The Lovely Return

What if love can transcend time and death? When I was three years old, I started drawing a house with a red door. Next to the house I drew a happy family—a husband, a wife, a baby, and their dog. For years I cried every night, clutching the drawings, begging my mother to take me home to my real family. I was labeled odd—a talented child with an overactive imagination. But one day I wandered straight to that house with the red door, and I found the man and the dog I had been drawing. Alex Fox was quiet. A sexy, brooding artist. A recluse hiding behind an eye patch and shaggy hair. A grieving widower, suspended in time, never moving forward. Waiting for his love to return. As I grew up we developed an unlikely but easy friendship, bonding over our mutual love of art. He felt familiar, his home felt like home. But as the years passed I found it harder and harder to ignore not only my growing feelings for him, but the odd visions that played through my mind every time I got too close to him, or spent time in his house. Or more accurately, when I touched his late wife's things. Like her wedding gown. And her husband's lips. Dreams, reality, and sanity began to blur until I came to a startling revelation. I wasn’t having visions, and I wasn't delusional. I was having memories. Alex's late wife's memories, to be exact. Alex fights our undeniable connection, believing I'm off limits and too young for him. He tries desperately to do what's right—pushing away the one and only thing he's been wishing for since that tragic day when he lost everything. Or so he thinks. He was mine, once upon a time, in a prior life. And I’m going to make him mine again.