“Thank God for William,” I said.

  Maggie raised an eyebrow at me like I was being a dick. I didn’t like that look, but as she wasn’t wearing anything, I let it slide.

  “You’ll be able to come over to my house,” she said. “I can cook you dinner.”

  “I can take or leave dinner,” I told her, and that was true. I didn’t want to play house with Maggie. I wanted to hook up with her a couple of times a week. Maybe more, but I wasn’t interested in bringing her flowers and the two of us selecting the right wine to go with her French whatever. Maggie knew where I stood. I was taking advantage of her and helping her to shit all over her happy future, so I figured the least I could do was to be up front about it.

  “Come on,” she said, forcing a smile. “It’ll be fun. It’ll give us a chance to see.”

  “To see what?” I asked. But I already knew the answer.

  She slapped my butt playfully. “To see how we do together.”

  “I think I already know,” I told her, but that wasn’t true. I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to see. I wanted her to keep sleeping with me. I didn’t care if she broke up with William. That was her business. I had no interest in taking William’s place.

  * * *

  Maggie lived in a snooty part of town where none of the neighbors knew each other, so my coming and going wasn’t a problem for her. No one there gave a crap about her business. That’s what she said. I saw a few housewives eye me as they pushed their baby strollers down the street, but if Maggie didn’t mind, then neither did I.

  Before William had been in Scotland a week, I was coming over every day, sleeping there every night. Maggie would text me when she was on her way home, and I would meet her at the house. As it turned out, she never made me dinner—it was always take out or prepared stuff from the grocery store. Then we would have to figure out what to with long hours together. It was a weird transition, at first. We had only ever flirted or had sex. Suddenly, we were a real couple, washing plates and choosing side dishes. I hadn’t thought we were up to it, but it turned out I liked it. We would watch some old movie, and Maggie would talk about what this scene or that meant when the film first came out, or what the director was trying to say, and it was actually kind of interesting, stuff I hadn’t thought about before. Then I would make some comment or ask some question, and Maggie would look at me like I was really smart, or at least smarter than she had given me credit for. It was like she was taking me seriously, and the truth was, I enjoyed it. I kept acting like I didn’t, but I did.

  One day over some salmon filets she bought she said to me, “What would you do if William confronted you?”

  I shrugged. “What would you want me to do?”

  “Would you hit him?”

  I chewed my fish thoughtfully. “Yeah, probably. I mean, if I had to. If he got all in my face.”

  She looked down at her plate. I could tell she liked that. Smart women like that sort of thing because the guys they’re usually with don’t know how to protect themselves.

  I was in her bed when the call came in. It was maybe just after midnight. I watched as she answered, as she went quiet and pale, as she put a hand to her mouth. I watched as she considered dropping the phone, or opting out by collapsing or something, but that wasn’t Maggie. Maggie dealt with things. She took a long breath, and then grabbed a pencil and began to write down information. Then she hung up the phone.

  “There’s been an accident,” she said, her voice mechanical, slow, precise. “William is dead.”

  But I already knew that. I knew it as soon as she put her phone to her ear, maybe as soon as it rang. I knew it, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Okay, maybe I was sure. I was glad.

  * * *

  I stayed out of her life for a few weeks. William’s family decided he should be buried in Scotland, which it turns out was where he was from. I hadn’t know that, but I liked it. He was buried far away. There would be no regular trips to set flowers at his grave. Perfect.

  Maggie spent more than a week there, and then, when she returned, her time was taken up with friends and relatives and well-wishers. I understood that she didn’t want to deal with me. Her fiancé was dead now. He had become Saint William, and all the things that had bothered her about him before—his being safe and unassertive and in mediocre shape—now seemed irrelevant. She had loved him and planned to live the rest of her life with him, and I was a reminder of how she had spurned and humiliated him, even if he hadn’t known it. William was forever, but not me. A year from now, she wouldn’t remember my name.

  Except that a month after the funeral, she called me up. “I need to talk to you,” she said. “Can you come over?”

  When she answered the door, she was wearing sweat pants and an oversized t-shirt. That’s woman code for “I’m not going to fuck you,” by the way. I looked at her and her sad smile, and I knew that this was where I did not want to be. I thought of a million excuses I could use to get out of there now—an appointment forgotten, a friend with an emergency—but I let them slide.

  Maggie poured us some white wine with a foreign name and sat across from me in her cavernous living room.

  “I didn’t want us to end on bad terms,” she said.

  “Who says we have to end at all?” I asked.

  She turned away, and I could see she was crying. They were silent tears, and I could pretend not to have noticed.

  “I can’t be with you anymore,” she told me, still not looking in my direction. “After what we did to William.”

  “We didn’t do anything to him,” I told her. “He never knew. He never had any feelings about us because we kept us a secret.”

  She turned her head toward me, hard and sharp. “I was going to marry him,” she said. “Don’t think I wasn’t. If he showed up here, right now, I would marry him.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” I said as kindly as I could manage, “but he’s not going to show up.” I was starting to feel like I didn’t even want to bother to sleep with her that night. It would be all sad and awkward afterwards, and it seemed like it was way more trouble than it was worth. The smart play was to agree with her, tell her I understood, give her a brotherly hug and get the fuck out of there. It was like there was this little guy in my brain, shouting into cupped hands what I should do, but I ignored him.

