Her Other Life

The house was too quiet now.

Quiet in the way of old tombs, where even the air forgets to move. Clara sat by the window, pale light of dawn staining her face in ashen hues. The cracked glass trembled against the wind, but the storm was inside her - raging, constant, endless.

Her father slept behind the door, his breath a thin, rattling thread she could barely hear anymore. She had been awake all night. Again. The weight of the hours, the endless tending, the fear of his next breath - or worse, the moment it wouldn’t come. The agonizing pressed down on her like iron chains.

That was when the Nurse arrived.

At first, Clara thought she was a dream. Some trick of sleeplessness and longing. The woman’s silhouette framed in the doorway, the morning sun catching in her dark hair, made a halo of sorts, though Clara doubted she was any angel. The Nurse stepped inside with the certainty of someone who belonged, as if the house had been waiting for her all along.

She smelled faintly of sea salt, and something sweeter, jasmine maybe. Clara drank in that scent like a starving thing.

“I heard you needed help," the Nurse said, her voice low and warm. “May I?”

Clara nodded, unable to speak. The Nurse moved through the room with easy grace, setting down a battered leather bag beside the bed, unrolling cloths, glass vials, lengths of clean gauze. Her hands were steady, sure, and pale as ivory. They brushed against Clara’s as she worked.

Together, they lifted her father, changed his linens, cooled his fevered brow. And all the while, the Nurse hummed a song Clara thought she knew but couldn’t place. It lilted, somehow mournful, but foreign. Belonging to some distant shore.

“You’re carrying too much, child.” the Nurse said at last, wiping sweat from her brow. “No one can bear a weight like this forever.”

Clara blinked away tears. She hated the word child, but from the Nurse’s lips it felt less like dismissal and more like benediction. She opened her mouth to argue, but found herself confessing: “I don’t know who I am anymore. I only know what he needs.”

The Nurse smiled, a hint of sorrow behind blue eyes. She sat Clara on the edge of the narrow bed and took her hand. The skin was warm.

“You are someone who deserves more. You are meant for the world beyond these walls.”

Clara closed her eyes and tried to imagine it: sunlight on foreign cobblestones, strange languages she might have learned, the taste of wine not bought in boxes. A world where she was more than a caretaker, more than a shadow haunting the edge of her father’s room.

“I’ve been to places you wouldn’t believe,” the nurse said quietly, as if reading her thoughts. “Marrakech, Vienna, New Orleans in the spring. Someday, we could go together.”

A sob caught in Clara’s throat, but she swallowed it. “You promise?”

The Nurse squeezed her hand. “On my life.”

And for the first time in years, Clara could feel something in her, burning. Maybe yearning. She looked at the Nurse and thought she had never seen anyone so alive, so full of possibility. Who was this woman? Maybe she was an angel?

Outside, the dawn had broken fully now, casting the room in a pale, golden light. But in Clara’s eyes, it was the nurse who glowed.

* * *

Night fell heavy over the house, as if the sky itself mourned. The lamp cast long, flickering shadows that stretched like grasping hands across the faded wallpaper Outside, the wind howled, rattling the loose shutters, but within, there was only hush. The hush of exhaustion after a long day’s work.

Clara sat curled in the armchair, a threadbare blanket around her shoulders. Her father slept again, if the shallow rise and fall of his chest could be called sleep. The Nurse kept vigil, she was back, dabbing his forehead with cool cloth, humming that strange melody under her breath.

“Come,” the Nurse said at last, standing as she did. She beckoned Clara to the kitchen and began to brew two cups of tea. The bitter kind that Clara’s mother used to make, one and a half teaspoons in the strainer, wait 10 minutes and add a splash of milk. She replicated the recipe exactly, though Clara didn’t remember ever telling her about it.

They sat across from each other, the space between them charged with something unspoken. The Nurse’s eyes gleamed in the lamplight, blue eyes reflecting her own, deep as the ocean and full of stories Clara ached to hear.

“Tell me,” The Nurse urged, leaning forward. “What do you dream of, when you let yourself?”

Clara hesitated. The words that came to mind felt forbidden and dangerous. But the Nurse’s gaze held her fast and the truth tumbled out before she could stop it.

