Page 27 of Into Ember

“So all those dreams,” she says slowly, working it like a knot, “the stars, the — all of it. You walked into my private, personal dreams, on purpose, for—” she does the math and I watch it hit — “for YEARS—”

“No.”

“No?”

“I thought I was dreaming you.”

Her mouth is open around the next accusation and it just stays there.

“You have to understand what you looked like from my side.” I turn the mug on the table, one slow circle. “I find a woman in a dream under stars that aren’t ours. Fine. Strange stars happen. But then I find her again. That doesn’t happen. Dreams are a shore, remember — you never find the same wave twice. And then again, and again, the same woman, year after year, a woman who talks to someone who isn’t there and laughs at her own jokes before she finishes them and holds her cup with both hands. There is no version of that which is real. So I decided the obvious thing. I decided I’d made you up.” A breath goes out of me, and it takes something old with it. “I thought you were mine. Something my own sleep built to keep me company, out of old stories and wanting. I visited you the way you’d visit — " and the true word arrives before I can pick a smaller one — “the way you’d visit the best part of your life that you knew wasn’t real.”

Nobody says anything.

Elara is looking at me like I’ve handed her a box with something alive in it.

“You were lonely,” I say, because she should have all of it. “In the dreams. You didn’t say it. You didn’t have to. I came because you were lonely, and so was I, and neither of us was real, so there was no harm anywhere in any of it. That was the whole arrangement. Two made-up people, keeping each other company.”

“I—” She stops. Starts again. “I thought YOU came from a book. I filed you under fiction. I told my best friend about you like you were a character.”

“I know.”

“You KNOW?”

“You told me,” I say. “Under the stars. You said if I were real it would ruin everything.”

The sound she makes is not a word. She puts her face in her hands, and from inside them, muffled and furious, “I need you to stop knowing things.”

“Probably fair.”

She surfaces to glare at me, and finds me smiling, which by her face is the wrong response, and I try to fix my mouth and it won’t go. I’ve had a lot of practice being calm. None of it applies. The woman from under the strange stars is glaring at me across my own kitchen table with milk-coffee in both hands. No practice covers that.

“And that last night? Before the crossing, before — " she waves at the world — “this. Were you—”

“Yes.” No point softening it, and I don’t want to. “I didn’t choose it, that time. I fell asleep on your floor and the pull took me through — it does that, with you. And I landed in the middle of everything you hadn’t let us see. I broke your door, Elara. Four strangers…”

I pause looking at Leif.

“Three strangers stayed in your home all night, and you held yourself together in front of every one of us, chin up, jokes ready. Then you finally got to rest and the whole day came off you at once. I needed to make sure you were okay. I wasn’t going to leave you alone with it. So I stayed, and I kept the watch. Gerald helped.”

I see Erik’s smirk. I don’t bite.

“…Gerald.”

“He likes you,” I say. “He’s very protective.”

“My houseplant.”

“Yes.”

“My POTHOS.”

“He shows up in your dreams to protect you, Elara.”

She looks at the ceiling. She looks at the ceiling for a long time. I don’t know what she’s asking it for. I hope it helps. Gunnar has both hands over his mouth and his shoulders are shaking, and Erik refills her mug without being asked.

“I need so much more coffee,” she tells the ceiling.

And then she comes back down, and looks at me, and something in her face has changed while she was up there. The anger’s still in it. But it’s different now. I can’t tell in what way.