THE BORDER LINE

He came to bury the past and marry the future. The past had other ideas.
Christopher has not been back to the house in ten years. He is thirty-three, he is engaged to be married, and James, brilliant, devoted, entirely present, is the life he has chosen. When James books a week in the European countryside, a stone farmhouse at the end of a quiet lane, Christopher says yes. He does not mention that he has been here before.
Mark died on the staircase of this house a decade ago. What happened in those final moments is something he has never been able to say.
But the house remembers.
What begins as a week away from the noise of ordinary life becomes something else entirely: five days in which the past refuses to stay buried, in which James begins to sense that the man he loves is not entirely his, and in which Christopher must finally reckon with the question he has spent years not answering.
What is a ghost but a love that was never given permission to end?