  “William is gone,” I said. “I know you feel guilty, but you never did anything to hurt him, and now he’s not around anymore. But I am.”

  I came over and sat by her. She stiffened and pulled away from me, but I knew this was a game at this point. I began to kiss her neck. At first she shoved me away, told me to stop, but pretty soon we were upstairs and those baggy clothes were lying on the floor. Big surprise, right?

  * * *

  That’s how I basically moved into her house. It was just a temporary thing. It had to be for a guy like me because I loved my freedom too much, but even so, I liked having Maggie around. At least, I liked the old Maggie. The post-William Maggie turned out to be kind of a mope. She didn’t talk much. She didn’t want to have sex unless I forced the issue. She sat silently at meals.

  Why didn’t I walk the hell out of there, you’re wondering, and it’s a good question. I’m not sure I have the answer. I think I wanted the old Maggie back. I think I believed if I waited long enough, the old Maggie would return. This half-dead thing would be a memory, and she would be fun again.

  Two weeks into this, my patience was starting to wear thin. Maggie acted almost like she didn’t want me around. I’d say, “Do you want me to move out?” and she’d say, “Yes,” and I could almost believe she meant it. She’d tell me she didn’t want to have sex, and then we’d have sex anyway. I started to think that I didn’t understand women all that well.

  Maybe that’s why things started with Amanda. You can’t argue that was wrong on my part. I mean, it was how I met Maggie, so was she in a position to complain? Anyhow, it’s the way of things. People meet, they get together, they move apart. That’s just how it goes, right? Amanda wanted more and more of my time, and she was new, a country not yet conquered. Maggie was just Maggie. Nothing she did or said really surprised me anymore. I still liked the things she did and said, but so what? I like tacos, but I’m not going to spend the rest of my life with a tortilla stuffed with chicken.

  So, I was waiting for the right moment to let her know that I was done, that I was moving out, that it wasn’t personal. I figured I’d keep the whole Amanda thing to myself, since there was no upside in that. But that was about the time the business with the ghost started.

  * * *

  I was about to start the talk. You know the one. I’ve been thinking, Maggie. Where is this really going, Maggie? That kind of bullshit. Not fifteen minutes earlier, Amanda sent me a text asking if I could meet her for a drink. A drink would lead back to her place—make no mistake about that—and I liked the idea. Amanda was tall, trim, big in the shoulders and chest, and I was getting worked up just thinking about her.

  Maggie and I were sitting on the couch, with the TV on, but not really watching anything. Maggie was staring into the distance. This is it, I thought. This has got to be the end of our little experiment. I’m sliding into bullshit relationship mediocrity, and if I don’t get the hell out now, I’m screwed forever.

  I took a breath and opened my mouth, but Maggie spoke first.

  “I’ve been seeing someone,” she said.

  This announcement surprised me. I won’t lie to you. Maggie sat next to me, her legs tucked under her body, her arms wrapped around her chest. She kept her eyes down, and her loose hair covered her face like a veil.

  “What the fuck?” I asked.

  I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right to think that. Why was I making a fuss about this when I was the one who was about to kick her to the curb? She was making my life a whole lot easier right now, and I ought to accept a gift when it’s offered. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, that little guy with the cupped hands was trying to tell me all this, but I wasn’t listening to him again. I was angry. How could Maggie be stepping out on me?

  “I guess I can’t be surprised,” I said. “You fucked around on William, and now you’re fucking around on me.”

  She raised her eyes, and I saw something there that scared me. Not physically scared, like she was going to stab me or anything. I saw a kind of darkness and chaos, the look of a person who warped all the rules when she was around.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I’ve seen William.”

  “William,” I repeated, feeling more and more like a deflating pool toy. “Dead William?”

  Maggie kept that dark, chaotic glare on me. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve seen him. His ghost.”

  When I’d gone through the roster of how Maggie might respond to my leaving, I’d considered the possibility that Maggie might go crazy, but not that she might be crazy. Here’s as much supernatural shit as I believed: she could sense something was up with me. She could feel me pulling away. Maybe she’d caught a whiff of Amanda’s perfume, or maybe she had just seen a look in my eye, but whatever it was, she knew. She might not even have known that she knew, but some nugget of female predatory instinct was driving her to get her claws in me deep and not let go. This crap about a ghost was just her way of trying to nail me down.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” I told her.

  “Yeah,” she said, picking up a glass of wine and draining half of it. “There’s nothing like seeing one to make you rethink that position.”

  Here’s what she told me. It was four or five days ago, after nine, and I was still at the gym, since I had a late client—go ahead, see if you can guess her name—and Maggie was at home. Her father and brother were in town for a visit, which I’d been avoiding, having clients at convenient times. They had been over for dinner, so when she heard a noise downstairs, she thought it was one of them coming back for some forgotten bullshit. It had sounded like there was something moving around the house, but when she looked around, there was no one there.

  Then, she said, came the knock at the door. When she opened it, there was William.

