Lady in the Moon

Tabitha’s world was coming apart.

Rain smeared the darkened sky into something indistinct, and the tears only made it worse. She could barely see. Every time they slowed, another memory surfaced—another sharp, undeniable truth—and sent her spiraling again.

The future she had carried so carefully—children, grandchildren, growing old together—had been torn away. Jacob didn’t want her anymore. Didn’t want her to carry his children. Didn’t want slow Sunday mornings or the comfort of her hand in his as they aged. He didn’t want the quiet life they had built.

He wanted Sophia.

The tears surged again, blurring headlights into streaks of light across the rain-slick road. But the drive was familiar now. Familiar enough that she didn’t fight it. She let the tears fall freely, spilling over and slipping down her cheeks as the road carried her forward.

She turned down the overgrown drive, what had once been gravel now reduced to little more than pebbled dirt. The mailbox still bore the fading wildflowers they had painted all those years ago—her Nanna’s graceful petals woven between her own clumsy, childish ones.

The sight steadied something in her. It told her she had made the right choice in coming here. She needed this place—the quiet, the familiarity, the grounded comfort that only a childhood haven could offer.

The small white house came into view, glowing in the headlights like a tombstone. In the five years she’d been gone, the forest had crept closer—vines swallowing the porch, the once-tended gardens folding back into the wild. The sight struck her with a sharp, quiet shame.

She had failed her Nanna. Failed this place.

Five years since she’d closed that door, promising they would return. That this would become part of their shared life—summer visits, holidays, something steady to come back to. But it hadn’t happened. Jacob had wanted cities instead. Plays. Exhibits. Movement and noise.

So she had followed.

She had wrapped herself around his life until there was no space left for her own. She had enjoyed it, too—the museums, the shows, the bright windows—but somewhere along the way, she had let this part of herself fade. Let it become something distant. Almost forgotten.

Tabitha dragged the back of her hand across her face and stepped out of the car. Mud swallowed her shoes, rain soaked through her clothes, but she didn’t stop. She grabbed her duffel and pushed toward the porch, shoving aside the heavy, wet vines.

The door gave easily. The key still sat in the deadbolt.

Inside, the familiar scent of herbs and powder wrapped around her—thinner now, edged with dust and something stale. She reached for the light switch and flicked it on, a small, practical relief that she had insisted that they keep the power on.

White sheets draped over the furniture. Cobwebs clung to the corners. Dust lay thick across every surface.

She moved through it without pausing, crossing the main room and slipping into the tiny back bedroom.

Her bedroom.

The pink walls had dulled with time. The drawings that once covered them were faded, curling, some fallen to the floor. She set her bag down and picked one up, studying it. A memory surfaced—her younger self pressing crayon to paper, her parents sketched in uneven circles, her small figure between them. She had been so young then. Their absence hadn’t fully taken shape yet.

She let the paper fall.

Pulling the sheet from the narrow bed, she curled onto the mattress. It felt wrong to take Nanna’s bed—like stepping into something sacred she hadn’t earned. The blankets smelled of dust and disuse, but she pulled them close anyway.

She didn’t have the energy to fix anything tonight.

Maybe tomorrow.

But it didn’t happen the next day.

Or the three that followed.

On the fifth day, she finally found the strength to face it—the sheets, the dust, the quiet neglect. One by one, she pulled the covers away, revealing the home she had known as a child. The oversized floral couch. The rose-colored wingback chairs. Outdated, all of it. And yet, each piece stood as a reminder of exactly why she had come back.

At the bookshelf, she stopped.

Her gaze moved slowly over the familiar spines—her Nanna’s books. Gardening. Herbs. The animals of the forest. Her fingers traced along them until they stilled on a deep blue cover, silver scrollwork catching the light.

The Lady in the Moon.

Her favorite.

She had imagined reading it aloud one day, her voice soft in the quiet of a shared home. A child in her lap—a little boy with Jacob’s eyes—listening as she turned each page, the story passing down as it had to her.

She turned away sharply, forcing the image from her mind. She hated how everything still led back to him.

That was why she couldn’t stay in the city. Jacob had told her she could keep the house, if she wanted it. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. How was she supposed to live inside something they had built together, when every room carried the weight of what had been lost—of promises that no longer meant anything?

No. She couldn’t stay there.

He could keep it all. She almost hoped it would haunt him—the way it haunted her.

But it hurt. God, it hurt.

Walking away meant abandoning years of her life. Years spent building a home, dreaming of a family, shaping her days around his. She had stood beside him as he climbed the corporate ladder, steady and certain in what they were building together.

And in the end, it hadn’t mattered.

