Prologue #2
The yard filled with radios, uniforms, and controlled movement. It all meant nothing, just as it had before. Our world had already ended.
I turned to see an ambulance, knowing in my gut I had to reach it, to get inside before they loaded Olive’s body into the back. I had to change the ending. From that moment on, only one thought possessed my mind: If I could reach the ambulance, I could change it.
Finally, I was feet away from the open double doors of the ambulance. “Don’t… put her… in there…” I called to them. “Don’t take her away!”
The world blinked. The yard vanished. No house, no porch, no family, no ambulance. Only the dim light of dusk and the smell of death thick in the air.
Suddenly, I was standing alone in a dark room that felt less like a space and more like a sealed container.
The air was cold and heavy, stale in a way that reminded me of a freshly turned grave.
My lungs strained against it, working harder with every breath, and only then did I understand what was happening.
The air wasn’t circulating. It was slipping away.
Panic welled up within me. I needed to get out. I needed to get back to the yard, to the ambulance, to Olive.
The thought landed with absolute certainty. She still had time. All seemed lost at first glance, but I knew it the same way I knew my own name. With that knowledge came another, quieter truth: If Olive died, I was to blame.
Still, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t reach any of them. I couldn’t save them. I was alone in a narrow, pitch-black vault, lungs burning as I fought for air that wasn’t there.
My eyes popped open, and my body jerked upright as if dragged from deep water. My chest heaved, my heart slamming so violently it hurt. Cold sweat soaked my skin, sheets twisted around my legs, throat raw from a scream I couldn’t remember making.
“Thomas?” Liis said, rising with me.
I sucked in a breath, stopping just short of screaming. Stella was asleep down the hall, and after six months of her terrible twos, I knew better than to wake her.
“You’re okay,” Liis said, rubbing my back. “It was just a dream. We’re safe at home.”
I pressed my palms to my face and slowed my breathing the way I’d been trained to do, in through the nose, out through the mouth, slow and controlled.
My body obeyed, but the images did not, and that made rage well up inside me.
Sharp, irrational anger that had me powerless in a place I was supposed to control—my own mind.
Olive’s vacant stare had been carved into my mind. Trenton’s voice splintered into raw, panicked shouts. I could still see the exact second everything unraveled, and the useless certainty that I had done nothing that mattered.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat there, shoulders bowed, sweat rolling down my spine.
“At your dad’s again?” Liis asked, her hand still on my back. “The day of the shooting?”
I nodded, rubbing my face with my hands.
“You’re soaked,” she said, worry creeping into her voice. “The sheets are soaked. Maybe… maybe you should talk to someone again.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You know I can’t. There’s no point if I can’t tell the whole story.”
She sighed, crawled across the bed behind me, and settled onto her knees.
Her arms slid around my waist as she pressed her cheek to my back.
“It’s been over two years. The nightmares come every time we come back from a visit to Eakins or Colorado.
We can find a psychologist within the Bureau with clearance—”
“No.” I stood, rubbing the back of my neck. “We can’t risk it.”
She didn’t argue. She folded her hands in her lap, eyes fixed on the wall, offering a small nod. “Then talk to me. Same dream?”
“The same framework,” I said. “Different details. Val was there this time.”
“Tell me,” she prodded.
I told her what had stayed with me; the sun behaving like a faulty signal, the family arranged on the porch as if someone had staged them.
I described the children circling Dad, Olive suddenly small again, and the way everything felt a half-step out of alignment: the Lincoln the wrong color, Oliver laughing on the quilt even though he wouldn’t be born for nearly another year after the shooting.
Beneath all of it sat that terrible certainty, the knowledge that something was off and that if I could keep Olive out of the ambulance, I could change what happened.
“The grass turned into vines?” she asked, thinking through what I’d told her.
“And wrapped around my legs,” I said. “And you just stood there. Watching. You didn’t even try to get to Stella.”
She gave a small hum, considering my words. “Well, that alone should’ve tipped you off you were in an alternate reality.”
“That’s the thing… I did know, and still, I had this urgent feeling to change things.”
Saying it out loud made me feel ridiculous. Liis seemed to agree. She simply leaned into the problem the way she always did—calm, methodical, and intent on understanding every angle.
“Start with what felt real,” she said. “Not what looked strange but what your body reacted to.”
I rubbed the back of my neck before answering. “I remember feeling the heat. I pulled my collar away from my neck and it was damp. The engine. My pulse spiked just hearing it, before I ever saw it.”
She nodded slowly, as if filing that away.
“Your subconscious still registers threat before imagery. That tracks. The weird sunlight didn’t scare you, but a car approaching did.
” Her gaze drifted for a beat, then came back to me.
“The vines. Do you think they were trying to stop you, or protect you?”
I exhaled through my nose. “Stop me. I couldn’t move.”
“That’s an important point to acknowledge.
You weren’t paralyzed by fear, you were physically restrained.
The wrong color Lincoln, Oliver being there, Olive being younger.
Those aren’t random errors. They’re signals that your brain knows are multiple truths.
You’re not confused, you’re aware.” Her brow creased faintly.
“But awareness doesn’t help you. You still can’t change the decision we made.
And then you focused on the ambulance. Not the shooter, not your father, or even Olive, but to the one variable you believe you can control.
Your subconscious is still trying to solve a problem you didn’t create, process guilt you couldn’t avoid.
It all tracks, Thomas. When you’re under stress, your subconscious grabs the most emotionally charged template it has and applies it to your current circumstances, even when the situations aren’t identical. ”
I sighed. That was oddly a relief. “Maybe not identical… but all related.”
She stood. “Take a shower. I’ll strip the bed and put on fresh sheets, and you can tell Blinky Sun and The Vines to go to hell.”
I frowned. “That sounds like a band that both peaked and crashed in the summer of 1997.”