“I dream of leaving,” Clara said, the words tumbling out. “Of selling this house, paying the debts and going somewhere no one knows me. Somewhere I can just …be. I dream of waking in a room that smells of fresh bread, of being far away from death.”

The confession hung in the air, shameful and holy all at once. Clara’s hands shook as she raised the cup to her lips.

The Nurse only smiled, a slow, knowing curve of the mouth.

“Why shouldn’t you? Dream, I mean. Do you think your purpose is to waste away in this mausoleum? You should be dancing in the streets of Barcelona. Sailing the Aegean. Laughing, weightless, free.

Her words filled Clara like wine, warm, heady, and dizzying. The room seemed to blur at the edges and for a moment she saw herself as the Nurse described: hair loose, bare feet in the sand, a passport worn at the corners from so much use.

“Would you…take me?” Clara whispered, hungry for the promise she’d heard before.

The Nurse reached out, brushed a strand of hair from Clara’s face. Her fingers warm and steady.

“When the time comes, I will be there with you. I’ll be waiting for you in the sand and in the wind, but it’s you who must choose it Clara. You who must be the one to unlock the door.”

Clara fell asleep some time later, still curled in the armchair, and the Nurse was gone. But a smile played on the edge of her lips as she remembered.

* * *

Morning came gray and mean, the sky bruised with storm clouds. The house was colder than usual, but the heat was off. Clara stood at the kitchen table, the weight of unpaid bills spread before her like a deck of cursed cards. The ink blurred where her tears had fallen, but there was no one to see. No one but the Nurse.

She stood by the window, staring out as if she might will the storm to go away. Her reflection in the glass looked ghostly, insubstantial.

“You can’t keep this up,” the Nurse said, voice soft but edged with steel. “This house is killing you, Clara. These debts will bury you alongside him.”

Clara gripped the edge of the table until her knuckles were white. “I don’t have a choice.”

“There is always a choice.” The words struck her like a slap. She spun on the Nurse, anger and sorrow warring in her chest. “What would you have me do? Leave him to rot? Watch him die alone while I run off to chase fairy tales with you?”

The Nurse stepped forward, Clara’s words sliding off her. She took Clara’s face on her hands, gently, insistently. “Is this living? Wasting away in the dark, counting every penny, waiting for the end? You deserve more.”

Clara’s breath came fast and shallow. “I can’t. He needs me.”

“Does he?” The Nurse’s eyes burned now, not with any cruelty but with a frightening kind of mercy. “Or do you need him to need you, so you don’t have to face what you’ve lost? So you don’t have to see that the door has always been unlocked?”

Clara took a sharp breath, horror rising in her throat. How could she say such things? But beneath the fury, a small voice whispered: Because it’s true.

She sank into a chair, trembling, the weight of years pressing down. The smell of sickness clung to her, to the walls, to her very skin. She could not remember the last time she had stepped beyond the gate outside of work. The last time she had felt the sun on her face without the dread of coming home.

The Nurse knelt beside her, took her hand. “Come away with me. Leave the debts. Leave the grave you’re digging for yourself. There is still time.”

Clara wanted to say yes. God, how she wanted to say yes. She could almost feel the breeze of a faraway shore, taste the salt of an unfamiliar sea. But then her father’s cough tore through the silence, raw and ragged, and the spell shattered.

Clara pulled her hand free. “No. Not yet, I can’t.”

The Nurse’s gaze softened, as if she had seen this before, a thousand times. Maybe she had. She turned on her heel and left the room. Clara never heard the front door, but when she stood again, the Nurse was gone.

* * *

The house was empty.

Clara awoke to silence so deep it rang in her ears. The storm had passed in the night, leaving the world hushed. She lay still for a long moment, listening. She waited for the soft clink of glass as the Nurse prepared medicine, the scrape of the chair as she sat by Father’s side. But there was nothing. Only the relentless ticking of the mantle clock.

She pushed her feet into slippers and called out,

“Hello?” No answer.

She rose, and searched. First the sickroom, the sheets undisturbed, father asleep and wan, his breath a whisper. Then the living room, the kitchen, the narrow hall. No sign of her. No coat on the hook, no worn leather bag by the door.

Panic took root. Clara tore through the house, calling, pleading. The garden was empty, the gate still bolted. The lane beyond was deserted, slick with rain. No footprints, no trace. The Nurse was gone.

