Page 101 of Julian

Then Kylie stepped beside me and pointed toward the beach. “There,” she whispered.

And I saw what she was pointing at… Harper, standing barefoot at the edge of the water on the beach. The tide caressed her ankles. She wore a loose white dress, and she was beaming. She looked stunning standing there. Harper lifted her face toward the sunrise and smiled, completely unaware we were watching her.

My body began trembling. I looked back at Kylie as she watched me carefully.

She looked both hopeful and hopeless, an understanding that she possessed that I yet did not.

“I brought her here,” she whispered.

“Kylie… What… Why are you doing this?”

Her fingers slid softly through mine.

“For you, Julian. She’s here for you.”

I felt a tear form in my eye. I blinked to fight it off and as my eyes opened up, both Kylie and Harper were gone and I was alone.

I wake abruptly, disoriented and very on edge. For several long seconds, nothing makes sense.

My heart pounds unevenly and with increasing speed while fragments of the dream cling stubbornly. I can still feel the warmth of the Bahamas against my skin, Kylie’s laughter drifting across the yacht deck, Harper standing barefoot on the shoreline bathed in morning light. I can still see all of it with terrifying clarity.

What really sends chills down my spine is how it unfolded… Kylie smiling at me as she said, I brought Harper here… for you.

I suck in a breath and stare upward into darkness, trying to orient myself while panic and peace collide violently within me. It’s the strangest sensation, being both comforted and unsettled at once, as though my mind and body cannot agree on whether the dream was a gift or a punishment.

Slowly, the room around me comes into focus. My bedroom in Manhattan. Harper asleep in the bed beside me, her mouth parted slightly. The bedside clock says it’s nearing five a.m.

Reality slowly takes over piece by piece. I sit up slowly, pressing a hand against my face as I try to steady myself, but even now I can still hear Kylie’s voice so clearly it seems impossible she isn’t here.

You’re not with me. You’re with her.

Jesus Christ. It felt and seemed so real. Was it?

I carefully swing my legs over the edge of the bed so as not to wake Harper, and sit with my elbows braced against my knees, staring blankly at the floor. My pulse slows, but the dream refuses to loosen its grip.

There had been an eerie peace in Kylie’s demeanor. And somehow that unsettles me more than the grief ever has.

I stand, then cross the room barefoot before pushing open the glass doors leading onto the small terrace connected to my bedroom. It’s unusually warm for January—at most in the lower fifties—and I need this fresh air.

The city is alive this morning. Steam curls upward from rooftops and subway grates while distant sirens echo downtown somewhere before dissolving into silence again.

I grip the iron railing and close my eyes.

For years, I have lived inside grief so carefully it became comforting in some odd way. It was a routine I built my life around because it felt safer than imagining a life beyond it. Kylie wasn’t simply my wife. She was the great love of my life. The center of everything good I had ever known.

And losing her—losing them—gutted me so completely that eventually I stopped trying to fill the space at all.

Surviving them was already a betrayal in some ways, it seemed.

But now Harper has entered my life, almost accidentally, and in doing so she has begun waking parts of me I thought were buried, never to be revisited.

At times, Harper stirs up those dormant emotions: hope, peace, desire… others too, other emotions that I can’t quite accept.

What was Kylie doing in my dream bringing Harper?

“What am I supposed to do with that?” I whisper to myself as I stand on the terrace.

The city offers no answer.