A phone rang in the distance, pulling her attention away from the sky. She did not want to look away, fearing if she did, she would lose it.

The phone kept ringing.

The sound sliced across the sky, erasing the clouds, the plane, and the birds, and washed out the blues until it was a dingy black.

Jordan stared into the darkness, her heart racing, her mind clawing back the memory of color and sunshine. She sat up, tears streaming down her face. She shifted her body to the nightstand and fumbled for the light switch. A click told her it was on, and for a brief second she thought she might need a new light bulb.

And then she remembered. She was living the nightmare, and it was not going to fade like her now-imaginary blue sky.

Would she ever switch this lamp on again? As she groped for the phone, she knocked over a bottle of sleeping pills she had refused because she feared if she took one, she would never stop.

As her fingers brushed the smooth surface of her phone, it stopped ringing. “Shit.”

She raised the display to her face, trying to shift the screen so she could make out who had called. But the haze and darkness were too thick.

The voice activation had become so annoying to Jordan she had asked Avery to turn it off before she went to bed. Now, her once-valuable phone was little more than a paperweight.

Jordan swung her legs over the side of her bed. Her feet touched the blue area rug that extended roughly a foot beyond her bed. Rising, phone in hand, she moved slowly, her hands outstretched. Sally had told her to use the white cane, but she could not remember where she had set it down. If she did not get more organized or develop a sharper memory, her injury was going to swallow her whole.

The carpet shifted to the cool tile, and she guessed she had another five feet to walk to reach the door. The house was quiet, the silence broken only by the shuffle of her feet and the ticktock of the clock.

Her phone dinged with a voicemail, drawing her attention back to the screen as if she could somehow magically see it now. Middle-of-the-night calls generally were attached to a case, and in her situation a homicide. The word had spread about her disability, but she had scattered her business cards around the city during so many investigations that she knew there were plenty of people unaware of her situation.

She shuffled her feet across the great room that separated her room from Avery’s. Crossing with confidence, she believed her many years in this room had armed her with enough familiarity to pass safely.

Jordan’s knee slammed into a coffee table.