Sweet Romance18 min read
The Candle in the Pencil Case
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I found the hidden envelope on a slow Tuesday, while the city outside my window moved on with its ordinary noise and I held a cigarette for the first time in a week.
"Don't smoke in the study," Hannah had scolded me for ten years.
"I know," I told her then, and I knew she expected me to be better. Now the ash fell and I read.
The envelope lay in a dark little slot behind a row of history books. The handwriting on the front was my wife's name, and the letters that worked out like claws—Hannah—felt like a stranger's.
I touched the paper. My hands were not steady.
"Julian?" Claire's voice came from the hallway. She always used my name that way, like a spell.
"Be right there," I answered.
Later, when the house was quieter and the light in the study turned blue through the blinds, I opened it. The ink inside belonged to the other Hannah—the one the doctors called the first personality, the furious, dangerous one. I had seen that pen stroke before, the heavy scratches like blades. The letter began, "Be careful of our daughter." It ended with a sentence I could not let sit in my chest without tearing me to pieces: "You will find the candle."
I put the letter down and the smoke tiredly curved into the room, and I replayed all the things I thought I understood for the last ten years.
"She loved history," people had said at the funeral.
"She was brilliant," the publisher had told me over the phone.
"She was gentle," neighbors had whispered.
They were all true. They were not the whole truth.
There had been a second truth, a steady and older voice living in Hannah, and a sloppy, violent voice that woke sometimes and terrified us. The doctors called it dual personality. I called it a life I had learned to live around. The bigger truth—the dangerous one—had filled half of her consciousness, and to love her, I had loved that quieter, brighter person who wrote books and fixed my collar and read to Claire. Loving her felt like leaning on a warm window ledge. Loving the other was like leaning into a blade.
When she fell from the twenty-fourth floor and the noise of that instant pressed into my chest like a coal, I thought of the letter later, and felt foolish for how much I wanted to believe anything but the simplest reading: she killed herself in a room she knew was safe. The police had said so. The coroner had said so. The room had been Hannah's.
But the letter said, "Be careful of our daughter." It demanded my attention in a way the coroner's neat report never could.
That afternoon at the school, Collins Farley had sat me down.
"Your daughter was in a fight," she said, not looking at me, looking at a clock. "She didn't start it."
"What happened?" I asked.
"Some boy reached into her pencil case," Collins said. "He was told not to. He took something. He got bitten for it."
"I'll pay for the medical bill," I said. "I'm sorry. I'm—"
"She's not like the other kids," Collins said. "I wanted to tell you. She freezes sometimes. She watches people like they are pictures, and then she looks away."
Claire did not come into the office filled with tears or explanations. She sat at the corner like a small statue. When I called her name she looked at me and for a moment, in her eyes, I saw something that was not a child's thing but a very old intelligence.
"Are you all right?" I said, and her eyes measured me.
"I'm fine," she said. "I'm okay."
After the meeting I took the envelope into the car and waited for the rain. I could not open it in front of the school. Rain would wash the ink for me if I let it. Instead I put my hands on the paper and felt the small ridges of a life I thought I knew.
The candle, the letter said. There was a candle in Claire's pencil case.
I did not want to believe it. I have spent the last month trying not to believe more things than I can hold. But the handwriting was not a stranger's; it was Hannah's violent script that had threatened me before. It said, in jagged syllables, that the candle was the key to the curse that had followed her life, and that the curse would come for our child too. It said, in the kind of lie that is also truth, "You cannot hide. You will also be found."
That night, after Claire had gone to bed with a cereal-sticky face and her teddy tucked under an arm, I opened her pencil case on the kitchen table.
"Claire keeps the worst stickers on this," I told myself, and there lay the old wax candle, dull and crinkled, a thing that smelled faintly of something like juniper and old resin. It had been in the box for years, tucked beneath broken pencils and erasers.
I held one end up to the light. It looked harmless. It looked like a child's thing. I clicked the lighter.
Before the flame could take, Claire's small body was at the doorway, eyes wildly open.
