Ties That Bind by Natalie R. Collins

power switched on. He stared at the black. Waiting. Waiting for something that would never happen.
    In this room, everything looked normal. He looked normal. As long as his visitors didn’t stray from this room, no one would ever wonder about him. No one would ever say, “I don’t think he ever got over the accident.”
    No one ever got past this room.
    Paul supposed that he was always going to be waiting for her to be there when he came home. To look up at him as he walked through the door and say, “Hi, honey, how was your day?” Trite, he knew. But he missed her. He would settle for trite.
    He was responsible for her death, but in some ways so was Sam. She didn’t realize it, of course. She had walked away without a backward glance.
    Liar. You walked away. Took the coward’s way out, and went on a mission, knowing full well you had left her.… Well.
    He didn’t want to go there again. Not tonight. It was the reason he was a seminary teacher. It was the reason he did all the things he did. He was atoning. He’d known that for a long time.
    It was easy to imagine the God he loved forgiving others. Him? Not so much.
    He missed her. And he missed Sam. And he missed the children he had barely had a chance to know.
    Sam. Just the thought of her made the guilt roil through his stomach. Sam had been the reason. For all of it.
    The worst of it was, his wife had never even known how much he loved her. She died thinking he carried a torch for someone else. Did he? If he did, why did he miss his wife so much? Every. Single. Day.
    How do you continue to live normally when the worst comes to visit? How do you walk and breathe and act as though nothing is wrong when the devil comes calling at your door and hands you the death card? Even worse, when you know you are responsible, how do you manage to put one foot in front of the other the next day? And the next. And the next …
    Paul had been taught all his life that as long as one lived the principles of the Gospel—i.e., going to church, paying a full tithe, attending the temple regularly, living the law of chastity—his reward would be great.
    Paul’s problem was that reward seemed hopelessly empty now. Now he was all alone, filled with despair, missing the woman he had killed and housing unhealthy emotions toward the woman he had abandoned.
    When he sat with his colleagues at testimonials and meetings, he listened to them talk about the last days, the second coming of Christ, the Celestial Kingdom. And he wanted to scream. He wanted to yell, “This would be a good time. Now would be good!” Because this life was completely and utterly empty.
    How I am supposed to walk on, every day, empty, unfulfilled, until that time comes? I am only human. I have needs. And they are stirring again. She makes me feel things I shouldn’t feel.
    He was aware of a cramping in his hands and looked down to see he had his fists clinched tightly into balls, his fingers white. Sharp pains arced through the digits as he spread them out, opening up and closing the fist, regaining the feeling he had lost. If only the loss of real life could be solved as easily as the loss of circulation in his hand. Just open it up, move it a bit, and everything comes back to where it was before.
    Before. Sam. She belonged to before. Before he had met his beloved wife. And the feelings Sam brought up in him were primal, and wrong.
    What would happen if he acted on these strange, primal feelings? Would he lose his place in Heaven? Would he be destined for a life on the Terrestial plane, the lowest of God’s three kingdoms?
    Would it be worth it?
    Did you really just ask yourself that question?
    If he were to hurry it up, worried about his eternal salvation as well as his burning loneliness and desire for a woman who was against everything he believed in, he wouldn’t get that reward. Suicide was against God’s laws.
    He would just have to wait, living as an empty shell, until he could rejoin his wife and