I wake with a lurch, wake with Yin’s voice right in my ear. My heart beats a sickening pitter-patter and her voice keeps reverberating in my head.

My sheets are tangled, I’m sticky with sweat. I can tell from the grey light seeping around the edges of my bedroom curtains that I’ve woken way too early. Liv and Naomi dropped me off late last night, after post-exhibition pizza and gelato, and I stayed up even later watching videos in bed.

You’re awake, I tell myself, you’re awake in your room and it’s now and not then and Yin is not whispering in your ear and she’s not even here anymore. So why did her voice sound so real?

I throw off my doona and sit up, hoping to shock myself into wakefulness, into reality. You can make up your mind what to feel but then your traitorous brain will lift the gate and let the monsters in while you sleep.

I dig my nails into my arm until I am back in my body, back with it.

I can’t have dreams like this, I can’t.

I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but when I pad out to the landing with my hair mussed up, still in my disgusting sweaty pyjamas, desperate for juice and toast and coffee and daylight and normalness, I can hear Mum’s voice and something about it is so instantly secretive that I know to creep.

I skip the squeaky stairs, I’m silent as a mouse as I crouch at the bottom, Mum only metres away in the kitchen. I sit my butt down.

‘…working from home today,’ she says.

Her soft tone means it’s a personal call; she has an entirely different voice that she uses for work.

‘I’m a little worried about her…keep an eye on things… uh huh, uh huh…’

I wish for a rubbery extendable neck that could wrap around the corner like a periscope. Worried about who? Me? Liv? Grandma?

‘Have you heard much from Allison?’

Aha. She’s talking to Ally’s mum.

‘I still remember my first time in Italy,’ Mum says. ‘The food. The men!’

I roll my eyes. Get a grip, horny old lady.

‘I think it’s been hard for her, with all her friends out of town. We were supposed to go down to the beach house, but work took over…’

I grip the carpet beneath me. She’s talking about me, behind my back, to Ally’s mum.

‘It’s more than that though. She’s erratic, moody…I don’t know. She’s not being herself and she won’t talk to me at all…’

There’s silence as Ally’s mum weighs in on my craziness, my inability to be myself.

‘There’s my therapist,’ says Mum, ‘I did wonder…’