"Give it back!" she cried and lunged for it.
She grabbed the candle and pulled it to her chest like a talisman. For a second she was a terrified little animal.
"Claire," I said. "What is this? Where did you get it?"
She did not answer. She pressed her face into her knees, wrapped herself around the candle.
Her hands were shaking. Her small voice came out jagged: "Don't make it burn. Please."
I tried to calm her. "Sweetie, it's just a candle."
"It's not," she whispered. "It's not just a candle."
I agreed to take it away. I put the candle into my jacket pocket like a contraband and felt a metal cold on my chest. I drove to the hospital because Han—because the past was a room full of closed doors and the only person who might open them was the man whose voice had watched us for years, Dr. Raphael Lawson.
At the clinic, he sat like someone who had aged a decade in five. "Julian," he said, "we have results."
"They said she has the same diagnosis as Hannah," I said before he could finish.
"Yes. But there's more," Raphael said. "Come with me."
He showed me videos in his office until the world made no sense. Claire sat at a small table drinking something, and when asked if she remembered him she said, "Yes, you always ask me about the coffee."
"Coffee?" Raphael said to the camera.
"Yes," Claire said. "It helps me sleep."
She was distant and older and then, with a tilt of her head, she spoke like Hannah in a tone I had not heard since the night she read to us by lamp: "I am older. I have written about being older."
"Do you know the name of your mother?" Raphael asked. He said it like an investigator watching a wound.
"Yes," she said. "She killed me."
The room went cold. The tape showed Claire's face contort into something raw. "She pushed me. Twenty-four floors. She pushed me."
The doctors stayed calm in a way that makes one want to believe them first. They explained diagnosis, they explained degeneration, inheritance, the improbable, the test results written in numbers that suspected a shared pattern across two distinct minds. "We used a controlled dialogue," Raphael said. "We induced a stream of questions and recorded answers, side by side."
I watched Claire in the tape scream the same phrase for a long time: "She killed me."
"She says things to provoke," Raphael told me when the tape cut. "She repeats a story. She repeats it until it becomes true for her."
"She's my daughter," I said. "She's seven. She can't—"
"She's not seven in there," Raphael said. "There is another mind. It behaves like Hannah's second mind did. Its knowledge, its pattern, its language—we cannot explain it. In the cognitive tests, every answer matched Hannah's answers to the same prompts. The two responded in near identical ways."
"How is that possible?" I asked. "How can a seven-year-old, even one who was near books as she grew, mirror an adult's life experience?"
Raphael's hands were steady as he tapped the report. "We do not know. We must watch. You must not let the house be unsafe. Claire is not self-harming—yet—but she is repeating trauma."
After the meeting I went home with the candle in a shoebox and the house full of the smell of burned memories. I did what any man who loved his wife would do when faced with the impossible: I read everything she had left behind.
Hannah's manuscripts were full of history. They were also full of a kind of horror I had never expected from her—a history of a family of people who sought immortal life and paid a monstrous price. They kept children, fed them to rituals, believed they could breed forever. Hannah's books were meticulous. She showed me evidence, her working notes, old folktales twisted into a theory.
Somewhere between the ancient rites and the graphite notes, Hannah had found a story that mattered less as history and more as warning. A girl taken and made to live year after year in body after body—awakened, destroyed, awakening again—until that girl learned that to end it, death had to be exact.
The candle, Hannah's letter said, contained the means to end the line. It smelled faintly of juniper and something medicinal. Hannah wrote in the letter that the candle had been made by those who once abused the girl, hidden with their last superstition. If lit in a certain way, it could burn the bond with the blood that sustained her.
I read and reread the letter. The hand that wrote "Be careful of our daughter" trembled but held a promise: that the secret would be found by me and the candle would be used to end the cycle. The writing finished with the confession that Hannah wanted death—not because she loved death, but because she could not allow the curse to carry on. She wrote, "I will not let it live on in our child."
I thought I understood then. She had decided to die because the only way she knew to prevent her own.
