Page 175 of Ex Somnis

She takes the deck from me, shuffles it twice, then cuts the deck without looking and offers it to me.

I pull a card, and she takes it from me, turning it over.

The Lovers.

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Don’t look at it as lovers, look at it as twins,” she murmurs, as something in her expression goes very far away, very fast. “Oh.”

“Oh, what? Oh, good or oh, no?”

“Mirrors.” She’s not really talking to me anymore. She’s talking to the card, or through it, or past it to wherever this stuff actually comes from. “He won’t know which reflection is real if there’s more than one of it.”

She’s lost me.

“Mom. English. Please.”

She looks back up at me, her focus snapping back into place. “Elsewhere is a place you can visit briefly. A night, maybe less, before it pulls too hard and you have to choose to stay or leave. You can’t get stuck in elsewhere if you don’t untether.”

“Okay.” I knew that. “And what does that⁠—”

“They all have to step into elsewhere. As her.”

“As Tessa?” I stare at her. “What, dressed as her? Mom, that feels like a layer of weird even for us.”

“Not dressed.” Her mouth twitches, almost a smile. “As her. The way dreams let you be someone else. They’d all be Tessa to him. All of them, at once, standing in front of him, and he would have to be able to know which one was real. To choose correctly.”

“You want to trick him.”

“I want to test him.”

“That’s not the same.”

“It’s exactly the same, my little world wanderer. I simply phrased it nicer.”

I actually laugh. I didn’t know my mom could be funny, but then it dies out when she looks over my shoulder, and her eyes lose focus. It scares the hell out of me, because that’s the waking face, the face she wears at the inn when Mabel has to repeat a question twice.

“Mom?”

She blinks hard, refocuses on me with visible effort, like she’s hauling herself back up a slope. “I’m here. I’m sorry. Even in here, I don’t always get everything that happens when I’m awake. There are whole days I can’t account for. It’s like watching you through frosted glass sometimes, even from inside your head. It’s eating the parts of me that know things, and that’s the worst part. Not that I’m losing my mind. That I’m losing the me that would know how to fix it.”

Fuck. I didn’t come in here to make her relive her disappearing act.

“Hey.” I take her hands. “We don’t have to.”

“We do.” She squeezes back, hard enough that I feel it.

“So, we get him to choose. Out of all of them standing there as her. But why?”

“He has to prove it.”

“Prove what?

“Prove he actually knows the real one, the actual woman, not the version he built in his head. That is the stipulation. They will have to tell him that if he wants her to agree to staying, he has to prove that he loves her by choosing the right Tessa.”

“Okay, so he chooses…”

“And he has to release every promise that has ever been made to him.”