I blink a dozen times trying to orient myself. There is light spilling in from the kitchen and a sweet, nutty smell infiltrating the space around me. I take deep breaths of it, grateful my lungs are not filling with mist and starlight instead. I check my arms. My skin is smooth and unblemished. There is the mole I’ve had forever, the little scar from years ago when Moony let me slice strawberries. The cold fire was all a dream. She was a dream. But I still feel consumed.

“Good, you’re up!” My mother bustles past me, a wide Cheshire grin on her face. “I put blueberries and bananas in them. I hope you don’t mind.” She’s opening the blinds and straightening things in the room that don’t really need it. She looks busy and happy and way too awake. “I also put in pecans. You always loved that, remember?”

“What time is it?” I sit up. I feel groggy still. It must be early.

“Seven a.m. High time for you to be up and getting ready for school.”

I shake my head. Did she say school? “Mom, it’s summer. I’m not in school.”

She laughs it off. “Of course. Silly me. Still, breakfast is waiting.” She sings this last part in chipper notes.

I get out of bed and lower the blinds halfway to ease the transition. There’s no point fighting her; I’m up now. She must have started cooking a half hour ago. “Why are you up so early?” I don’t know what time she and Gary came in last night because I was asleep already, but I remember him saying something about midnight.

“Why not?”

She sits at the scarf-laden table and crosses her legs, swinging one foot a little too quickly.

I drop a soggy waffle onto a plate. They are undercooked and overbuttered. I sit across from her deciding to skip the syrup. There is enough fruit in there to sweeten seven waffles. “Fun night?”

She grins like a schoolgirl. “You could say that.”

I scroll through the headlines on my cell phone for distraction.

“So, you’re not mad then?” I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help myself.

“Mad?”

“You know, at me or Gary. Well, it was clear you weren’t mad at Gary anymore. Maybe, since you’re feeling better now, you can enlighten me as to why you blamed me for your perverted paranoid suspicions.”

Her grin slips like melting candle wax. “Catia, let’s not start this.”

“Why? Because it’s not convenient for you this morning, like it was yesterday evening?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” She gets up and starts putting the waffles away, acting as if yesterday never happened. But there is defensiveness in every gesture.

“You don’t know, or you don’t remember? Or is it just that you’d rather we all forgot?”