It’s almost noon when Cole wakes me up. “Hey,” he says. “You okay?” My body is stiff and sore from sleeping so long in one position. And my mind is already spinning again.

I want to tell him the truth about what happened last night. How bad it scared me, realizing that he was the voice from my old nightmares.

Look at the stars.

But I don’t, because the circles around his eyes are so dark this morning. And I’m not sure what it means yet.

Cole offers to make me lunch, but I need to take a shower and get cleaned up before I have to head to work with Glory, so he settles for sending me off with some peanut butter crackers and our first kiss in the bright light of day.

We’re standing on his back porch, surrounded by tubs of brightly colored flowers and being watched by an old black-and-white cat. The forgotten leaf blower and the gasoline can. The garden trowel. All the pillows. It’s a beautiful day. Perfect. Crisp and clear and clean. The kind of summer day you never get in Dallas, where the afternoon heat and humidity are enough to melt the skin off your bones. And I want so much to pretend that this is all there is.

This beautiful weather.

This beautiful back porch.

This beautiful, beautiful boy.

But I can’t pretend anymore. Because there’s also waking up knee-deep in the water. Staring into my own eyes on the beach. The thick smell of pigs in the night.

Cole’s pocket full of stars.

He takes my hands. The little blister from the lighter isn’t bad, but I wince when he squeezes the one with the splinter lodged in the palm. He runs his finger over the raised, angry spot where the bit of wood is buried. “It’s nothing,” I tell him.

We should talk about the split-rail fence.

The boots on the farmhouse porch.

But in the daylight, my mind can’t make those things seem real.

Even though my hand is throbbing.

I head back through the woods to Whisper Cove, and I make sure to go around the far side of the farmhouse, because it’s lunchtime, and there are big windows in the cafeteria.

I sneak into the cabin the way I sneak into our apartment in Dallas sometimes when I’ve been out later than I’m supposed to be. Doing things I shouldn’t. But there’s no need for silence. The cabin is empty.

I find a pair of tweezers in Val’s makeup bag, and I dig the splinter out of my palm. I stare at the tiny piece of wood. It’s impossible for it to be there. But it is there. How do I make sense of that?

How far can you ask your mind to bend before it breaks?