He had chosen someone else. Someone he met along the way—someone just as driven, just as consumed by ambition as he was. The opposite of Tabitha. The opposite of everything he had once claimed to want.

Or at least, everything he had told her.

“I want a wife,” he had said, his hands wrapped around hers, his gaze fixed on her as he knelt. “Someone who makes a house a home. Someone nurturing. Someone steady. Someone I can build a family with.”

His grip had tightened slightly, his voice softening.

“Someone like you, Tabitha. Please… be my wife.”

But this time, the memory didn’t bring grief.

This time, it was something sharper.

Anger.

It cut cleanly through the heaviness, sudden and unmistakable. And beneath it, something else—relief. Relief to feel anything other than the endless pull of sadness.

If anger was what dragged her out, she would take it.

She could be angry.

What she couldn’t do anymore was surrender to tears. Couldn’t keep sinking into that hollow, hopeless place that had swallowed her for far too long.

The next day, Tabitha stepped outside, her Nanna’s words echoing in her mind: “When you need peace, place your hands in the dirt. The earth will ground you.”

So she did.

Her fingers dug into the soil, ripping out the overgrown weeds from her Nanna’s flower beds. She cut and pulled at the tangled vines, revealing the chipped paint of the oversized porch. The tools in the shed were old and rusty, but they still worked.

By sunset, her hands were sore and blistered, but her mind was clear. Jacob no longer filled every corner. Instead, memories of working the garden with Nanna rose to the surface—times she had long forgotten, moments she hadn’t thought of in years.

When she returned inside, a tired satisfaction settled over her. The yard was slowly returning to life. Now all she needed was a cup of Nanna’s chamomile tea.

She opened the cupboard, rifling through the tins her Nanna had always kept—different teas, always carefully stashed. Hopefully, the tea hadn’t expired.

The first few tins were empty. Tabitha climbed onto the counter to reach the ones on the top shelf. The first was empty, too. But the second…

Inside were tiny slips of black paper.

She froze, staring down at them.

Her notes to the moon.

She had forgotten—forgotten the quiet magic of The Lady in the Moon. As a child, she had left little messages on her windowsill: silly questions, fleeting thoughts, even occasional compliments, praising the moon’s glow on especially bright nights. Each morning, she had awoken to find a slip of black paper—no larger than an index card—tucked in its place. On it, in delicate silver script, the moon had replied.

Now, she realized it had always been Nanna leaving the answers.

And somehow, it seemed, Nanna had kept them all.

That night, for reasons she couldn’t name, Tabitha slipped a note onto her windowsill.

A simple question, meant for no one in particular. Born of desperation, of quiet loneliness.

One she knew no one would answer.

"Are you there?"

She laid her head on her childhood pillow, her heart still in pieces and prayed for a reply.

Tabitha slept without dreams for the first time since Jacob had shattered her world. A deep, heavy sleep—the kind that left her sluggish upon waking, as if her body resented being pulled from it.

She stood at the mirror, studying her reflection, trying to piece herself back together. Hollow eyes. Sunken cheeks. Hair still twisted into a knotted bun. Beneath it all, she could see traces of who she had been.

She just had to find her again.

It would start simply. A shower. Then a trip into town for the supplies she needed.

She passed the large Walmart that had appeared sometime in the last five years, its bright sprawl jarring against her memory, and continued on. Instead, she turned toward the small grocer on Main Street—the same one she had known as a child.

It was sparsely stocked and overpriced, but it had what she needed.

And more importantly, it didn’t have the crowds.

But it did have Martha—an acquaintance she would have preferred to remain forgotten.

“Tabi?” Martha’s voice was saccharine, her smile stretched too wide. “Is that you?”

“Hello, Martha.”

“Well, I’ll be. It’s wonderful to see you again.” Her eyes flicked over Tabitha, quick and assessing. “Are you staying at Betty’s place?”

“Yes. Just fixing it up. Making up for the years of neglect.”

Martha snapped her gum as she handed over the receipt. “Then you’ll be here for a while?”

Tabitha nodded.

“I can send Derek out if you need help,” Martha went on, leaning across the counter. “He’s got plenty of time these days.”

“Sure,” Tabitha said, keeping her tone even. “If I need anything, I’ll reach out.”

After that, she returned to the work. Another day in the dirt—cutting back bushes, pulling weeds, clearing the overgrowth that had swallowed the yard.

When she reached what remained of the small herb garden beneath the kitchen window, her breath caught. Tears rose again, tightening her throat.

But this time, they weren’t for Jacob. Not for the life she had lost.

They were for herself.

For everything she had given away.

