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She’s aged; he hasn’t. That’s what happens when one of you is dead. Life goes on and Kat graduates high school, goes to college, gets a job. She leaves Whipstaff Manor and Casper stays behind. Still twelve years old; still in love.
They both knew it was coming.
She comes home for Chanukah each year to see her dad — to see Whipstaff Manor covered in snow — to see the ghosts. She finds Casper waiting for her in her childhood bedroom, the tiny room with its tiny bed that he still thinks of as hers.
She tells him of her apartment in the city. He can’t quite visualize it.
He says, “I love you, Kat,” and she smiles back at him, but she doesn’t say it.
He’s almost a hundred years old now.
He’s only twelve.
When Kat is thirty-two she tries to tell Casper about her job and she watches his smile freeze, his eyes glaze over, his attention fade away. She brings up academia and Casper’s mind spins its wheels. He tries to keep up; the last book he read was The Three Detectives, when he was still alive. His academic knowledge begins and ends with century-old baseball stats.
“I thought of a game we could play,” he says when she’s stopped speaking, and Kat tries to hide her disinterest the same way he tried to hide his.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s hear it.”
He leads her outside, where a crust of snow covers the ground. He takes her hand and it feels like her fingers have frozen; if she looks down, maybe she’ll see them layered in a scrim of ice.
He tells her the game and she goes through the motions. Suddenly, she feels like she’s babysitting. Suddenly, her heart aches.
She crouches in the snow, arms wrapped around her middle, and while Casper isn’t looking, she cries.
She never brings her husband to Whipstaff Manor. She forbids Dad from showing any pictures in that house; he smiles when she says that, a sad smile she’s all too familiar with, but he agrees.
When she visits home, she slips her wedding ring into a manila envelope in her glovebox and she leaves it there. She won’t put it back on until she’s back in New York, in the quaint, modern house she rents with her husband.
Casper’s always so pleased to see her. He floats down the staircase, his eyes wide and smiling. If there’s any sadness in him, Kat can’t see it yet.
“Hello, Casper,” she says.
“I missed you,” he says. Later, when they’re alone: “I love you, Kat.”
And Kat hums a toneless little note and smiles at him and all she can say is, “I know.”