All your dreams will come to life. So will all your nightmares. ― After narrowly surviving the car crash that killed his best friend, Andrew King is left to grapple with his loss and nurse a traumatic brain injury. With his injury comes a crippl...
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IT HAD BEEN HOURS since he had woken up. No one disturbed Andrew from his place on the futon in the bedroom. It was as if they were tiptoeing around him, careful not to knock out any screws already loose, and after hours of getting himself back to speed, Andrew had enough of the sitting around.
He reemerged into the living room where Sam and Rim halted their conversation, turning to face him.
"Hey," Sam said. "How's your head feeling?"
Andrew went to pour himself a cup of coffee from the carafe in the kitchen. "Fine."
"No more headache?" Sam asked.
He shook his head. "It up and left as soon as the amnesia broke."
Andrew looked to Rim, who averted his gaze, an unsteady hand running through the short layers of her hair.
Sam cleared her throat and rose to her feet. "I need to go...find something," she said, hurriedly disappearing into one of the other rooms.
Andrew moved to sit on the couch beside Rim, cradling the warm cup in his hands. "Thank you," he said.
She laughed but it was nothing more than a short, breathy exhale. "For what?"
"For getting me out of there," he said, but he wasn't talking about Roanoke, his fingers dancing along the side of his scalp. "For bringing it all back."
Andrew staring into the mug, furrowing his eyebrows at his reflection in the dark, rippling coffee. "How did you know?"
Rim smiled, giving a small, imperceptible shake of the head. "You hum it to yourself. When you're falling asleep, when you're scared. You even hum while you dreamweave, and in the chaos of a seam, sometimes its the only thing I can hear."
He turned to regard her, and she became shifty under his gaze, kneading at the soft tissue of her temple.
"I'm not mad at you," Andrew said quietly.
"You should be." She sighed, folding her hands in her lap. "Everything that is happening to you, it's because of me."
"You really think they would've just given up on Dreamweaver if you hadn't have volunteered?"
"If we didn't have someone like you," he continued, "someone who didn't know the program and everyone involved like the back of their hand, do you think we would have gotten this far?"
When she finally looked up to meet his gaze, her wide brown eyes were slick with moisture.
"I killed my best friend. I'm the last person to not recognize a mistake as what it is — a mistake."
He dug into his pants pocket to retrieve a long gold chain, glimmering in the low light of the apartment. Its tantalizing shine reflected in Rim's damp eyes and she inhaled a sharp breath at its sight.