That night I drove to the small cemetery and screamed into the dark until there were no words left. I had loved Hannah; I loved the laugh-lines at the corners of her eyes and the way she corrected misplaced commas. I also had loved the other voice—the dangerous one—and in the end, she had written a plan none of us had fully understood.
When I returned home, Claire was awake. She had sat at the kitchen table with the candle cupped like a relic. "Will you help me?" she asked.
"Help you how?" I said, feeling foolish.
"To remember," she said. "She wants me to remember her names."
"Who does?" I asked, and that night the child in my living room told me stories like a historian, of being taken into stone caves and of people with teeth like bad stars who tasted blood to learn secret words.
I listened until dawn. "I am Hannah," she said at one point, and then she shook as if the word burned her.
"You are not her," I said. "You are my daughter."
"She was here," Claire said. "She is here, too. She told me about the candle and said she'll go if it burns right."
"Who told you?" I asked.
"Her," Claire answered simply.
I did not sleep that day. Instead I burned what I thought would protect my daughter: the stack of manuscripts. If those pages could doom others, I reasoned, they should not be left. I set the papers in the sink on the terrace and fed them to flame until the words curled into an orange quiet. I told myself that was the end of that.
The next morning, Raphael called with a voice of waking panic.
"Julian," he said. "We need the candle."
"Why?" I asked. "You told me to keep it safe."
"My son," he said. "He's sick. The boy… he has a pattern. He exhibits knowledge he shouldn't have. There are families here who could turn this… they could take it and use it."
The direction of his voice shifted. It was less scientific now, more raw. "I need the candle, Julian. I need anything that might stop this."
"Why are you begging me?" I asked. "You are a doctor. Find a way."
"Please," he said. "My son is my son."
He begged and he terrified me. He was the man who had held my wife's files for years, the one who had watched the patient who had been her for so long, and suddenly the man who wanted the candle for his child was asking me like a parent in a church.
I thought of the manuscript burning and felt it burn twice: once paper and once memory. I imagined the candle in the wrong hands.
"I will not let anyone use her as a tool," I said. "Not you. Not anyone."
"Julian," Raphael whispered, "there are people—"
"Then keep them away from my family," I said.
He agreed and hung up.
Weeks passed. Claire improved; the small bursts of violence subsided like waves. She smiled in a way that suggested a child at play again, and I thought the danger had passed. I put the candle in a tin box and hid it deep inside the closet where Hannah used to keep her special papers. Sometimes I would feel for it at night and wonder if the heat inside me would ever go out.
Then, one morning, while I was at a meeting with the publisher, my phone buzzed and the number was Raphael. My chest tightened.
"Julian," Raphael said in a voice that had a new hardness. "There are men at my hospital. They know. They threatened my son. I need the candle. They will take my son if I don't give them something."
"Who?" I asked.
"They are not from here," he said. "They said they wanted to continue the research. They said they would buy the candle. They said they'd take my son. Julian, I am asking you to meet me outside St. Mark's. Just meet me. I'll give you money. I'll give you anything."
"Why won't you call the police?" I asked.
"Police don't always act fast," he said. "You are the only one I can trust."
I drove like a man being pulled. The street outside the hospital smelled of rain and exhaust. I parked and saw Raphael. He looked as if someone had lit a small, private bonfire behind his eyes.
"I can't do this," I said. "What are those people? Who will take a child because of a candle?"
"They are collectors," Raphael said. "They want immortality or a way to force immortality. They will take anyone's child for a thing that promises power. Please, Julian, please."
"I will not give it to them," I said. "I will not trade my daughter's safety for someone else's greed."
"Then give it to me," he said, his voice breaking. "I will hide it. I will keep it safe."
I studied him. The man who once wore lab coats now was small and raw. "If I give it to you, will you give it to the families you treat? Will you use it to help?"
"You think I won't?" he snapped. "You think I'm not trying to save my own son?"
"Then call the police," I said.
He said nothing. Then he reached into his coat and pressed something into my hand: a thin piece of paper with a number. "If anything happens to me," he said, "call this."
