i
    Many years had passed and still the young woman felt uneasy at the mention of marriage. After the failing of her own, there was not a single wedding she attended where her body did not convince her she had to wretch. The last time one of her sisters got married - to a man much more worthy than her ex, but a reminder all the same - she had nearly passed out at the reception. Now, of course, not every man was a bad man (her Jenny’s Ronny, for example, was a great man, rich and respectful), but the occurrence of a wedding meant the conversation of marriage, and that was the part that made her anxious.
    Now that her youngest sister Clarise was wedding, she could not sleep soundly at night. She tossed and turned, as one does in such a situation, but the circumstance did not go away and neither did her bout of restlessness. When at last it seemed her mind had wound down, the flicking began.
    It was no ordinary flicking. It was a deliberate sound; she could almost feel it pattering on her head with each tiny blow. She tried desperately to keep her eyes shut, but after the dozenth flick she found the sleep had snapped straight out of her. Huffing, she rolled out of her bed and shuffled to the window. 
    There was a man on her lawn. Was she imagining it? No, there he was, a human man, planted on her grass, hurling rocks at her window.
    She squinted. Suddenly the figure was less of a shadow and — was it… no, it couldn’t be, could it? — it was her ex-husband. The woman felt something fume inside of her. Her lips mouthed words at him, first questions, then horrible words, before she could even think what to say. Her ex did not answer, just continued bending down to pick rocks off the earth and tossing them in air. Each one hit against her window, and, creating the sound that had stolen her sleep, fell right back down onto the lawn where her ex-husband stood waiting for it.
    Instantly reruns of their marriage raced through the woman’s mind. She found her nails digging deep into the chipped white paint of the windowsill. No matter how hard she pressed, she could not get the rage out of her system.
    How dare he? How dare he take everything from her, and then, years later, come back to take more? To haunt her? To taunt her?
    She shook her head. She wanted to catch one of those rocks, launch it right back at his head, but refrained from opening the window.
    Instead, she made a list of promises to herself. One, she would invest in noise-blocking earplugs. Two, she would install better windows, ones that could not make so much clinging and clacking when hit by rocks. Three, she would never let herself fall in love again. There was absolutely, terribly no way she would ever let a man get so close to her heart — or her house, for that matter — under her supervision again.

ii
    She was having a restless night, as she often did around a relative’s wedding, when something completely snapped her out of any possibility of slumber. It was a small, repetitive noise, sort of like a twig being tossed into a campfire. She rose from her bed and walked over to the window in her nightgown. Standing on her lawn, just a floor below, was her ex-husband, picking rocks from the ground and catapulting them into the air.
    “What are you doing?” she mouthed into the glass. Her question was met by another rock. No, she definitely wasn’t getting sleep tonight.

iii
    Just when she was about to lose her faith in love, her ex-husband came back to diminish it completely. With each rock he flung at her window - landing with an unsatisfying ping-crackle against the glass - she thought to herself, I am never letting myself fall in love again.