“I came out to get a drink at about eleven and saw you asleep. I didn’t want to wake you, so I just pulled it over you.”

“Yeah, well I saw the afghan on me.”

The dream came back to Sherry in full color now. She remembered the boy and she felt her heart lift. Shannon! Only that couldn’t have been real time, because he looked unchanged from the last day she’d seen him.

“I saw Shannon,” she said and her voice trembled slightly.

“You always see Shannon,” her roommate said.

“No. I’ve thought about him a lot, but this is the first time I’ve seen him.” Sherry sat on a stool, her mind abuzz. “And I slept through the night—without a nightmare. That says something.”

“Well, I can’t argue with that. Maybe standing up to Piper yesterday did some good after all.”

“That’s not it. Although I think I just might agree to their three-month medical leave—somehow I can’t see working with them now.”

Marisa dipped her hands back into the dishwater. “So you’re saying this was an actual vision. Like the kind your grandmother supposedly has.”

“I don’t know. But this wasn’t just a dream.”

Her roommate raised a brow and wiped a green plate. “You actually saw Shannon this time. Really saw him, huh?”

“He was younger than he would be now. But it felt so real.”

“You never saw his body . . .”

“That’s what I’m saying. I actually saw him—”

“No. I mean after he was killed. You never saw Shannon physically dead.”

“Please, we’ve been over this a dozen times. He’s dead. Period. I’m not going to open up old wounds.” She’d said the same many times, but the argument didn’t feel as strong in light of her dream. He had been alive there, hadn’t he?

“You say that, but I’m telling you, you don’t have closure. How do you know he was actually killed back there, if you didn’t see his body?”

“Don’t be stupid.” Sherry turned to the window, remembering. It had been some government man who’d told her the plantation had been overrun, the Richtersons killed. Drug infighting. “Everyone knows that he was killed.”

“Then verify it again. Track it down again. Official knowledge of his death. People have been tormented for years by lingering doubts, and from what I can see, you fall into that group. You’re still having dreams about him, for crying out loud!”

“I do have official knowledge,” Sherry said.

She clenched her eyes and tried to think reasonably. The very idea that he might still be alive cut at her like a knife. A thousand hours of therapy had placed him in a small corner of her mind—always there, always vivid, but small. Now he was suddenly coming back to the surface, and she could not allow a dead past to retake her mind. It would be worse than her nightmares.

A lump the size of a boulder pressed painfully in her throat and she cleared it. “I don’t want to go there again.”