Page 189 of In Somnis

“Wait.” I turn to face her. “You can hear what people say to you? In waking life?”

“Sometimes.” She shrugs. “It depends.”

“Tessa, that means⁠—”

“It’s sacred, in a way.” She cuts me off. “And private. Your comfort zone. Because it has power over you, which means it gives you power too. If you want to be lucid, fall asleep thinking of your place, and it’ll bring you there… and if you know someone else’s place, you can fall asleep thinking about that instead, and you’ll find yourself in their dreamscape.”

I watch her profile and decide to let the Derek topic go in favor of this one. “Does the other person have to know you’re coming?”

“No, but it helps.” She smiles. “Connection helps more than knowledge most of the time. Although, you could never enter a dreamscape of someone who doesn’t want you there. You can think of me, or this beach, when you’re falling asleep. We have enough between us that it’ll work.” She squeezes my arm. “Or you could just stay.”

“Tessa.”

“I know, I know.” She says it lightly, but something underneath it isn’t light at all. “I’m just saying. The option exists.”

She keeps her eyes on the water.

“Your space says a lot about you,” she continues before I can push on it. “Your kitchen is clear. Warmth, nourishment, creativity, home. It’s so completely you, it’s almost funny.” She looks at the doors around us. “Mine is… this. Doors that lead to different dreamscapes, different worlds, different versions of things. My subconscious wants to explore. It always did. I think I was made to live here.”

I let that sink in as we walk in silence until the doors thin out gradually, and there’s only one left ahead of us. It’s bigger than the others. Not taller, exactly, but weightier, with dark wood worn smooth, the grain of it visible in long, flowing lines.

“It also has…” Tessa says as we come to stand in front of it, “… a door to elsewhere, which tells you a lot about me and where I should end up, I guess.”

My pulse ticks up. “5D?”

“Whatever you want to call it.”

The door swings inward, and behind it is a kitchen.

My kitchen.

Not the one in my dreams, my base, but the one from my childhood home in Boston, the one with the yellow walls, the chipped tile above the stove, and the window over the sink that looked out into the neighbor’s yard. The one that smelled like lemon cake and coffee and had the warmth of a house that was lived in by people who loved each other.

My mother is standing at the stove.

She’s laughing, her head tipped back, one hand pressed to her chest like she always laughed when something really got her, and beside her is a man I’ve never seen before, but there’s familiarity in the line of him that I can’t place. They’re both so real and so completely there that the air goes out of me entirely.

“Mom,” I whisper.

I haven’t said that out loud in weeks.

They both turn.

“Lenny.” She smiles at me, and the pull is immediate, gravity but warmer, like something reaching into my heart and tugging. It’s not grief, it’s relief. The sick and very seductive relief of seeing love offered in a form that doesn’t ask anything hard of me except surrender.

I take one step forward without deciding to, drawn toward the threshold, toward the yellow walls, the smell of lemon cake, and her face.

Her face, how it looked before she got sick.

I freeze mid-step.

“Lenny,” Tessa whispers softly as she steps past me and over the threshold. “We’re all here. Everyone you love.” She gestures somewhere behind my mother, and I follow her hand and see him, my dad, in the hallway, leaning in the doorway like he always did, and I make a sound I can’t describe. “We miss you. You can visit, sure, but you can’t stay. Not unless… let go, Lenny. Let go and stay with us.”

Tears blur everything.

My mother holds out her hand while the man beside her puts his palm on her shoulder as if he belongs there.

“Yeah, Lenny.” His green gaze holds mine. “You’re welcome here.”