Facing her in the shadows, Maeve startled: the two women made a sort of mirror image. The same size and height, dark-haired, dark-eyed. But more than that, a tension to the girl that felt too familiar. A nervousness. Small and lithe enough to fit in at audition time, lining up down the long hall with the other junior dancers—and something about the way she held her body. Fierce and anxious, all at once. How Maeve used to look too. But now?

She stiffened. November was the center’s off-season, the whole reason she’d scheduled her visit for this time. She’d been told there would be no other dancers on-site, much less someone looking for mentorship. She didn’t want to see herself in this girl, in her anxious eyes.

“I’m fine—it’s just a little rain.” The words coming out more snappish than she’d meant. “And I’m sure you haven’t heard everything.”

The girl’s face went blank and somewhere behind her exhaustion, Maeve felt a ping of guilt. She took the key, found her own way to her room, and collapsed into bed—but then woke in the dark, over and over, with a vivid string of dreams.

First: She is in a garden in winter, everything barren and white, and Iain suddenly beside her, gripping her arm, his spade raised in his hand. Then she dreams that she flies home but forgets the children and goes to a party instead; Iain takes them somewhere and she doesn’t know where. She dreams of her old house, the one before they moved back to the city, that she and the children live with Godzilla. This does not seem outlandish in the dream.

Finally, a dream she is being crushed.

In this one, she is in bed, her bed at the center. There’s an animal smell—she can smell the thing before she sees it—and then it’s through the window, as if the window simply opened to it. Soundless apart from the heave of its breath; the weight of it, enormous. Maeve cannot make it out, cannot seem to open her eyes. Chest-crushing. A darkness pressing down on her.

She woke up then for good, struggling for breath. Her coat like some humpbacked shadow in the corner where it hung, draped and drying, over a chair. She flipped on the light and unpacked.

Now she watches the little loading wheel on her screen going endlessly around and around. Buffering. The nightmares haven’t worn off: she just wants to know that her children are safe at home. That they’re okay.

But when the image suddenly jolts back to life, Maeve finds that she is looking at her own mother rather than the kids.