floor of the world. Samantha was sitting on the bed. She looked up when I opened the door and smiled.

“Welcome home!”

Her eyes were gone, leaving nothing but raw tissue hanging out of dark, bloody holes torn in her head.

“I fixed her eyes!”

She held the doll up to me. Crudely sewn where the buttons had been were my wife’s eyes.