Chapter 4
Gray
The nightmare hits like ice water in my veins.
I'm small again—so small my feet don't touch the floor when I sit on the bed. My hands shake as I clutch something soft and worn, its fur matted from too many tears. The air tastes like burnt toast and cigarettes, acrid and wrong, making my stomach twist.
"You're just going to leave?!" The voice explodes through thin walls, making me flinch. "After everything I've done for you?"
I know that voice. Kevin. Bree's father. But I shouldn't be hearing it like this—shouldn't be here like this.
"I can't do this anymore, Kevin." The woman's voice wavers between sharp and broken, and something in my chest cracks at the sound. "I've tried. God, I've tried. But I'm done."
Claire. Bree's mother.
I press my hands over my ears, but the voices seep through anyway, poison through cracks. My heart pounds against my ribs as I squeeze my eyes shut, colors bursting behind my lids.
"You're not thinking about Bree." Kevin's voice turns mean—the way it always did right before something broke. "What kind of mother just walks out on her kid?"
"Everything I do is for her!" Claire's voice cracks like glass. "You don't understand. You never did."
I pull the bear tighter, clutching it to my chest. My fingers curl into its fur—so tight I feel threads pop.
She wouldn’t leave me. She wouldn’t.
Wait.
She wouldn’t leave me?
The front door slams, shaking the walls. Everything goes quiet.
"Mom?"
The word slips from my lips.
But it’s not mine.
It’s hers.
Small. Trembling. So full of hope it hurts.
"Mommy?"
I slide off the bed, my socks silent on worn carpet. The hallway light cuts across the room, just enough to see the tear in the bear's ear. I fixate on it, blinking hard against the sting in my eyes.
Kevin's voice explodes again. "Damn it, Claire!" Something crashes, and I jump. "You're gonna regret this!"
I run to the window, pressing my hands against cold glass. Below, a figure cuts through the darkness, moving so fast she's almost running. Long dark hair streams behind her like a flag of surrender.
"Mom!" I bang on the window, but she doesn't look back. "Mom, please!"
She reaches the corner where the streetlight flickers—that broken one that never works right.
For a second, she pauses.
And I think—I hope—she's going to turn around.
But then...
A faint glow halos her figure. Soft, almost like moonlight. Just for a breath.
I blink.
And she steps into the shadows.
The night swallows her whole.
One moment she's there, and the next... nothing.
I shrink back from the window, clutching the bear to my chest, and slide to the floor. My knees hit the carpet as the first sob breaks free—
I wake up gasping.
My chest heaves like I've been drowning, cold sweat making my shirt stick to my skin. The room is too quiet, too dark, and for a moment I can't remember where I am. The taste of cigarettes lingers in my mouth, and I swear I can still smell burnt toast.
I sit up slowly, running a hand through my hair. My fingers shake.
What the hell was that?
The nightmare clings to me like smoke, every detail sharp and vivid. The texture of the bear's fur. The exact words of the fight. The way the light flickered around Claire before she disappeared.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed, my bare feet hitting the cold floor. The mist hovers at the edges of the room, thicker than usual, watching. Waiting.
I know that night.
Bree told us her mom left when she was little. But she never told us how. Never described the fight, or watching from the window, or...
The bear.
She never mentioned a bear.
My chest tightens.
It wasn’t just a dream.
It felt like a memory.
And I don’t know how that’s possible.
My stomach drops as the implications hit me. I shouldn't know about the bear. I shouldn't know the exact words Kevin and Claire said to each other. I shouldn't know what it felt like to be six years old, clutching a stuffed animal while your world falls apart.
But I do.
I remember the night it happened—hearing something through our shared wall. Shouting. A door slamming. I was probably eight or nine, and I looked out my own window when I heard the commotion. I saw someone walking away under the streetlight, but I didn't think much of it at the time.
I never told Bree I saw her mother leave.
And she never told me she watched it happen.
