Page 118 of In Somnis

This is the one thing I can actually talk about. Not Lennon, the dreamscape, or the deal we made. This at least sounds like a normal problem. Professional. A problem that has a solution in theory, even if I don’t currently have one.

“I have nothing to give him,” I say. “The publisher wants something to read. A chapter, a scene, a napkin with three words on it.”

“And you don⁠—”

“I have nothing.” I shift the takeout bag on my lap. The lemon chicken is going cold. That’s the most concrete problem I have right now, and even that I can’t fix. “I’m past the deadline. Considerably.”

The thing Miller doesn’t understand, and I can’t explain to him without sounding insane, is that the writing and the dreams are the same thing. Always have been.

My first horror book hit the bestseller list. Miller acted as though he’d predicted it, which he hadn’t, and I acted like I wasn’t shocked, which I was. The second did better. The third went into four printings, got optioned, and had Miller leaving me voicemails at hours that should be illegal. By the fourth, we weren’t talking about whether it would sell anymore. We were talking about how much, and to whom, and in how many languages, and that was the book that got me the contract we’d spent years building toward.

I wrote all of them the same way. Go under. Build the thing. Walk around inside it until I understood what made it true rather than just dark, what made the fear recognizable rather than just loud. Come back. Put it on paper. No outline, no notes, nothing Miller would recognize as a process if he saw it. Just the dreamscape and whatever I could bring back from it.

It was getting better every time. I knew what I was doing in a way I hadn’t after the first one, or the second. By the fourth, I could feel what I was capable of, could see exactly where the next one was supposed to go.

And then my subconscious has gotten stuck in the forest, and I’ve been sitting at a desk with nothing ever since.

I can’t tell him any of that. So instead, I don’t answer his calls.

Derek exhales. I can hear him reorganizing his approach, the quiet mental shuffle of a man who has been doing this long enough to know which angle works on me, which is none of them, but he keeps trying anyway.

“Maybe we should do this more often,” he says. “Get you out. Different air, new places, something to work⁠—”

“No.”

“Ridge—”

“It’s not that,” I say flatly, because it isn’t. “Outside isn’t the problem.”

The problem is inside.

The problem is that the place where I do my best work has been locked out of reach for months. The first time the lock came loose, it was a blonde woman with citrus nails who did it, and I have no idea what to do with that information except keep showing up, hoping she doesn’t notice how much I need it.

Derek doesn’t push, but his jaw shifts as we pass the Vaughn mansion at the end of the street. Neither of us looks at it directly, but his eyes track it the same way they always do—a split-second pull, like a compass needle that can’t help itself—then he’s looking at the road again, and his hands are easy on the wheel, as if nothing happened.

Yeah. We both notice things about each other.

Two months ago, he showed up at my door with a six-pack, wanting to cheer me up. Since I don’t drink, he did it alone, slowly and thoroughly, until somewhere around the fourth beer, he stopped pretending he’d come over for my benefit.

He told me he still loved her, that he never stopped.

Not that he needed to tell me. I know.

But one thing he definitely doesn’t know is that Paul and I tried.

We tried fucking hard.

For months, Paul and I built theory after theory, chasing every half-credible thing we could find about what happens when someone goes so deep into their subconscious that they don’t come back. We did everything we could think of to bring back the woman Derek quietly fell apart over for more than a decade. But even with the trauma of what happened, he’s still the most infuriatingly functional person I’ve ever met, smiling easily and taking care of his daughter.

I glance over my shoulder at Melanie, whose blinks are getting slower and longer, her rock clutched in her fist.

She is probably his why. Why he pulled himself up and moved on.

But I haven’t, even if I stopped trying after Paul and I stopped talking. The guilt of that has been sitting in my chest like something wedged under a door that won’t close properly.

Then there’s Lennon.

She might be the key we needed all along.