She staggered back inside, breath ragged, dread coiling in her gut. On the kitchen table lay the bills, the ink somehow darker now, as if mocking her. The Nurse’s teacup sat where she left it the night before, but when Clara lifted it, it was dry, dust-lined, as though untouched for days.

“No, no, no…” she whispered, heart hammering. She should call, she thought, call the agency. Someone must have sent her over. She opened drawers, overturned cushions, searched for a number, a brochure, an invoice. Nothing. Maybe her father had called, but he was asleep. She couldn’t bear to wake him to tell him she had lost his Nurse.

Her hands shook as she gripped the edge of the sink, staring out at the gray world beyond. Loneliness and grief finally unmoored in her mind.

Father coughed then, a wet, tearing sound that snapped her back. She ran to him, wiped his brow, steadied his breathing, she reached down and pulled the medicine from the battered brown leather bag on the floor beside his bed and his breathing eased.

The Nurse's voice echoed in her memory: come away with me. Leave this grave you’ve built. But now it was only an echo, thin and fading. Had she conjured the voice, that comfort? She stared down at the brown leather bag. Had that been here the whole time? Was it full, the medicine was in there. She knelt beside it, her trembling hands finding the edge of the bag where the leather was embossed. ‘C.K’ it said. Clara Kinsley.

She pressed her forehead to the cold wood floor. Outside the world stretched wide and empty, a promise unkept. Inside, the house seemed smaller, darker, the walls closer than before.

She closed her eyes and tried to remember the Nurse’s face. It blurred now, features slipping away like dreams upon waking. All she could recall was the feeling, warmth of her hand, the sound of faraway shores in her voice, the promise of a life she would never have, and the blue of her eyes, just like Clara’s.

The clock ticked on

* * *

The house had gone still as a crypt.

Clara moved through it like a ghost, hollow eyes, slippered feet, her night dress clinging to her thin frame. Days had passed. Time had dissolved. She had not eaten. She had not slept. Work had called. She didn’t answer. The walls pressed close, heavy with the stink of death and despair.

Her father’s breath was fainter now, each rasp a countdown she could not stop. And through it all, the Nurse’s absence echoed louder than any sound.

Clara clutched at fragments. She remembered her voice, the promises whispered in the dark. She stumbled from room to room, her heart always searching for some trace of the woman who had been her salvation. But the house yielded nothing.

She ended in the hallway, before the tall mirror that hung opposite the front door. The glass fogged with grime and warped at the edges. How long had it been since she looked upon herself? Since she had dared?

Clara reached out and wiped her sleeve across the surface. And there - staring back at her - was not the woman she remembered.

It was her.

No uniform, no kind stranger’s face. Only Clara, gaunt, hollow-cheeked, hair wild, eyes sunken and fever-bright. The hand that soothed her father’s brow was hers. The voice that spoke of distant lands had been hers. The promise of escape, hers.

She gasped, staggered, her throat catching. Hadn’t she been real. She spoke to her, touched her. She heard her own shipper stories to the empty room. She saw her reflection in the window, speaking to herself in the lamplight.

It had been her.

* * *

The bag was packed, her hair curled, her eyes bright, their blue reflected back at her as she stared at herself in the mirror. The sun curled around her, a soft halo glinting off her dark hair. She stood tall now, the sun beaming down upon her, warm on her skin. She saw herself, and for the first time in so long, she knew herself

Clara lifted the small bottle of perfume from the vanity, spritzing a delicate breath of jasmine at her throat and smiled at the fine mist that settled, the promise of distant shores.

She had been both prisoner and liberator, captor and comforter. The Nurse’s final words echoed through her, but now they were truly hers: You must be the one to unlock the door.

This was her moment. Her escape. The house behind her faded with the last threads of duty, the man she had cared for slipping into the hush of memory. It was not abandonment, but truth. A truth reflected now in the glass, no longer fled from but embraced.

Clara pressed her forehead to the cool mirror, the sunlight warm on her back.

“She never existed,” she whispered, taking a shaky breath. “But oh, how I loved her.”

But as the sun climbed higher, Clara stepped through the doorway, down the concrete steps towards the waiting gate, her bag rolling behind her. As she pulled the bolt open, stepping forward onto the cobbles beyond, at last tasting freedom, she realized the Nurse did exist, and she deserved to be loved.