I had spent years trying not to imagine Maisie growing older.
Arthur had spent years doing exactly that.
The first chapter made it clear.
Our daughter was five.
Not eight months.
Five years old.
She was getting dressed for her birthday and refusing to wear a matching pair of socks.
I read the scene slowly.
Arthur had imagined me standing nearby, trying to persuade her to choose two that looked alike.
His version of Maisie didn't care.
As far as she was concerned, socks were hidden inside shoes.
Why should their colors matter?
I could almost hear the argument.
Not because I knew what Maisie would have sounded like at five.
I didn't.
That was the painful part.
I knew her baby sounds.
I knew the way she had reached for us.
I knew the little face she made when she didn't like something.
But I never heard her speak.
Arthur had invented her voice.
And he had made her stubborn.
Just like me.
I put my hand over my mouth.
Then I laughed.
An actual laugh.
I hadn't expected that.
I was sitting at my kitchen table reading about my dead daughter, and my husband had somehow made me laugh.
It felt wrong for half a second.
Then I read on.
Maisie wanted chocolate cake.
Arthur had arranged a cake with raspberries on it.
In the scene, she regarded the berries as a serious mistake.
She refused to eat the cake until her father removed every last one.
I could picture Arthur doing it.
Carefully lifting the fruit away.
Trying not to damage the frosting.
Pretending he hadn't made a mistake while knowing perfectly well that he had.
It was such a familiar kind of trouble.
Arthur had never been especially good at remembering the smaller details of a celebration.
He remembered that something mattered.
He remembered that someone deserved to feel special.
Then he sometimes got the details wrong.
I read the exchange again.
The imagined little girl was not especially reasonable.
She was demanding.
Funny.
Certain she was right.
And Arthur let her be that way.
He didn't write her as a perfect child.
That mattered more than I understood at the time.
I kept turning pages.
At the end of the birthday scene, he described me watching Maisie blow out five candles.
He gave me a smile.
Not the strained kind I wore when I imagined a birthday that would never happen.
A real one.
A mother's smile at a child who was there.
I stopped reading.
The house felt too quiet.
I lowered the paper.
For years, June 14 had meant remembering everything we had lost.
The birthdays.
The candles.
The awkward school photographs we would never buy.
The ordinary arguments we would never have.
Arthur had given us one of those birthdays on paper.
He had let us live through it.
Just for a few pages.
I wiped my face.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
The question stayed in the room.
I didn't know whether I was hurt or grateful.
Maybe both.
I picked up the next pages.
Maisie was older now.
At eight, she was learning to ride a bicycle.
Arthur described her determination.
She wanted to do it without anyone helping, even though she still needed someone close enough to catch her.
I knew that kind of determination.
I had seen it in Aurora.
I had seen it in myself.
And I could imagine it in Maisie.
Arthur had made the scene so ordinary that I almost forgot it hadn't happened.
Almost.
Then I remembered.
I was reading about something our daughter had never done.
That knowledge returned with every chapter.
Maisie grew.
She changed.
She began having interests that had nothing to do with us.
At twelve, she wanted to work with animals.
Not merely keep pets.
She wanted to become a veterinarian.
Arthur had written about the idea with the seriousness of a father listening to a child announce a whole future.
I tried to picture her at twelve.
I couldn't.
I had only ever known her as a baby.
But I recognized pieces of Arthur in the way he had imagined her.
Her certainty.
Her questions.
Her habit of deciding something mattered and refusing to abandon it.
I wondered whether he had thought about these scenes while sitting beside me.
Had he imagined her riding a bicycle while we watched television?
Had he pictured her school years while I complained about the sagging cushions?
Had he invented her voice during the quiet evenings when I thought he was simply resting?
I looked toward the empty space in the living room.
For twenty years, Arthur had defended that couch.
And for at least some of that time, it had held these pages.
I continued reading.
By sixteen, Maisie had a boyfriend.
Arthur had given the young man a habit that irritated him immediately.
He addressed Arthur too casually.
He called him buddy.
I laughed again.
Arthur hated being addressed that way by young men he barely knew.
He never liked it when someone acted familiar before they had earned it.
I could hear him complaining to me after the boy left.
I could hear myself telling him not to be so difficult.
He had imagined the whole thing.
A daughter's first boyfriend.
A father's disapproval.
A mother's attempt to keep everyone civil.
There was nothing grand about it.
That was what made it hurt.
I had once imagined the important moments we would miss.
Graduations.
Weddings.
Birthdays.
But Arthur had written the smaller ones too.
The arguments over schoolwork.
The awkward family conversations.
The times when a daughter was certain her parents didn't understand anything.
He gave Maisie school dances.
He gave her vacations.
He gave her disagreements with us.
And somewhere in those disagreements, he gave us something I had never expected.
A chance to know the kind of person she might have become.
I read about her moving into her first apartment.
I found myself worrying about her.
Was she prepared?
Did she have everything she needed?
Would she be lonely?
Then I stopped.
I was worrying about an imaginary apartment.
An imaginary young woman.
My daughter.
I rested my hands on the table.
