Page 12 of Ex Somnis

Her gaze stays on Lennon before it finds mine. “What is she to you?”

“Everything.”

Mrs. Vaughn is quiet for a moment, then she nods slowly, as if receiving information she already suspected. She moves to the other side of the bed and methodically straightens the blankets. “You haven’t left her side in three days.”

“I haven’t.”

“You can, you know,” she says gently. “Go home. Sleep in a real bed. Have a shower. I’m here. I’ll give Lennon the same care I give Tessa.”

She already is. The tube, the schedule, the monitoring. Lennon is better off here than anywhere else, which is the only reason she is still in this bed and not in mine.

I don’t have the staff.

I don’t have the experience.

I don’t have the right to risk her because I need her closer. Wanting her is not the same as keeping her alive and safe.

Looks like I can’t keep anyone safe.

Something shifts in Mrs. Vaughn’s expression when I don’t answer. “I have a feeling that this wouldn’t have happened to her if she’d kept away from us.”

None of this would have happened if she had kept away from me.

“Lennon said Tessa was her best friend.”

Mrs. Vaughn makes a small sound between acknowledgment and grief. “They were inseparable.” She looks down at Lennon, then reaches out and pushes a strand of hair from her face.

My chest pinches hard enough that I almost step forward to stop her.

It’s the same gesture. The same gesture he just did, gentle against her cheek. I know it’s Mrs. Vaughn. I know it’s maternal and entirely different, but my nervous system still sits in the memory and cannot quite tell the difference from across the room.

“Lennon is kind,” Mrs. Vaughn says quietly, her hand dropping back to her side. “And good, so good. Always has been. I don’t know what happened to her in the last decade, but it felt like she arrived here needing Tessa as much as Tessa needed her.”

And now look at them.

“I don’t know anyone else,” she continues. “Who would have kept calling when the other person couldn’t answer. Who would have kept sending flowers, kept caring for someone who, in turn, couldn’t show up anymore.” Her voice is steady, but only just. “I mean… who does that?”

Someone who shows up, because showing up is the only tool she’s ever known that reliably works.

“Maybe she did,” I muse, making Mrs. Vaughn turn to look at me. “Show up, I mean. It’s possible Tessa maintained contact through dreams. The emotional tether between them would account for certain things…” I trail off, not sure how she’ll react.

She looks at me for a long moment with an expression I can’t quite read.

“It’s only a theory.”

“Dr. Bennett.” Her voice is careful. “I hired you as a lucid-dreaming therapist because I tried everything else and nothing worked, and because I read my daughter’s journals and know what she was up to before… all of this. Every person I consulted before you looked at me like I was the one who needed help. I’m all ears for theories.”

I exhale slowly. “There are certain… circumstances where two people can share a dreamscape. The emotional bond between them is strong enough that it’s plausible, maybe even without either of them understanding what they were doing.”

“Is that even possible?”

“It is. Another client was able to step into mine a few years back.”

Ridge kept pushing, night after night. We’d meet in my dreamscape, and he’d tear apart whatever rules we thought were holding the structure in place. He was trying to reach 5D. We both were. For Tessa. To see if the second layer held any trace of what had happened to her, any way in.

I’d approached it methodically and in control, which made it impossible for me to let go enough to step into 5D, even for a moment.

Ridge’s response to that approach was, in retrospect, inevitable.