Ever since their divorce, Brian Michaels had lived in fear that Melissa would one day reveal their secret. He had kept his family and friends and his new wife, Azure, in the dark about what had happened eighteen years earlier. As far as he was concerned, that chapter of their lives had been torn out and tossed away. And he wanted things to stay that way. There was only one problem—actually, two.

Melissa was the first problem. And then there was the baby. The infant who was now old enough to be drafted.

Brian liked to think that everything that had happened when he was a teenager was way back in the past. It was so far in the rearview that it could never affect the present. But there were times when he thought of mistakes he had made and ways he had treated others. In those moments a mix of emotions surfaced that he didn’t want but couldn’t deny.

The fear of the secret being exposed didn’t strike him every hour of every day. It would hit at times out of the blue—at work or pushing his daughter on the swing or having a conversation with Azure. He would feel a pang of guilt that he’d never told her and imagine the fallout if she heard it from someone else. Still, he held back, believing that he could control news of the past by simply dismissing it.

He had a dream that kept returning, something unbidden from his subconscious, he guessed. He was in a big room with fancy tables filled with food, people holding fine china and drinking from tall crystal flutes. Everyone was dressed in tuxedos and formal gowns, like they’d just walked a red carpet. Everyone had perfect hair and bright smiles. And across the room he caught a reflection in a floor-length mirror that ran the entire wall. One person stood out amid all the finely dressed people. A tall man with mussed hair. When others moved, he noticed the man was only wearing underwear.

And the man in the mirror was him.

Frantically, he looked for a door but there was none. And the more frantic he became, the more people in the room backed away, whispering and tittering, and suddenly he was in the middle, alone, and the music stopped and people stared. Exposed and ashamed, he could do nothing but try to cover himself.

He awoke from that dream on many nights in a panic so great that he would roll out of bed and sit on the edge, rubbing his eyes and shaking. He wondered if others had that same kind of dream and what it meant. Did dreams mean anything?