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"Two days ago I was a baker," he said to himself, "and I had a wife, and a house, and a child."
You've still got the child, she said in his mind. It is what we went after. We didn't ask to have a healthy child, a thriving business, and for both of us to die when we had great-grandchildren.
"I will remember to be very specific in the future," he told his wife's shade, "as soon as the next witch shows up next door." He considered this. "My money's on the princess' stepmother."
No bet, his wife said, and he wondered if she's ever smiled like that when she was alive. When he'd had a chance to catch it with a kiss.
He looked away abruptly and watched Jack hammering on the new frame for the addition. As the princess sanded some wood he'd planed earlier. "By the way," he told the spirit, "you thought we needed more room before? Now we're housing the entire village."
Well, there's not that much left of it. She seemed to shrug. You'll be fine. And they're probably the best of the lot, anyway. Look over there.
He looked in the correct direction even before he realized she wasn't pointing. He saw his son; the girl had picked him up and was singing a rhyme to him in her clear voice. A bloodthirsty little motherling in a cloak of wolfskins, minding the child -- just as his wife had said she could do.
Everything had always been just as his wife had said it would be. But now this.
"The strong are supposed to survive," he said. "It was supposed to have been you."
I have no idea what I'd have done with your princess, she said wryly.
"Suppose it had been the prince?" he teased.
He could almost taste her dislike. Him you're better off without, she said with conviction. Stick with what you've got.
He felt like there was a story there, but he knew the dead -- especially his wife -- told no lies. So he didn't ask. "I loved you, you know," he said. "We weren't either of us that good at showing it. I'm sorry about that. I really am."
It's like the wishes, she said. Just be clearer, next time. Say everything.
The baker, whose house was being rebuilt (and expanded), looked at the young man Jack, actually focused on the task in front of him. He watched the girl come down the hill with the child in her arms, holding the babe as gently as she would a golden egg. And then he looked a long time at the princess, who wasn't a princess anymore.
When he turned back to the fleeting image of his wife, she was gone. He wondered how long it would be before she returned -- or if she would at all. Half of him wanted to chase off into the mist until he found her.
And half of him, not.
It was that half of him that went and calmed the child, who was crying for milk. That half of him who smiled at the princess. She was singing to herself as she sanded the wood of a shattered hazel tree.