Page 197 of In Somnis

Nora is already in the doorway when I turn to look again, and she reads the room quickly, without fuss, coming to stand on the other side of the chair.

“Her breathing, it⁠—”

“I know,” she cuts me off, eyes not leaving her daughter’s face. We watch her breathing for a moment. It steadies, gradually, the rhythm finding its way back closer to normal, and I feel the tension in my shoulders ease by a fraction.

“This is the third time this week. The breathing.” Nora still keeps her eyes on Tessa. “Dr. Hargreaves mentioned it at the last review. She said if it continues…” She stops, smoothing the blanket over Tessa’s lap with one hand. “She wants to talk about next steps.”

“What kind of next steps?”

“Can we…” She looks at the door.

“Of course.”

I grab my notebook and bag and follow her out into the hallway, before she pulls the door to Tessa’s room almost closed behind us.

“They want to put her on oxygen support.” Her voice is lower out here. “If her breathing keeps deteriorating, they want to put her under. A clinical coma in a hospital setting.” She looks at the closed door rather than at me. “They say they can’t provide what she’d need here, even with all the medical staff.”

“And your concerns about that?”

She looks at me then, and it’s the first time in over six years I’ve seen Nora Vaughn look uncertain.

“If I move her.” Her voice drops further. “If I put her in a hospital, and they manage her breathing and put her under, keep her under…” She stops. Presses her lips together. “They don’t know what that does. To wherever she is. They don’t know if she’d⁠—”

“If she’d come back,” I say quietly.

“If she’d survive it. They don’t know. And I can’t—” Her voice breaks a little. “I can’t lose her completely. Not yet. Not when she’s still…” She glances back at the door. “She is still here. I know she is.”

I don’t reach for the clinical framing. I stand there and let it be true, because it is true, and sometimes that’s the only thing that helps.

Nora’s green eyes are glassy when she finally looks back at me.

“Excuse me.” She straightens, and her heels are steady on the hardwood as she moves down the hallway. “I’ll call Dr. Hargreaves. Let her know about this morning so she can come and check.”

“I’ll see myself out,” I say to her retreating figure, but I don’t think she hears me.

I go downstairs, one hand trailing the banister, the house quiet around me, but when I reach for the front door handle, I hear a familiar voice on the outside.

“… Try this first, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll teach you lucid dreaming.”

Her voice.

Slightly breathless in the way she gets when she’s moving and talking at the same time, and what she just said.

Lucid dreaming.

Like she knows what the words mean, and I stand there with my hand on the door handle, trying to process the fact that Lennon Maes is on the other side of this door, apparently knowing about Lucid dreaming.

I check my watch.

8:04 a.m.

I check it again.

Waking life.

The handle turns from the outside, and the door swings inward, almost hitting me in the face before I manage to step back. Lennon is pulling someone behind her, her hand wrapped around a shirt sleeve, and the someone is Derek Wells.

What in the world?