My movements feel disjointed, dreamlike. I push the door closed. Reach up to the lock—eerily familiar in my fingers—and engage it. I leave my hand on it for a long moment, but the second I take it away and turn my back, I’m no longer sure enough that I really did lock it.

Come on. I can do this. I’ve done this, much more than this, before. I’m recovered. I’m better.

Even I can’t believe myself anymore.

A flick of motion from behind the ugly curtains catches my eye. Something is outside the house. I check the lock again—just one more time—and then drop the key back into my left pocket. Left, for locked.

I step toward the window. The beige carpet muffles my footfalls. I pass the lumpy chocolate-brown monstrosity of a couch, the only piece of furniture that isn’t stained or tattered.

“I love it,” I’d said when the furniture company dropped the couch off on our porch.

Ty squinted. He walked around it, shook his head, and sat on it. “This,” he pronounced, “is both the ugliest and the most comfortable piece of furniture my ass has ever had the pleasure to grace.”

“I told you!” I folded my arms smugly. This was the first purchase I’d ever made with my own money, earned from my very first job as a grocery store bagger. The furniture was on clearance and I’d had to spend my whole hoard of savings—my entire first month of pay-checks—to buy it and the accompanying coffee table, but the pleased surprise in Ty’s eyes was worth it.

He’d been providing everything for me since Mom left the year before. And now I’d finally provided for us too—something small, yes, but permanent.

I avert my eyes from the couch. It’s just a memory.

The flicker of motion behind the curtains catches my eye again. I slow as I approach it. Carefully, with one finger, I move the curtain half an inch to the side.

The window—isn’t a window. It’s a screen. There’s a field of stars, and something silver and massive. I open the curtains wider so I can see. One of my fingers brushes the screen.

The house disappears. A memory—not mine—reaches out and clamps around my mind.

I was created for first contact, it whispers. The house around me fades away. Something brilliant—nebula, the memory hums—blooms around me in the open vastness of space.

I jerk my hand away from the screen with a sharp exhale. The nebula vanishes. I look around. Window, couch, table, potted plant. Nothing unusual. Nothing terrifying. But the vertigo of being suspended above a nebula in open space is still clawing at my mind, and I have to put out a hand to support myself against the wall.

The memory waits patiently for me to get my bearings.