Jona was no longer interested in dating. As he got older he accepted that his heart didn't have room for any other people in it and he didn't try. After his children were old enough to attend career training he found himself alone at home at night for the first time in many years, but he was not lonely. Even when the mirrors were empty, he knew that his family was just a call away and at least once a day one of his mirrors would light up and bring with it a sweet soprano voice to fill his heart. With two award winning and best selling teen series and a handful of novels that were made into cinema shows his newest books sold phenomenally well even when they came out with barely any advertising. The other authors under him had multiplied and he had long since hired more staff to keep the booming publishing house from becoming overwhelmed.
With more money than he really needed Jona decided to relax a bit, and he spent more time painting than he did writing. A fellow artist mentioned while one day that he should consider having a show to display his art. There were enough pieces, certainly, and if he added in some of the work that he used in his books he would surely draw in an enormous crowd. Jona thought about it for a while but eventually declined. His canvases were coated in paint depicting a deep longing, and he was not ready to share that part of himself with strangers. Even his children were not allowed to go through the many canvases that were stacked along the sides of the large room. It was too hard to explain why they all seemed to have the same woman on them, but that woman was not their mother, or anyone that he had ever actually met. But he knew her voice better than he knew anyone else's, and he could paint her face with his eyes closed. He knew. He had once done so.
Approaching 50 he began to think more of why he had been linked to this woman from another world. A small amount of bitterness leaked into his thoughts at times, especially when he would wake up from a sweet dream to find himself alone, the object of his affections far out of his reach. It felt almost like his whole life he had been haunted by a ghost, and even though he would not get rid of the experience for any amount of money he acknowledged that it had been hard, and often times painful. Ignoring the emotional side, just hiding it from his family and friends had been so much work. His sons suspected that something was off about their father, the way he made sure that all their furniture and decorations were matte, but then stared at the only reflective surfaces in the house with a sad smile sometimes. Or how he would sing songs that they had never heard of, and had not been able to find when they went looking for copies, but insisted that they were not his work. How his stories felt so real, as though he had actually seen the fantastical things inside them. But they never questioned him about it, he never mistreated or ignored them and had given them as much love as a parent could give. They never wanted for anything so all they hoped for was that their father could be happy too.