The picture frame shudders. A small table lamp clicks on. She’s there.
Her face is lit like a dream I just remembered. The pleated lamp shade throws out soft light. She’s wearing a white Oxford shirt, buttoned to the throat. A black vest. A narrow tie.  The kind she wore the nights we used to pretend we were strangers meeting for the first time.
I don’t move. Even the dogs stay curled and asleep.
“It’s you,” I say.
Her eyes are the same. That’s what undoes me. Her eyes. Still clear. Still warm. Still watching me the way she used to, when we lay on the floor listening and singing to records we’d memorized. Changing the lyrics and laughing.
“It’s me,” she says.
She’s on the far side of the frame. Or inside it. I don’t understand the space between us. She isn’t a memory. I’ve painted those before. They don’t speak.
“I never thought...”
“I know. Me too.”
Silence stretches between us. Not awkward. Just full. Something unfinished we forgot to bury.
“Are you angry I left that way?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “I left too. Just…later... in a different way.”
She lowers her eyes. On her hand, the ring. The one I gave her. The one they returned to me in a plastic bag, sealed with a label.
“You’re wearing it,” I say.
“I never took it off.”
I nod. I don’t ask how. Not yet.
“Are you real?” I ask.
“As real as you imagine,” she says.
Outside, even the forest has gone still. My breath feels heavier. The air, damp.
“Can I come to you?”
She doesn’t answer. But the space between us begins to dissolve. The light bends. A faint shift. I don’t climb through. I don’t move at all. Still, I am there. 
Sitting across the table from her, we’re closer now. Almost touching. But, still divided by something thin and old.
“You haven’t painted me,” she says.
“I’ve tried. At least a hundred times.”
She watches me for a long moment. I let her. I want her to see it all—the work, the silence, and all things lost and hidden away.
“You weren’t ready,” she says.
“No.”
“Do you still sleep on the same side of the bed?”
“I do.”
She smiles. Not nostalgia. Something quieter.
“I’ll come to your studio next time,” she says. “When you can draw and we can talk.”
“Now?”
"No. Not now."
"When?"
“That’s up to you.”
The table lamp flickers. Her face fades. Her outline softens like chalk in rain.
“Wait,” I say. “Why are you going?”
She doesn’t answer.
The world stays dark until I've returned to my studio.
The dogs lift their heads. The forest around the studio relaxes.
I open a new sketchbook and draw the line her hair made against her neck. A single stroke. Just that. A beginning.
I leave the small table lamp turned on and fall asleep on the couch.