The anger shifted, no longer aimed at him, but inward. She had let it happen. Let herself be narrowed, reshaped. Gardening traded for neat nails and polite volunteer work. Jacob had insisted on hiring someone—said his wife shouldn’t be digging in the dirt. And she had agreed.

She had let friendships slip, trading them for dinners with his coworkers and their wives, conversations that never quite felt like her own.

How had it happened?

There had been no single moment. No clear choice.

Just a slow erosion—until one day she woke up and her life no longer felt like hers.

It was his.

The anger didn’t fade until she was crawling back into bed, her gaze catching on something small and black resting on the windowsill.

She stilled. Her breath snagged.

Slowly, she pushed herself up and reached for it—a familiar scrap of soft black paper. Careful, almost reluctant, she unfolded it.

Silver, looping script caught the light.

One word.

A reply.

‘Yes.’

She dropped it.

Panic crashed over her, sudden and consuming. She stumbled from the bed, moving through the house in a rush—locking windows, checking doors, securing anything that could be secured. When she finally returned to her room, it was with a kitchen knife placed within reach on the nightstand.

For three nights, she didn’t sleep.

Every sound made her flinch. Every shifting shadow held something waiting.

On the third night, with her nerves worn thin and her thoughts circling, she placed another note on the windowsill.

‘What do you want?’

The next morning, her eyes were drawn to the windowsill. There, resting against the locked glass, was a new slip of black paper—the same soft, dark paper from the tin on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard.

This time, it wasn’t a statement. It was a question.

“What do you want?”

She spent the day circling the question in her mind, turning it over from every angle. What did she really want? Not what she had been told to want, not what had been expected of her—but what she wanted, deep down.

That night, as she lay in her childhood bed, the answer crystallized. Her hand moved almost on its own as she wrote:

‘I want to remember who I am.”

The next morning, when her eyes opened, they immediately fell on the new slip of paper resting in its place. Still heavy with sleep, she climbed to the windowsill and unfolded it.

‘You are enough. You are Tabitha.”

Tears pricked her eyes as she read and reread the silver words, letting them seep into the cracks she had carried for so long. She hadn’t felt enough in years. Not for Jacob. Not for anyone.

He had never said it outright—never praised her, never acknowledged her—but she had always felt it, that quiet, persistent sense of insufficiency. Whether born of his words or her own fears, it had shadowed her, making her feel like a piece forced into a puzzle, never quite fitting, never quite whole—just enough to fill the void.

But now, that was going to change. She would never make herself less again. She would be enough. She could be Tabitha—better than anyone else. For the first time in years, a flicker of something long forgotten stirred within her, something she had hidden carefully.

All day, her thoughts circled what she needed—and wanted—to do. She needed freedom from Jacob, and that began with severing the financial ties. She needed a job. Not wealth, not prestige—just enough for the basics. Something simple she could take pride in, something she could enjoy.

The next day, she found herself speaking with Nanna’s friend, Benji, owner of the local greenhouse. Carefully, she explained her situation, hoping he might have a place for her.

“Well,” he said, brushing a dirt-stained hand over his overalls, “I suppose I could use someone part-time. Perhaps in the summer, we could move you full-time.”

“I’ll take anything,” she said. “I don’t need much.”

So they shook on it. The deal was made. Tabitha would start the next day.

That night, proud of her first step toward true independence, she wrote to the Lady in the Moon about her accomplishment.

‘I will work in Benji’s greenhouse. I think this is going to be a good thing.’

The next morning, she found yet another slip of black paper resting on the windowsill. She unfolded it, and the words shimmered like a promise from a long-forgotten friend—one she had neglected, yet who had quietly watched over her, waiting patiently for her return.

“What is planted with intent will bloom. Keep planting.”

And so Tabitha did. Day after day, she worked the soil, her hands sinking into the earth, planting seeds and tending to whatever emerged. Slowly, deliberately, the pieces of her new life began to take root. Routines formed. Acquaintances blossomed into friendships. Smiles became steady companions, and tears grew rare.

When loneliness or doubt crept in, she wrote a note to the Lady in the Moon—a constant in her life she would never let slip away again. The tin on the top shelf filled, and a new one was begun, each note a treasure of wisdom and quiet reassurance.

She often wondered if the Lady in the Moon kept her notes—reading them again beneath silver light, smiling not at the words themselves, but at the woman who had written them. At the quiet, stubborn journey of someone who had once been lost, and had found her way back.

Tabitha smiled as she placed the tin on the top shelf, beside the others. It was a gentle smile, steady and certain. The kind that didn’t fade.

The smile of a woman who had grown her own happiness—who had finally become her own home.