Excerpt from Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Pete

In the house with the drawn curtains and the sealed-up room, there is a second person living.

He is Pete, the person that I love. It is his house I wear, his rooms I have dimmed to quarter-light, his spare bedroom I have commandeered to make my lair.

My love has saved me. It wraps strong arms around me when I cry with despair; it gives me the routine of a working week to lend vicarious structure to my shapeless days. It brings me daily laughter, a reason to keep washing?.?.?.

.?.?.?and it slices me open with guilt. For I am creating two shadow lives, where there need only be one. I am sucking the light from Pete's life, leaving him a twilit, liminal creature, single yet not single, who at social events sits alone among the couples, with a strange absent presence always by his side.

I argue with myself during my long periods alone. I undertake lengthy ethical investigations and conduct detailed philosophical analyses. I am trying to discern the behaviour that would, in my circumstances, be morally right. Should I leave him?

This would be difficult, practically; it would require time, research and careful organisation--but it could just about be done. I would need to find another place to live, with another blacked-out room; either a place on my own, with people nearby who could be paid to do my shopping, or a place with someone who was prepared to look after me, prepared to close doors before they switch on lights, pull curtains before I come into a room; someone I could trust, because I would be at their mercy.

I pummel my conscience for an answer. By staying, by shirking the responsibility and effort of leaving, by continuing to occupy this lovely man while giving him neither children nor a public companion nor a welcoming home—do I do wrong?

This is how I reason, hour after hour. Then I hear his key in the door, and his tread on the stairs. I hear him call out
"Wotcher, chuck!" and stomp about in the bedroom next door as he takes off his shoes and tie and puts on his slippers. Then he knocks at my door, and I say "Come in," and scramble up to hug him.

And all my ethical reasoning crumbles to ash in the sheer fact of his presence. Because together, even in darkness, we light up a room; because the clotted guilt inside me breaks up and disperses before a surge of stupid happiness; because I love him, and I know I cannot leave him, am incapable of leaving him, unless he asks me to go.

And he has not asked me.

And that is the miracle which I live with, every day.

Excerpted from Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey. Copyright © 2015 by Anna Lyndsey. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.