CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Notes from the dark:
The world is a shadow; the mind holds the light.
I dreamed of dying.
It wasn’t a loud and bloody death. There were no sirens in the air. Mine was quieter. Slower. Like slipping beneath a gentle tide, where the water was warm and the darkness was still.
In the dream, I was standing in a field of black butterflies. Their wings pulsed like heartbeats; each one was soaked in crimson. They didn’t flutter—they hovered. Suspended in grief. Their bodies were delicate, but their presence was heavy.
I tried to walk through them, but they clung to me. Their wings brushed my skin like whispers and apologies.
Like a warning.
I didn’t cry. I couldn’t. My body was hollowed out, emptied of everything but ache. It stayed there, humming under everything, until I could no longer remember what silence felt like.
There was a boy in my dream.
Not Tristan.
Not Rowe.
Just a boy with no face, standing at the edge of the field. He held a jar of fireflies, and they blinked like dying stars. He didn’t speak. Even without a face, I knew he was watching me, like he was waiting for me to choose.
To stay.
Or to vanish.
Which one, Daisy?
I wanted to ask him what the fireflies meant. If they were memories. If they were pieces of me that I’d lost. But my voice was gone. Swallowed by the butterflies. By the blood. By the grief wrapped around my throat like a coarse noose.
I fell to my knees.
The butterflies landed on my shoulders, my back, my head. They buried me in silence. And in that silence, I felt something break.
It was a soft snap, like a thread pulled too tight.
I woke up gasping.
The motel room was still. Tristan was asleep beside me, his breathing slow and steady.
I watched his chest rise and fall, and I wondered if he ever had dreams of dying.
Did he dream of black rooms or grief or butterflies and blood?
Had his father’s death made him edge toward the darkest parts of himself?
I didn’t want to wake him. I just wanted to remember the dream. To hold it in my hands and study it. To ask it what it wanted from me.
Because I knew it wasn’t just a dream.
It was a warning.
Or maybe a promise.
The past doesn’t die quietly.
It dreams.
And sometimes, it dreams of us.