“You are my K, and you definitely came here, to this dimension, four years ago. There was a displacement. If you don’t remember us together, then…”
Emily blinked away a tear and wiped her cheek. I could see how hard this was for her.
“It’s my fault,” she said. “You left because I asked you to.”
“What?”
“I discovered that Crow was manipulating the Radiants to try to bring back his wife and daughter, and that it was messing up not only the game but the entire multiverse. I tracked you down and convinced you that we needed to do something. We spent years together coming up with a plan, and then you changed your mind.”
“What happened?”
“We fell in love. You told me you didn’t want to leave me. You didn’t want to risk forgetting.”
“And then?”
“Four years ago, we discovered Crow’s manipulations were causing more damage than we thought, and if we didn’t act soon, the entire multiverse was in danger of collapsing. I talked you into slipping dimensional streams to try to stop him.”
“That sounds completely insane.”
“Does it?”
“Slipping into dimensional streams and forgetting a whole other life where you and I are married doesn’t sound like the most likely explanation. My experiencing a severe break with reality feels far more likely.”
“You and I used our connection to the Radiants to facilitate the slip.”
“Our Gatewick sauce.”
“Yes.”
“You said you weren’t sure how much Gatewick sauce I have.”
“I’m still not sure, but I think it might be a lot.”
I wanted to tell Emily what she was saying was crazy, but I’d been experiencing missing time and discrepancies in the fabric of reality. I wasn’t sure what to think anymore.
“Okay,” Emily said as she turned back to face me. “I’m going to ask you a weird question.” She took a breath and steadied herself. “Do you remember the black well?”
“I—”
The dream came flooding back immediately. It was like being struck. I hadn’t thought about it for decades.
In the dream, Emily, Annie, and I were walking in one of the farmer’s fields out near their family’s vacation home. We’d been laughing and running through the high grass for hours when Emily and I went back to the barn to get a drink from my backpack.
We’d reached the barn and were watching Annie running and jumping across the middle part of the field, chasing the neighbor’s dog, when she just disappeared.
We’d been watching her run one second, and the next she vanished into thin air.
“Yes, I remember, but the black well was a dream,” I said. “It was my dream.”
“It wasn’t a dream, K,” Emily said. “It was real. It happened. We found those Playboys in the old house, you tripped and hurt your knee, we talked about a grasshopper army taking over the world and about Annie having nightmares after seeing part of The Exorcist. That was all real. I was there. Annie was there. It happened.”
“It was a dream,” I said.
I knew it was a dream; it had to be. But I’d never shared the contents of that dream with anyone. There was no possible way Emily could know those specific details.
Not unless she’d been there with me.
I’d forgotten all about that dream. But I remembered it clearly now.
I could feel the grass in the field against my legs as we walked, hear the beating of my heart in my ears, smell the evening rain forming in the air.
I remembered the two of us walking through the grass for a long time, looking for Annie, calling out her name. We ended up standing in front of a dark-ringed ancient stone well that we’d discovered the summer before. The stones had been blackened with some kind of burned ash or mold.
We called it the black well.
Emily and I yelled out Annie’s name one last time as we slowly looked over the edge.
There at the bottom, in a pool of dark, shallow water, was Annie’s tiny broken body.
She was dead.
I remembered screaming, falling into a pool of nothingness, the sky shaking and shattering in a brilliant flash and glow, and feeling every part of myself and the world around me break apart like a huge jigsaw puzzle.
Then I woke up in bed.
I ran straight into the room next door where Annie and Emily had been sleeping in the bunk beds.
When I opened the door, Emily was sitting up in the top bunk staring at me, her eyes wide with terror.
Annie was curled up in the bottom, sleeping soundly.