The Lovely Return

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, begging my mother to take me home to my real family.

But one day I wandered straight to that house with the red door, and I found the man and the dog.

Alex was quiet. A sexy, brooding artist. A grieving widower, suspended in time, never moving forward.

As I grew up we developed an unlikely but easy friendship, bonding over our love of art. He felt familiar, his home felt like home. But as the years passed I found it harder to ignore not only my growing feelings for him, but the visions that played through my mind every time I got too close to him, or spent time in his house.

Dreams, reality, and sanity began to blur until I came to a startling revelation. I wasn't having visions. I was having memories. Alex's late wife's memories, to be exact.

Alex fights our connection, believing I'm off limits. He tries to do what's right—pushing away the only thing he's been wishing for since that tragic day when he lost everything. Or so he thinks.

He was mine in a prior life. And I'm going to make him mine again.