Wren's POV

I called Maren from the floor.

Not from a chair, not from the couch, not from any surface that would've suggested I had my life together. From the kitchen floor, sitting cross-legged in a puddle of cold coffee, with ceramic shards from my favorite mug pressing into my left thigh.

She picked up on the second ring. "If you're calling to cancel Saturday—"

"He's real."

Silence. Then: "Who's real?"

"The man from the dreams. He's here. He just moved in next door."

More silence. I could hear her tattoo gun buzzing in the background — she must've been mid-session. She muted it. "Wren. Slow down."

"I'm not being dramatic. I'm sitting on my kitchen floor in coffee and I'm telling you that the face I've been drawing for three years is forty yards away carrying a box into the cabin next door."

"Okay." Her voice dropped into the register she used when she thought I was spiraling. Calm. Measured. The same voice she'd used when I told her about Claire. "Dreams are weird. Faces blur. You've been drawing the same guy every night for — how long?"

"Three years."

"Right. Three years. So your brain has a very specific template. And now you see a guy who kind of looks like—"

"Maren. The scar."

"What scar?"

"Above his right eyebrow. Dream number 89. He fell down stairs and his head hit an iron railing. I drew the exact shape of the scar. I have the page. I'm looking at it right now."

I wasn't looking at it right now. I was staring at the underside of my kitchen sink. But I didn't need to look at it. I'd drawn that scar so many times I could trace it in the dark.

She was quiet for a long time. I heard her chair creak.

"Okay," she said finally. "What are you going to do?"

"I don't know. Lock my door? Move? Die?"

"Let's maybe skip that third option." She paused. "Listen, maybe it's a coincidence. Scars aren't fingerprints. Lots of people have scars above their eyebrows."

"In the exact same shape? The exact same eye? With the exact same jaw and nose and—"

"Have you actually seen this guy up close?"

No. I hadn't. I'd seen him from thirty feet away through a fogged kitchen window while hyperventilating on my floor. There was a reasonable chance I was projecting. A desperate, grasping, probably-wrong chance. But a chance.

"No," I admitted.

"Okay. So maybe step one is not panicking. Step two is getting off the floor. Step three is — I don't know — maybe just see his face up close before you start packing a go-bag?"

She was right. She was usually right, which was infuriating.

I cleaned up the coffee. Changed out of my soaked sweatshirt. Looked in the bathroom mirror and saw a woman with dark circles, tangled brown hair, and the expression of someone who'd been punched in the soul.

I brushed my teeth. That felt productive. That felt like something a functioning adult would do before meeting the man she'd been watching die in her sleep for three years.

He knocked at 4:17 p.m.

I know the exact time because I'd been watching the clock since 6 a.m., unable to work, unable to eat, unable to do anything except sit on my couch and stare at the wall and have the same conversation with myself on a loop:

It's a coincidence. It's your brain playing tricks. You're projecting because you're lonely and traumatized and you eat cereal for dinner four nights a week.

But the scar.

Lots of people have scars.

The scar, the jaw, the nose, the way he moves—

You saw him from thirty feet away through a dirty window.

It's him.

It's NOT him.

Knock knock knock.

I stood up so fast I knocked over my laptop. Left it on the floor. Walked to the door. Stopped. Pressed my hands flat against it. Closed my eyes.

If I open this door and it's him — really him, not a projection, not a coincidence — then the dreams are real. All of them. Claire was real. The subway man was real. The woman in the parking garage. All of it.