The cries intensify, but they aren’t coming from the crib. Now, they’re behind me. I whip around. “Jackson?” I rush out of his room and down the hall. The cry shifts again, as if bouncing freely through the house. I fumble for the baby monitor on my nightstand and knock over my water glass. It thuds against the carpet. Back in the hallway, I strain to hear exactly where he is.

Downstairs?

“Oh my God.” I ignore the logical part of my brain that knows a three-month-old can’t escape his crib, and I sprint downstairs anyway. My toe bumps into something. I crouch down and connect with a tiny nose, mouth, and chin. But it’s not flesh I feel—it’s plastic. A baby doll? I check to make sure. The doll cries harder, and I drop it and spin around in my foyer. “Jackson?” I call his name again, and mid-cry, he cuts off. The house grows deathly quiet, except for my chaotic breath.

A crack of lightning brings me out of it. I jolt awake, drenched, my heart a jackhammer. I lie in my bed, queasy with nerves. “It’s just a dream,” I reassure myself. “You’re okay.” I reach for the glass of water on my nightstand and suck down the last remaining drops. I collapse back in bed. Thunder rolls outside, then another flash of lightning.

The nightmares are becoming so real.

I snake a shaky hand over my face and wipe away the sweat. The events from yesterday drift into focus: the footsteps. The open door. The moved playpen. Last night, Jess worked hard to reassure me that my exhaustion is to blame, but I’m not so sure.

I gauge the empty space beside me and run a hand over the sheets. A sob catches in my throat. I squeeze my eyes shut until the outline of Chris’s face fires in my memory—the slightly crooked nose, broken twice from college rugby, the large amber eyes and impossibly thick lashes, the tiny cleft in his chin. I reach out as though I can still press a finger into the dimpled flesh. My hand fists around air, drops, resettles.

I roll back over. Nights and mornings are always the worst. I can keep myself busy during the day, but at night, when I settle into bed, his absence is the loudest thing in the room. That, coupled with all of these terrors about Jackson—Jackson crying, but I can’t find him; Jackson tumbling from my arms down the stairs; Jackson floating away in a river—it’s enough to make me want to boycott my bedroom entirely.

I press the button on my alarm clock to tell me the time. It’s only 4 A.M. I sit up, slip on my robe, and listen for Jackson at the top of the stairs. His white noise machine whooshes on low from his nursery down the hall.