The meeting was a disaster. A man in a dark car watched us from the curb. As we parted, I felt a hand on my boot—someone had filmed our meeting. I had the candle in my pocket.
That night, after I tucked Claire into bed and read the ridiculous storybooks Hannah used to pick, I took the candle out again. It seemed smaller than before, thinner. I thought of the manuscripts and the faces the old pages had described. I thought of those collectors and their talk of experiments like hungry dogs circling a bone.
"Do you want this?" I asked the quiet room.
Claire answered before I could catch my breath. She sat up, eyes wet. "No," she said. "But I do not want them to have it."
"Who?" I asked.
"They'll use it like a key," she said. "They will put more girls in the places. They will feed them until they are not themselves."
"You think they'll do that?" I asked.
"People will do anything for forever," Claire said.
That was true. I thought of Raphael. I thought of the way a man can become monstrous when his child is threatened. I thought of the way institutions fold when money and promise come knocking.
So I decided to secure the candle in a place no one would think to look: under the floorboard in the study, behind the same books that hid the envelope. I marked the spot with a tiny scratch only I would know and I slept for the first time in months.
It did not last. One week later, the phone rang at midnight. A male voice, urgent and small, said, "Julian Diaz? You have the candle. We will meet you tomorrow at the square."
"I don't know who you are," I said.
"You do," the voice said. "You know the kind. Bring it."
I told no one. I took the tin box, then took it out and found the candle gone. The tin was empty but for a smear of wax dust.
I called Raphael. "Someone took it from under the books," I said.
"Who?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said. "But they found it."
At dawn, the square smelled like rain and betrayal. Crowds moved like a slow current. At the appointed hour a man stepped forward and demanded the candle. He was not alone. He had a camera, two men with him, and a woman with a little boy who looked sick behind her.
"Where is it?" he said loudly. "We were promised the candle."
I stepped forward because I could not not step forward. "You have no right," I said.
"Who are you to decide?" the man said. "Do you have proof? We were told that the lesion of immortality is in this town. You possess the key."
The crowd tasted the moment. People circled us, phones up. I recognized one of the men as a reporter I had once given a quote to years before. I looked for Raphael and saw him across the square, near a bench, his hands wrapping and unwrapping their own fear.
"Show us," the man said.
"I won't give you a thing," I said.
"Then you are a criminal," the man said. "You are hiding a power we were told about."
"Where did you get that talk?" I asked. My voice went sharp.
"From every roof," he said. "From men who cannot die. From money. From the people who want to take anything that can be bought."
I felt the crowd tilt. Phones took pictures. People murmured.
Raphael stepped forward then. His face had the red streaks of someone who had watched fear burn a hole in his chest. He walked beside me.
"Julian," he said, "this is not how it should be."
"Then what is 'how it should be'?" I asked.
"You shouldn't be alone in this," he said. "Give it to me. I will secure it."
"The police will decide," I told him.
"Police are slow," the man with the camera called out. "We are not waiting."
"Listen to me," I said. "If you think you can use this—"
"Use it?" the man laughed. "You think we want to use it? We want to study it."
"Studying means experimenting," I said.
Phones held their breath. "If you do not give it to us," the man said, "we will take it."
"We will take it now," another said.
The crowd surged. For a terrifying second a hand reached past me and grabbed the tin. I lunged. A fight broke out like children shoving over toys. Voices rose. There were shoves and a dropped camera and the sound of someone cursing.
Then Raphael's voice cut through the chaos with an order that had been years in building. "Stop! All of you! You are not men. You are not doctors. You are thieves."
"Who are you?" the camera man shouted.
"I am a man who has kept secrets under white light for ten years," Raphael said. "I have documented cases you read about in textbooks. I have sat with the dying, and I have seen men who would sell a child if they thought a secret would protect their own."
The square went silent for a moment, because statements like that are designed to make people stop.
