Page 174 of Ex Somnis

She crosses the distance between us and wraps her arms around me, smelling like sage and something warmer underneath it. It’s something I don’t have a word for because it only ever existed in this spot, against this collarbone. I haven’t smelled it in years.

“I’ve been waiting for this,” she says into my hair, and her voice cracks right down the middle. “For so long. You don’t understand. I’ve been waiting.”

“How long?” I ask, my old-soul brain already knowing the math is going to be bad. “How long have you actually been in here?”

“Over a decade.”

Over a decade.

I spent years thinking she was disappearing into a disease, and I could never talk to her again, when actually she was here.

The whole time.

“How did that even happen? Why would you… why would this be where you…”

She tucks a curl behind my ear, the same gesture she’s done since before I can remember, except this time her hand doesn’t shake. “That’s a long story, my little world walker.”

“World walker, so you do think that I have a special aura?”

Sometimes, when she says things in waking life, I don’t know if she means them, means them for me, or if she’s saying out loud what wanders into her mind without it having any meaning. Sometimes they do, sometimes they’re simply words.

“You do.” She smiles, and it reaches all the way up into her eyes. “I’ve always known what you were, Jasper. And I watched you grow into the man you are today. Just from here.”

Something in my chest does something I don’t have a crystal for.

“You watched,” I repeat. “All this time. You saw me in here and you never…”

“I couldn’t reach you how you needed me to.” Her thumb brushes under my eye, catching something I didn’t know had already escaped. “I thought this was the only place I had left to love you from, even if you’d never know.”

I don’t say anything because if I open my mouth right now, it’s going to come out as a sound, not a word.

She’s the mother I built a religion around when I realized I couldn’t have her. Tarot, crystals, and astrology weren’t a phase. They were me reaching, every single day, for whatever piece of her I could still get my hands on while the rest of her sat in a chair in the garden looking at something none of us could see.

And the whole time, she was here. Clear-eyed. Present. Watching me build a dreamscape big enough to hold both of us, and never once getting to tell me she was proud of it.

“I’m so glad,” I finally manage. “That you’re you right now.”

She pulls me back in, and for one entire, uninterrupted minute, I get the thing I have wanted since I was seven years old, standing at the edge of a hospital corridor, not understanding why my mother kept looking through me instead of at me.

I get to be held by someone who knows exactly who’s hugging her back.

“We have to help them,” I say, because the second the hug ends, my brain decides this is the moment to remember why we’ve actually tried so hard to find her.

I need spiritual backup.

I need her help to help them.

“Lenny. Tessa. All of it. I don’t know how, but I know it has to be now. I’ve felt it for weeks, like a frequency I can’t tune into.”

“You don’t have to know how.” She brushes a curl back from my face again. “You have to ask.”

Right. Obviously. Why ask the universe for the answer when I’ve got the actual oracle standing right in front of me, holding my face?

“Okay.” I think about my deck that has somehow vanished, but new cards arrive in my hand as if they’d been there the whole time, and I forgot to notice.

“You know what I’m talking about? Lennon? And her friend Tessa? Who is stuck in her dreams?” I told her the whole story, at least three times, when we were both awake, but all she did was ask me for more tea.

“I remember enough.” She nods. “Pull a card.”