“Look, I’m not trying to tell you it’s easy,” Jordan said. “To deal with this, with being a dream. I just mean—I just mean, if you’re thinking, This is the magic thing that explains why everything’s weird and wrong and why it’s so hard to figure where I fit, well, it doesn’t solve things like that. We’re not different in ways that matter. Your boy Declan just pretends it matters so he doesn’t have to think too hard about his mum and how he feels about that, and because he’s afraid that if you’re a real person, you’ll grow up and leave him and then he won’t have a family and he won’t know who he is. There. There’s your two-dollar therapy session, I don’t know if it’s for you or for him but maybe you can split the cost.”

“You’re pretty cool,” Matthew said.

“Aw, yeah I am.” She lightly high-fived him again. “So what do you think of my painting?”

Matthew pointed to a long orange breast on the closest canvas. “I think it’s better than that one.”

Jordan laughed gleefully. “Hey, I see a smile on that face. You happier, then?”

Matthew thought about it. “Yeah.”

It was better than happiness, actually. For the first time since he’d found out he was a dream, he felt like himself again.

Chapter 27

Hennessy remembered sitting for Jordan in White.

Jay had spent the morning crying at a mirror on the second floor of their London row house, and Hennessy had spent the morning watching her through the cracked door. She’d drawn the shape of her mother into the shag rug she sat on and wiped it out again and again, trying to perfect the slope of her shoulders, the bend of her neck. It was difficult to tell if Jay had been truly crying or if she were crying for reference. She was taking photos of it with her phone in the mirror and then rapidly typing something into it.

After a few hours of this, Jay emerged without warning, and although Hennessy scrambled away to prevent discovery, her mother found her wrapped in the linen curtain at the end of the hall.

“Little ghost,” she said to Hennessy. “Let’s go to the studio.”

Hennessy was rarely allowed into the studio and certainly never invited, so it was with awe she accepted her mother’s hand and rode the elevator to the third-floor studio.