I’m Sadie Monroe. I’m 28 years old. I work as a pediatric nurse in a small hospital outside Columbus, Ohio. I live alone in the house where I grew up. The same house where I watched my mother take her last breath in a hospital bed we set up in the living room. I’m not the kind of person who believes in ghosts. I don’t watch horror movies. I don’t read my horoscope.
I double-check that the doors are locked every night, and I keep a baseball bat next to my bed. Not because I’m scared, but because I’m careful. I’ve always been careful, so when I tell you what happened that night, I need you to understand something.
I wasn’t dreaming. I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t having some kind of breakdown.
I was wide awake, standing in my hallway at 2:00 a.m., staring at my phone screen while my dead mother’s name flashed across it. And when I finally looked through the peephole, she was standing right there on my porch. Same face.
Same gray cardigan she was buried in. Same soft eyes that used to check on me when I had nightmares as a kid. Then she said something that made my blood turn cold.
Something that only she could possibly know. I know how this sounds. I know you’re probably already coming up with explanations.
A scam caller. A cruel prank. Grief playing tricks on my mind.
I thought all of those things too. I wanted to believe any of them, but none of those explanations could account for what she said next. Before I tell you the rest of this story, do me a favor.
The night it happened was a Thursday in late February. I remember because I had just worked a double shift at the hospital, 16 hours straight, and my feet hurt so bad I could barely walk to my car. We were short-staffed that week.
We’re always short-staffed. But that week was worse than usual. Two nurses called in sick, and we had a little boy in the ICU who wasn’t doing well.
I spent most of my shift sitting with him, holding his hand, telling him stories about superheroes while his parents took turns crying in the hallway. By the time I clocked out, it was almost midnight. The drive home took 20 minutes, and I don’t remember most of it.
I was running on coffee and adrenaline, and all I could think about was my bed. The house was dark when I pulled into the driveway. I’d left the porch light on that morning, but the bulb must have burned out.
I made a mental note to replace it and then immediately forgot. I was too tired to care about anything except getting inside and lying down. I didn’t turn on any lights when I walked in.
I knew the layout of that house better than I knew my own face. I could walk from the front door to my bedroom with my eyes closed. I’d been doing it since I was five years old.
The house still smelled like her sometimes. My mother, I mean. Renata Monroe.
She wore this lavender lotion every single day, and even though she’d been gone for three years, I swear I could still catch a hint of it in certain rooms. The bathroom, the kitchen, her old bedroom, which I still hadn’t cleaned out. I kept telling myself I’d get to it eventually, but “eventually” never came.
My mom raised me alone. My father left when I was twelve. His name was Dean, and I don’t talk about him much because there isn’t much to say.
One day he was there, and the next day he wasn’t. He didn’t leave a note. He didn’t call to explain.
He just packed a bag while I was at school and disappeared. My mom came home from work and found half the closet empty. She sat on the edge of their bed for a long time, just staring at the space where his clothes used to be.
I watched her from the doorway, too scared to say anything. She never cried about it. Not in front of me, anyway.
She just got up the next morning and made me breakfast like nothing had happened. Scrambled eggs and toast, same as always. And when I asked her where Dad was, she looked at me with those calm, steady eyes.
“It’s just us now, sweetheart,” she said. “But that’s okay. We’re going to be just fine.”
And we were. We really were. My mom worked as a seamstress.
She did alterations for a dry cleaner downtown, hemming pants, taking in wedding dresses, and fixing zippers on winter coats. The work wasn’t glamorous, and it didn’t pay much, but she was good at it. Her hands were always moving, always busy.
Even when she watched TV at night, she’d have some piece of fabric in her lap, stitching away at something. We had our routines, me and her. Sunday mornings were for pancakes.
She made them from scratch, with blueberries if they were in season. Friday nights were for old movies. She loved anything with Audrey Hepburn.
We’d sit on the couch with a bowl of popcorn between us, and she’d recite half the lines from memory. And every single night, before I went to bed, she’d say the same thing: “I love you to the spoon and back.” It started when I was seven.
I was trying to say, “I love you to the moon and back,” but I messed up the words. I said “spoon” instead of “moon.” And my mom laughed so hard she had to sit down.
After that, it became our thing, our private joke. She wrote it in every birthday card. She said it at the end of every phone call.