  She put a hand to her mouth to scream, but she says she didn’t. Maybe it’s true. I don’t know. Women are always going to tweak those kinds of details, right, to make themselves seem less stupid. But the thing that matters here is that it was William, standing there like he had never died doing his important crap that no one cared about. He wasn’t beat up or bleeding or standing with some industrial pipe sticking through his head. It was William, like he was still alive.

  This is how the brain works. Not just Maggie’s brain, you understand, but pretty much everyone’s. Was William dead? Yes. Had he been dead for weeks? Affirmative. Did Maggie have any doubts about that? Negatory. Yet, she stood there and thought that maybe there had been a big mistake. Maybe William had never been dead at all. Maybe he had spent all this time eating haggis and oak cakes and now he had decided it was the right moment to head back to the US of A and rescue his fiancée from her meathead boyfriend.

  I didn’t get all the dialogue, but she said he talked like William. He sounded like him, both in his voice and his wording. Maggie invited him in, and he said no. He could not enter the house. He was there, he said, because he sensed she needed help. You believe that crap? She needed help. Like, from what? Did she need help looking at her stupid contracts at work? I don’t think so. She needed help with me. This dead asshole can’t even stay buried, right? He has to come crawling out of the grave to mess with my shit. Like he would have had the balls to mess with me while he was still alive. Don’t tell me this doesn’t raise your blood pressure too.

  Maggie swears she didn’t suggest it, but out of the blue William starts talking about why they can’t get married. He starts talking about how he lives in a coffin now, and there’s no room. He’s getting all worked up as he lists all the reasons why two people can’t move into a coffin, but the last isn’t really necessary, is it? I mean, if you say you live in a coffin, I’m not about to suggest shacking up. You pretty much barred the gate at coffin, right?

  Who knows what Maggie would have said. Maybe she’d have tried to talk him into some other arrangement, but they were both startled by the headlights of my truck pulling into the driveway. I wasn’t looking up. I was minding my own business, thinking that maybe I should have showered before coming over. I kind of brushed past Maggie and hit the bathroom. By the time I came out, she was in bed with the lights off, pretending to sleep, and I pretended to believe it.

  Now she was crying, but I’m actually good with tears. I hugged her, even though it was like hugging a goddamn statue. I made her some tea. Crying women love the shit out of tea. Who knows why? Coffee and tears do not mix, but tea and weeping go hand in hand.

  “He says he’ll be back,” Maggie said, sipping her tea.

  “He’s not coming back,” I told her, “because he was never here. You just dreamed it.”

  “I didn’t dream it. It was real.”

  My phone started buzzing from an incoming text. Amanda wondering where I was. I was busy. That’s where the fuck I was. Didn’t the fact that I was not where I said I’d meet her pretty much demonstrate that? I never understand why people don’t get the obvious.

  I tried to take Maggie’s hand, but she pulled it away. That made my nice guy routine a little harder to maintain, but I was trying. I was really doing my best.

  “I know you’re upset,” I told her.

  “No,” she said, her voice even, sharp as a scalpel. “No, don’t talk to me that way. He was here.” Then she smiled at me, and for the first time, I was scared. “You’ll see when he comes back.”

  * * *

  I didn’t believe her. Not really. Even so, I thought something was going on. Maybe Maggie was crazy. Maybe someone was trying to scam her. Maybe—and this one felt the most likely to me—she sensed I was pulling away and was trying to come up with a plan to keep me around. As plans go, this one was pretty fucked up, but women do some crazy shit when they’re desperate.

  In the meantime, I’d sent Amanda a few texts, politely telling her to fuck off, that I had things to do. At first she got angry, but when I didn’t answer her messages, she just left me alone. I figured that was how it would go.

  The next night, Maggie and I sat in near silence. She opened a bottle of wine, and we both drank a little too quickly. Then she opened another bottle of wine.

  “Maybe we should dim the lights,” I suggested.

  “It’s not a séance,” she said testily. “He’ll either come or he won’t.”

  I drank some more wine.

  At a little after 9:30 there was a knock at the door. It wasn’t a Christmas Carol banging or a timid and ghostly tapping. It was just a knock, just like anyone rapping his knuckles against the door. I thought to say that maybe ghosts don’t use doorbells, but I kept my mouth shut. I’m good that way. Instead, I watched as Maggie, now looking like a ghost herself, rose from the couch and shuffled over to the door. Her hand rested on the knob for a moment, and then turned it.

  I had never met William, but I’d seen pictures of him, and there he was—thin and pale with his unkempt hair, too smart to groom himself. Death hadn’t hurt his looks much, but they hadn’t improved them either. The fact was he looked like a person. There was nothing floating or transparent about him. He was there, like he’d never died.

  “I wanted to see you again,” he said. His voice sounded normal, not ghostly or groaning or filled with weird echoes.

  For all that, I knew this was a ghost. I was looking at a ghost. This was the spirit of a dead man, a soul, that which remained of the human form after crossing the barrier of death. I took out my cell phone and began recording the conversation. If nothing else, I figured I could take a video that would go viral. I’d be the guy who recorded a conversation with a ghost. That could get me on TV.