"Do you want to see proof?" Raphael asked. He opened his jacket and pulled out a folder—his hands shook but his voice was steady. "Here are records. Here are phone calls. Here is a chain. These men came from a group that traffics in human research. They have papers under false names. They are registered to shell companies."
The crowd looked at the men who had tried to seize the box. Their faces changed, sharpened, then crumbled as the falsified documents Raphael waved were confirmed by a call he somehow placed in the moment. The man with the camera turned pale.
"You can't—" he began.
"Yes, we can," a woman in the crowd said, and she pulled out her phone. "I have his registration. It links to a company used in fronted trials." She scrolled and showed everyone.
Phones turned from instruments of greed into evidence machines. People began to record the men who had lunged for the candle. Someone in the crowd recognized the reporter who'd traded quotes years ago and said his name out loud. That mention broadened the circle and others remembered things they'd seen posted on forums: whispers about unnatural experiments.
I stood there with a tin box empty as a promise. The angry men were being surrounded now by the crowd's attention. Raphael took a deep breath.
"These men will be delivered to the authorities," he said. "And you—" he pointed at the man with the camera, "—you will be named for promoting false cures. You will find yourselves stripped of licenses, of clients, of the thing you thought would make you safe."
"You can't do that," the camera man said, but no one heard him like before. The crowd's voice shifted to a new sound: accusation.
The men realized that their performance had failed. They tried to push through and were met by hands and phones and the clear anger of mothers who had been listening. A woman stepped forward with a child in a carrier and said, "I will not let you sell my child."
Raphael had succeeded in turning the audience into a tribunal. The men had been confident until the crowd turned. They went from swagger to red-faced bluster to denial.
"This is harassment," one of them said. "We were invited—"
"By whom?" someone shouted.
"By people with money," the man said.
"Aren't we tired of people with money deciding what bodies mean?" a voice called out. "Aren't we tired of experimenters thinking they can buy souls?"
The words hit like light. A dozen phones recorded confessions as the men argued and tangled, and more people called the police. When the uniformed officers arrived, they did not come to protect the men who've sought forbidden things—they came because a crowd had formed and the men had been documented trying to traffic a child's relic.
The officers read names, checked identifications, and found what Raphael had claimed: false fronts, falsified summaries, calls to brokers. They began to take the men into custody in front of cameras and people with their palms wet from the rain.
The camera man went white. He tried to negotiate, then slumped against a lamppost. Raphael, who had a look I had only seen once before—the tired resolve of a man who'd spend his life watching things go wrong—sat down on the bench and breathed out.
"You did this," someone said to Raphael.
"I did what I had to," he answered. "We will make a public record. We will make it harder. We will record every attempt."
They arrested the men, not for treasure hunting, but on charges connected to human trafficking and fraud. The crowd watched like a jury. Some shouted, "Good!" Others cried, "Finally!"
During the arrests, the camera man tried to twist his phone toward Raphael. A woman in the crowd slapped it away and said, "Not today."
Later, when the square had emptied and the police made lists and the storm had settled into a dull drizzle, the news vans circled like beetles. They had footage of the arrest and rows of people whose anger had replaced greed. Headlines the next day called it "Public Sting Foils Trafficking Ring" and "Doctor Exposes Predators." Raphael's name was everywhere.
He came to my house the next day, and there was something in his face like a man who had been both forgiven and found guilty.
"You were good," I said.
"I could not let them take a child," he said. "I almost lost my son... I thought of giving you every thing, then I saw those men and I knew you would not be the only one who lied to save themselves."
"What will happen to them?" I asked.
"They will be processed," he said. "And publicly exposed. There will be investigations. They will not get the candle."
"And you?" I asked.
He looked at me like someone who had been to a long funeral. "I will make sure this is not forgotten. I will keep a record. I will keep my eyes open."
After that, the threat felt smaller. The candle stayed hidden. The drums of greed were quieter for a while. Claire laughed and learned to ride a bike. People called her a survivor in conversation that sounded both tender and careful.
