When the worst dream showed up, Ronan already had a vibrant catalog of memorable nightmares. What sort did you want? Perhaps the classic monster mash: talons, fangs, shaggy feathers dripping with rain. Public humiliation: in a movie theater trying to hide a runny nose, wiping endless snot on a ratty sleeve. Body horror? Scissors slipping and snipping right into an arm, the bone and tendons sliding free. Mind-fuckery was a perennial choice: entering a familiar room and being struck with a sense of hideous and unshakable wrongness that dug and dug and dug inside him until he awoke shaking and covered in sweat.

He had them all.

“Nightmares are lessons,” his mother Aurora had told him once. “They feel wrong because you know what’s right.”

“Nightmares are bitches,” his father, Niall, had told him once. “Let them smile at you, boy, but do not get their numbers.”

“Nightmares are chemical,” his boyfriend, Adam, had told him once. “Inappropriate adrenaline response to stimulus, possibly related to trauma.”

“Talk dirty to me,” Ronan had replied.

Here’s what nightmares were: real. At least for him. Everyone else woke up with cold sweats and a racing heart, but if Ronan wasn’t careful, he woke up with everything he’d been dreaming of. It used to happen a lot.

And it was starting to happen a lot again.

He was starting to think maybe Before and After weren’t as clearly defined as he’d thought.

This was what happened in the worst dream: Ronan turned on a light and saw a mirror. He was in the mirror. The Ronan in the mirror said to him: Ronan!

He woke with a start in his old bedroom at the Barns. Spine, sweaty. Hands, tingling. Heart, kick-kick-kicking at his ribs. Usual nightmare postgame. The moon wasn’t visible but he felt her looking in, casting shadows behind rigid desk legs and above the stretching wings of the ceiling fan. The house was silent, the rest of the family asleep. He got up and filled a glass with water from the tap in the bathroom. He drank it, filled another one.

Ronan turned on the bathroom light and saw the mirror. He was in the mirror. The Ronan in the mirror said to him: Ronan!

And he twitched awake again, this time for real.

Ordinarily, when one woke, it was obvious the dream was a pretender. But this time, dreaming about dreaming … it had felt so real. The floorboards; the cold, chipped tiles of the bathroom; the sputter of the tap.

This time, when he got up for that glass of water, the real glass, the waking glass, he was sure to marvel his fingertips over everything he passed, reminding himself of how specific waking reality was. The bumpy plaster walls. The rubbed-smooth curve of the chair-rail molding. The puff of air from behind Matthew’s door as he pushed it open to see his younger brother sleeping.

You’re awake. You’re awake.