“I can’t believe this,” she mumbled. “If what you’re saying is true, then what about all the people that are in here? I’ve seen them. I’ve spoken with them. Who are they ?”

“They’re part of the illusion too. They’re just projections of Ryan’s memory—echoes of people he knew or met at some point in the past. Try to think of this place as a giant snow globe made up of all the people Ryan knew, an exact version of his world as it was at the time of his death.”

Amy fell silent again, deep in her own thoughts. She didn’t know what to say. If what her mother said was true, what did that mean for her? Why was she here? More to the point, how did she end up in here? Had something happened on the drive in? Had her dad taken a wrong turn? Had they gone through some portal? Was there some flash from the sky that struck their car and magically transported them into this other dimension? Normally such thoughts would sound ridiculous, but considering she had just found her dead mother hiding at the top of an abandoned lighthouse, Amy didn’t know what to think anymore. Nothing was beyond the realm of possibility.

“You’re going to have to explain this all again,” Amy said, “and I mean from the beginning, from when Dad and I first arrived. How did we get mixed up in all this? I need to know exactly how we got here.”

“There’s no we,” her mother said softly. “Only you made the journey to this place—just you.” There was a wary look in her eyes, as though she had known this question was coming. “Sweetheart, how much do you remember about last night?”

Amy’s throat tightened. “Uh, everything . . . I think.”

“Tell me, then. Tell me what you remember.”

“We drove here, checked in to the hotel . . .”

“And then?”

“And then I went for a walk along the beach. I came here, to the lighthouse . . . and then I went back to the hotel.”

“Keep going. Tell me exactly what happened next.”

“I got to my room and ran a bath, but I must have dozed off because I spilled water everywhere, and that’s how I first met Ryan, because he saw the mess and knocked on my door.”

“But there’s something else, isn’t there? Before you got into the bath, you went searching for something in your father’s bag, didn’t you? You found his pills.”

Amy’s heart skipped a beat. She opened her mouth to speak, then hesitated for a moment. “The . . . sleeping pills?”

“Yes—and you took some.”

“I did . . .”

“Do you remember how many you took?”