So how do I know?
The mist swirls closer, and I feel something tug at my chest—like a thread pulling tight. The sensation is foreign but familiar, like déjà vu made physical.
I need air. I need space. I need to think.
The kitchen is dark when I walk downstairs, but I'm not surprised to find I'm not alone. Rhett leans against the counter, his broad frame silhouetted in the faint light from the window. He doesn't look surprised to see me either.
We stare at each other for a long moment.
"You felt it too," he says quietly. It's not a question.
I don't answer right away. Can't. Because admitting it makes it real, and I'm not ready for this to be real.
"It wasn't a dream," I say finally.
"No." Rhett's voice is rough, like he's been awake for hours. "I don't think it was."
Footsteps on the stairs draw our attention. Wes appears in the doorway, his dark hair sticking up at odd angles, eyes bloodshot. He doesn't speak, just goes straight to the cabinet and pulls out a box of cereal. Starts eating it dry, straight from the box.
None of us comment on how his hands shake slightly.
"The bear," I say, testing the words. "She had a stuffed bear. Brown, with a torn ear."
Rhett nods slowly. "She called it Bear. Real creative, our Bree."
"She used to bring it to sleepovers," Wes adds, his voice quiet. "Until she got too old and started leaving it at home."
We all knew about the bear.
But we shouldn’t know how it felt in our hands that night.
Shouldn’t know the comfort of pressing our face into its worn fur—while our world shattered around us
"This is impossible," I whisper.
"Yeah," Rhett agrees. "But here we are."
The mist drifts between us, silent and knowing. And I wonder what any of this means now. I think about Bree upstairs, probably asleep in that big bed we built for her. Does she know what's happening? Can she feel us the way we felt her?
"What happened when she touched that crown?" Wes asks, echoing my thoughts.
"I don't know." I lean against the wall, trying to process the implications. "But something bled through. Her memory became... ours."
"Just hers?" Rhett's voice carries an edge of something I can't identify. "Or all of them?"
The thought sends a chill down my spine. Bree has decades of memories I've never seen. Trauma I've only glimpsed the edges of. If they start bleeding through like this one did...
"We need to tell her," Wes says.
"Tell her what?" I shake my head. "That we're suddenly experiencing her childhood trauma? That we felt her terror and abandonment like it was our own?" I run a hand through my hair. "She'll think we're insane."
"We might be," Rhett mutters.
But we're not. I know we're not. The memory was too vivid, too specific, too real. I can still taste the fear in my mouth, still feel the way my hands… No. Her small hands trembled as she clutched that bear.
The worst part isn't the impossibility of it.
The worst part is knowing she's been carrying that night—that level of pain and abandonment—alone all these years. While I lived right next door, hearing sounds through the wall but never saying anything because I was too afraid. I didn't know what true fear was.
"She was so small," I whisper.
"She's still small," Wes says, his voice rough with something that might be guilt. "Still carrying all of it."
We fall into silence again, each lost in our own thoughts. The mist continues to drift between us, and I wonder what all of this really means.
The sky outside the window is starting to lighten, painting everything in shades of gray.
Soon Bree will wake up, and we’ll have to pretend.
Pretend we don’t know things no one else should.
We'll have to act normal while carrying pieces of her past in our chests like shrapnel.
I think about the way she looked at us yesterday—confused, vulnerable. Finally trusting us with something that she would insist on handling herself. Letting us help her make sense of what happened. How can we do that when we don't understand it ourselves?
"What if this is just the beginning?" I ask, the words slipping out before I can stop them.
Neither of them answers. Because we're all thinking the same thing.
If one memory can bleed through this easily, what else is waiting in the dark corners of her mind?
And what happens when she realizes we're not just protecting her anymore—we understand, because we've lived it too.
The mist pulses once, like a heartbeat, and I know with bone-deep certainty that everything changed the moment she touched that crown. Not just for her.
For all of us.