Months later, on a humid night when the smell of lilacs drifted from the neighbor's garden, I was sorting Hannah's letters in the study again. The envelope from the beginning—Hannah's violent handwriting—sat on the table. The cigarette I lit made a soft crack of relief in the air.
I opened it at last and read the rest. Hannah's handwriting slowed near the end, as if her hand had decided at that point it would allow the truth to rest on the page.
She wrote about what she'd done and why. She wrote about being the girl the rituals had made and about the way she would wake inside someone else's life, tired and terrible and full of the memories of being eaten. She wrote about falling in love and about the first time she allowed herself ten years where love made things softer. She wrote about being in my arms and feeling the human warmth of not being alone.
In the final lines, she admitted that she had not wanted to die because she had given up hope. She had wanted to choose her own end rather than allow the thing inside to continue. She wrote that she had given the secret of the candle to the first woman she thought might do it for her—someone who had been broken by her—and that she had asked me, in a way shaped by most people's imagination of me, to end it.
She thanked me for being the man who could love her enough to carry his own burden.
I read the letter until the pages blurred. My hand closed. "Hannah," I said into the empty room.
Claire came in, unprompted, and leaned against the threshold. "Dad?" she said, small and steady.
"Come here," I said, and she did.
She wrapped her arms around me the way only a child can hold a man and make him feel real. "Are you happy?" she asked.
"Sometimes," I said.
"Will you tell me about her stories?" she asked. "The ones in the notebooks?"
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe I'll tell you some. But only ones that don't make you afraid."
She nodded and squeezed. Her small hands brushed the top drawer where the tin box was hidden. "The candle is safe," she said in the old voice that belonged, oddly, to both of them.
It remained safe. The men were prosecuted, their faces on morning shows where men apologize and lawyers read statements. Raphael's name was on op-eds about ethics in research. I testified once. I spoke about papers and hands and a candle in a pencil case. People listened enough to sign petitions. The din of those who wanted to buy immortality quieted, pushed back by law, by shame, by the memory of a mob in a square refusing to be part of something monstrous.
My last memory—one I keep in a small box besides the tin—was of the envelope Hannah sealed and hid behind a bookshelf. I keep it untouched and, once a month, I open the drawer to see if the scratch on the floorboard is still there. It is.
I will not say that everything is healed. Claire sometimes stares into the distance and says something that is not a child's thing. She asks me to tell stories about caves that are not too long. I answer, and I watch her breathe. Once, when the moon was a thin coin, she asked me, "Will she be gone for good?"
"I hope so," I said.
"She promised me," Claire said. "She promised she'll sleep."
"Then we will make sure she does," I said, and I mean it.
I still smoke in the study sometimes, in the small private hours. I keep Hannah's handwriting beside me like an ugly jewel, and I read it as if it will teach me a language I missed. The candle stays hidden in a place only the house remembers, and those who sought to take it were punished in the open square.
I remember the sound of the flare when I first struck the lighter against the metal and Claire's small hand grabbing for the wax. I remember the way Hannah's second voice wrote "Be careful of our daughter"—a possession of love and warning at once. I remember Raphael Lawson standing in the square and turning the crowd into an audience of justice.
There are things in this life we are not meant to inherit. There are curses you can bury and curses you must burn. The candle taught me that sometimes the only way to protect a child is to fight in public and to let others witness that the world will not allow monsters to trade children like coins.
That night when the square filled its story into the world, a woman swept forward from the crowd and took a photo of Raphael. She posted it with the caption: "He stood up." The post went viral. People wrote their own stories under it—stories of small ferocities and public defiance.
We live now with less fear, and I own a tiny ledger of names I will not forget. Above all, I keep a blank spot under the bookshelf marked by the scratch. When Claire grows older and asks, I will tell her that there was a candle and a choice and that in the end, the unanswered question about forever did not win.
There is one more thing I keep: the last line of the envelope, Hannah's looped last word. It is a promise to her daughter, to you, to me.
"Forget me," it said, and then, softer, "but not the way I loved you."
The End
— Thank you for reading —