What he loved most was waking beside her in the morning, the warmth of their bodies making a cavern of the sheets. His father said every woman looked the same in bed. Perhaps they did, but the sound of his wife’s breathing was unique. He thought he would know it anywhere, if by chance he ever met her during the day. He lay listening until her breaths faded into silence, and the warmth faded from the sheets. Then he would get up and open the windows to let sunlight into the empty room.

“You can never see me,” she said. “I will come to you at night, in the dark. You must never see my face.”

The first year of his marriage he kept a candle by his bedside, and he thought of it often as she lay sleeping. The tinderbox was so close. He would only look for a second-

But then he thought of the stories, the fairy tales they told about wives who looked on their husband’s faces after they had promised not to, the legends about the husbands who followed their cursed wives beyond forbidden doors.

He was not a fool. He learned to leave the candle in the hallway and find his way to her in the dark.

“Do you ever wonder what she looks like?” his friends asked. They wore expressions of concern, but their eyes shone with morbid curiosity. They too had heard the stories. They too wanted to know what would happen if he struck a light, and unlike him they had nothing to lose.

He laughed off their questions. “Nobody ever knows everything about their wife,” he told them. “At least I know what I’m ignorant of.”

But he wished they’d ask him something else: how he met her, or what her favorite flowers were, or what he’d thought about as he climbed the silver trellis to ask her name. Something with a story to it, instead of uncomfortable silences.

As time passed, he saw less and less of his friends. He disliked their whispers, and their probing questions. He had too many doubts of his own to harbor.

His wife’s skin was soft as silk, her voice pleasant, and her opinions wise. Sometimes, when he woke from nightmares, he would touch her hair, to remind himself that it was no monstrous thing that slept beside him; to remind himself that she was there.

His children, when they came, were born wailing into the darkness, and he knew them first as warm weights in his arms. Like their mother, they faded with the sunrise.

Their absence gnawed at him. Where did they go during the day?

One morning, he explored the floors of the empty house with a thoroughness he had not attempted since the early days of his marriage. He moved bookcases and counted floorboards, seeking an entrance to their hidden world. It had to exist somewhere, he told himself.

His worries stretched with the shadows, growing longer and darker as the day wore on. Perhaps this time they would not return. Perhaps they had chosen to remain wherever they were, in a world he could not access. Perhaps they did not exist at all.

But then night fell, and sounds started from the nursery. He heard his wife’s voice on the stairs and felt her smile light upon him as she entered the room, like a beacon in the dark.

“You don’t need to worry, you know,” she told him. “I will always be here.”

And he nodded. In the dark, he believed her.

His children grew older. He learned to recognize them by the sound of their footsteps, by the different peals of laughter that glanced off unseen walls. He tried to join in their games, but he was always much clumsier than they were in the dark.

When the night came for his eldest daughter to be married, he objected. He was old now. The daylight mirror showed him a face creased with worry, hair burnt grey with ancient fears. “But I haven’t seen him,” he told his wife, hating the creak in his voice, “how can I marry my daughter to a man I haven’t seen?”

“You married me, didn’t you?” Her voice was warm, and laughing, and young.

And of course there was no answer to that.

One night he brought the unlit candle to their bedside and waited until her breathing was deep and even. He turned the rough tinderbox over in his hands.

It wasn’t right, he told himself, that he should go through his life not knowing what his wife and family looked like. In the fairy tales, the hero always looked.

Bad things happened, of course. In some of the stories, his wife would turn out to be a monster. In some, he would lose his family to the underworld. In all the stories, he would be punished for his lack of faith.

But there were also stories that continued past this moment of betrayal. There were stories in which the hero quested, journeying down hard, painful roads in glass shoes that bled with every step, over iron mountains, and through woods that shrieked with terrors. Eventually, after he had suffered enough, he would find that impossible place: an unmapped valley, a hidden castle, a land east of the sun and west of the moon. And there, his wife and children would be waiting with their eyes full of forgiveness.

But that was in the stories.

With a sudden clasp of fear, he saw the red light of dawn lining the horizon. The tinderbox was in his hand.

The tinderbox was in his hand, and he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. “You must never see my face,” she’d told him. “Promise me you’ll never look.”

I have to trust her, he thought, miserable as he rose to let the sunlight into the empty room. He put the tinderbox back in its hiding place, knowing even as he did so that he would never draw it out again. His decision was made; his part in the story was over.

He tried to comfort himself with his resolution, but the silence of the house pressed down on him. He went and stood in the middle of the old nursery, surrounded by dusty keepsakes and ancestral portraits, listening for his family. But all he could hear was the sound of his own heartbeat: the slow, regular pulse of his life, counting down the minutes until nightfall.

The dark grew into him. It crawled into his bones and left him shivering in the day. The doctor came and left. The priest muttered prayers. She was there, once night fell.

“Did I do the right thing?” The old fear spoke through him, through the years. “I should have looked, shouldn’t I? Then I would have seen you. And-”

But his words faded into the fever, and anything more he said or thought was locked away inside him.

Cool lips kissed his in the darkness. She held him until his breathing faded into silence, and his warmth from the sheets.

Eventually, when the birds began their jangling dusk-cries, she rose to open the windows, letting starlight into the empty room. She stood there a long while, silent, studying the horizon with wet eyes and pondering the tremendous distance that stood between the Sun and Moon.

When the next night fell, she put on her heavy boots and slipped her husband’s tinderbox into her pocket. She left a note for the children, but said no goodbyes.

Standing at the door of her house, she realized she had no direction. Where could she find her husband now that he had passed death’s door, promise unbroken? There were no stories about that. The horizon stretched around her home, east of the Sun and west of the Moon, like a prison wall. She had no animals to help her, no seven-league boots to speed her journey. But perhaps, she thought, they will come later

Taking a deep breath, she began to walk.