"Arthur, you really did all this."
The words sounded strange aloud.
I looked at the stack.
There was still more to read.
I couldn't understand how he had done it.
Not just the writing.
The years of keeping it private.
Had he worked at night?
Had he written while I was out?
Had he returned to the same scenes whenever he missed Maisie?
I thought of all the ordinary evenings I had spent with him.
All the times he seemed quiet.
I had sometimes mistaken his silence for contentment.
Maybe I had been wrong.
Maybe he had needed a place for thoughts he couldn't say.
I continued until I reached the wedding.
Maisie was grown.
She had chosen someone to marry.
Arthur had imagined the preparations, the emotions, and the small worries that came with watching a daughter begin another part of her life.
Then he wrote about me helping her into her dress.
I stood behind her.
I adjusted the fabric.
She watched my reflection.
In Arthur's version, Maisie noticed my expression before I realized I was making it.
She knew I was close to tears.
She teased me gently about pretending otherwise.
I put the page down.
Arthur had remembered that expression.
I had made it at other important moments.
He had seen me do it when I was proud and frightened and trying to appear calm.
He had watched me swallow my feelings so many times that he could write about it without needing to explain.
I touched the page again.
There I was.
Not the woman I had been after Maisie died.
Not the woman who avoided photographs.
Just a mother standing behind her grown daughter, trying to keep herself together.
For a few minutes, I let myself believe in that moment.
Then the truth returned.
There had been no wedding dress.
No apartment.
No boyfriend Arthur disliked.
No birthday cake covered in raspberries.
We had lost her before any of those things could happen.
I looked down at the pages.
The laughter was gone.
I felt confused.
I felt grateful.
And I felt something uglier too.
I was hurt that Arthur had done this without me.
We had both loved Maisie.
We had both buried her.
We had both carried the loss.
But he had created this whole other life and never once invited me into it.
I didn't know what to make of that.
I stood up.
I carried the manuscript upstairs.
Arthur's desk was near our bedroom window.
Since his death, I had hardly disturbed anything there.
His things remained where he had left them.
There were drawers I hadn't opened.
Papers I hadn't sorted.
Ordinary belongings that still seemed too closely connected to him.
I placed the manuscript on the desk.
Then I sat in his chair.
For a moment, I simply looked around.
I could remember him sitting there.
Sometimes he was repairing something small.
Sometimes he was writing a note.
Sometimes he was looking for something he insisted he had put in a perfectly sensible place.
I used to tease him about his clutter.
Now I wanted to understand it.
"All right, Arthur."
I pulled the desk closer.
"Let's see what you left."
I opened the first drawer.
There were batteries.
Old ones.
More than any sensible person needed.
I almost smiled.
He had always been convinced a battery might be useful someday.
I moved them aside.
Nothing else explained the manuscript.
I opened another drawer.
Inside were three notebooks.
I took them out and placed them on the desk.
They looked ordinary.
The sort of notebooks Arthur might have used for measurements, lists, or plans.
I opened the first.
Then I opened the next.
And I found more of Maisie.
Not the finished chapters.
Notes.
Brief descriptions.
Ideas.
Small pieces of a life he had been building for years.
One notebook covered twelve years.
Twelve years of imagining.
I ran my finger down the page.
There was an entry about teaching Maisie to swim.
Another about a terrible haircut.
Another about me teaching her to drive.
I stopped at that one.
Arthur had always been more patient about certain things.
I had always believed I knew the best way to teach someone.
I could already imagine the arguments.
Maybe he had too.
I turned another page.
Then another.
The notes became more personal.
I wasn't merely looking at a story anymore.
I was looking at Arthur's private effort to understand the life we had lost.
Near the end of the notebook, he had written something about the manuscript.
He had hidden it in the couch.
He knew he needed to show it to me.
But he hadn't found the courage.
I read those thoughts again.
Courage.
That word troubled me.
Why would Arthur need courage to share something with his wife?
I searched the page for an explanation.
There wasn't one.
Only his uncertainty.
Then I noticed a sentence he had underlined.
It was an instruction to himself.
He wanted Maisie to have faults.
To make mistakes.
To be difficult sometimes.
He didn't want her to become an impossible, perfect child.
I closed my eyes.
That was when I began to understand why the stories had felt real.
Arthur hadn't tried to invent a flawless daughter.
He had given her a normal life.
A life with disappointment.
A life with bad decisions and arguments and small embarrassments.
The kind of life we would have been grateful to share with her.
I opened my eyes.
Then I looked at the manuscript.
I understood why he had written about Maisie.
At least I thought I did.
But there was one thing I couldn't explain.
Aurora.
Our living daughter.
The girl we had actually raised.
She was nowhere in the pages I had read.
And that frightened me in a way I hadn't expected.
Click here to continue reading: PART 4: After Reading the Childhood My Husband Invented for Our Lost Daughter, I Began Wondering Why Our Living Girl Was Missing
I Sold the Couch My Husband Refused to Replace, Never Imagining a Stranger Would Bring Something Back the Very Next Morning
Part 3 of 12
