“It’s incredible,” he says, tearing his eyes away to grin at me for a moment. “But you don’t see yourself, not like I do.”

“How so?” I’m touchy about criticism when it comes to my drawing. I try not to show how his comment stings.

“Your color choices. You’re all washed out, like a reflection in the water.”

I hold my arm up in front of his face. “You do see this paleness, don’t you?”

He smiles. “That’s not what I mean. It’s as if you’re afraid to define yourself too strongly. As if you’re not sure you’re fully here.”

“Time for another one,” I chime with an eye roll, turning the page before he can read any more into my self-portrait. When I draw, I don’t think too hard about the choices I’m making. They are intuitive. But analyzing them after the fact like this makes me feel like a butterfly trapped in a shadowbox under pins.

I’m in such a rush to get past the awkwardness of my self-portrait that I don’t think about what the next picture will be until I see it. It’s a drawing I did of the boy from the forest—the Fool from my dream. The trees are dark and angry, drawn in hard, slanting lines that seem to shriek onto the page. He cuts them down the middle, as though the forest is bleeding yellow. A small figure that is decidedly human but void of all identifying features except that damn waistcoat, and the giant white wolfdog at his side.

“Who’s this?” Daniel asks.

“No one,” I say.

He looks at me for a long moment and then gives up. He turns the page. Moony’s curtains bloom yellow. Her open doorway yawns. All else is blank.

“I don’t like that one,” I say quickly and turn the page again, regretting it the instant the next drawing comes into view.

It is the man from the cathedral and the café. His garish red bathrobe is unmistakable. The smug smirk on his face. The five o’clock shadow around his goatee. The paper he is not reading. His eyes bore into mine from the page, and I can smell the peppermint already.

“I remember this guy,” Daniel says.

I bite my lip. In the last several weeks, I’d let the strange appearances slide to the back of my mind. I didn’t forget exactly, but I put them away for a while. It was easier to do that than keep questioning what they were, why they were showing up in my dreams and my life. All the time I was spending with Daniel seemed to hold them at bay. He’d begun to feel like my own personal talisman. Now, I worry this little bubble I’ve been living in will burst.

Daniel looks at me.

“I know.”