The first thing I register is how thirsty I am.
Not pain, which is strange, because I expected pain after falling asleep on my couch again. Instead, there's just a heavy, cottony feeling in my head and a faint metallic taste on my tongue, like I've been asleep for too long.
"Miss? Can you hear me?"
A male voice. Warm, close.
I blink until the world grudgingly comes into focus: a ceiling painted gold, cherubs staring down like nosy toddlers.
What the hell?
That's not my ceiling. My ceiling has a water stain shaped like Florida and a smoke detector that blinks accusingly at 3 a.m.
I was on my couch. I fell asleep on my couch with the TV still on and tea going cold on the coffee table. I remember the home renovation show, the cat in my dream, the sunlight that felt too bright—
This isn't my apartment.
The ceiling is gold. There are cherubs. The light fixtures look like they cost more than my rent.
My heart kicks up. Did I sleepwalk? Get kidnapped? Enter some sort of fugue state and end up in—where? A museum? Someone's mansion? Where even was the nearest mansion?
I shift, testing my body. Everything feels... fine. Intact. No sharp pains, no injuries.
Then the voice again—gentle, formal. "Don't move too quickly. You gave us quite a fright."
The man beside me is a stranger. He's wearing a silver-embroidered gray coat, a cravat, and worry lines. His "stethoscope" looks ornamental.
He notices me staring and offers a polite smile. "Please remain still. I'll fetch water."
He disappears, shoes clicking on marble.
Marble. When was the last time I saw marble? My lifestyle doesn't do much more than flecked linoleum.
"Cassia, are you okay?"
A new voice, deeper. I turn my head and find a man kneeling beside me, dark hair slicked back, eyes sharp with worry. Blue jacket, gold embroidery—like someone stepped off the set of a historical drama.
"Did I—am I in some sort of historical reenactment?" I croak, trying to sit up.
He catches me with one gloved hand as I wobble. "You should rest. The physician will return shortly."
"Physician," I echo. "Not doctor?"
He frowns. "Cassia, do you remember what happened?"
I open my mouth, close it again. "Sort of?"
The "physician" returns with an ornate glass on a silver tray. He kneels, presents it like an offering, then backs away fast—as if I might bite.
"Where am I?" I ask after taking a drink.
"You're home," the dark-haired man says softly. "You fainted while dancing with Father. You frightened everyone."
I blink. "Father?" The word feels strange in my mouth. He didn't say my father or your father—just Father. Like it was obvious we shared one. Was this guy saying he was my brother?
He nods, relief softening his tone. "He's on his way. He insisted on seeing you himself."
My confusion grows. "That's… unnecessary."
But the doors open before I can finish.
The man who enters stops my breath.
He's broad-shouldered, moving with that careful authority some men carry like a second skin. Hair graying at the temples. Strong jaw. Laugh lines around his eyes—the kind that come from years of actual joy.
My throat closes.
It's his face. My father's face.
Not similar. Not like him. Him. The shape of his nose, the set of his eyebrows, the way he tilts his head when he's worried. Every detail I spent months memorizing in that hospice room, trying to hold onto something solid while he slipped away.
But this man isn't dying.
His hands are steady. His skin has color. He walks without the tremor, without the careful shuffle of someone whose body has betrayed them. He looks the way Dad did before—before the diagnosis, before the medications stopped working, before I had to watch him forget how to hold a fork.
He stops to speak with the gray-coated man before closing the distance between us in a few long strides, studying me like he's counting every breath. "My little Cassia," he says quietly, voice full of fond disbelief. "You frightened your old man half to death."
The words land like a physical blow.
The timbre is wrong—deeper, smoother—but the cadence. God, the cadence is identical. That slight pause before "old man," the way his voice drops on "half to death." It's the same rhythm Dad used when I was twelve and fell off my bike, when I was sixteen and came home crying about college rejections.
My chest tightens until I can't breathe properly.
I know this can't be real. I know it. But everything in me is screaming to believe it anyway, to take this impossible gift and not ask questions.
He moves closer, dismissing the physician with a glance. When he kneels at the edge of the settee, I catch the scent of cedar and smoke—exactly like Dad's flannel jacket, the one I kept in my closet because it still smelled like him.
I can't look away.
His hand is steady, warm, whole. He reaches out and cups my cheek. The touch is gentle, practiced, like he's done it a thousand times before.
"You shouldn't push yourself so hard," he says, and there's affection threaded through every word. "You're always overdoing it, even for something as silly as a dance."
The last time I saw my father's hands, they were shaking so badly the nurse had to help him drink water. His skin was paper-thin, bruised from IVs and blood draws. He couldn't hold my hand without his fingers spasming.
These hands are steady.
"I—" My voice breaks. "I guess that sounds like me."
Gabriel hovers nearby, silent, watching both of us like he's witnessing a scene that's both familiar and expected.
The man, this father who isn't my father but looks so much like him it hurts, chuckles. The sound is rich and warm, and it carves something open inside my chest.
"You look just like your mother when you're stubborn."
He brushes a strand of hair behind my ear and my body betrays me by leaning into it. Muscle memory from a lifetime ago. Comfort I haven't felt since I was twenty-three and sitting in a hospital room that smelled like antiseptic and death.
The ache behind my eyes sharpens into something I can't control.
I spent three years watching my father disappear. First the tremors, then the confusion, then the slow, cruel erosion of everything that made him him. By the end, he didn't recognize me. Called me by his sister's name. Asked where Mom was even though she'd been gone for a decade.
I held his hand while he died, felt the last vestiges of strength leave him.
This man's hands weren't frail.
He's whole. Healthy. Looking at me like I matter, like seeing me safe is the most important thing in his world.
And I can't—I can't figure it out. Can't make sense of a universe cruel enough to take my father and then dangle this impossible echo in front of me like some kind of cosmic joke.
The tears spill before I can stop them.
"Hey now," he says softly, and his thumb brushes them away with a tenderness that makes my throat close completely. "It's all right. You're safe."
Safe.
Dad used to say that. When I had nightmares as a kid. When I called him crying after my first breakup. When I showed up at his apartment at 2 a.m. because my roommate's boyfriend scared me and I didn't know where else to go.
You're safe. I've got you.
He hasn't said those words in so long. Not since the illness took his ability to string sentences together. Not since I became the parent and he became the child, and I had to be the one saying it's okay, Dad, I'm here, you're safe while he thrashed against restraints in the hospital bed.
Hearing it now, in this impossible place, from this impossible version of him, breaks something I've been holding together with sorrow and denial.
I manage a shaky laugh, but it comes out strangled. "You must have the wrong girl."
He smiles and it's his smile. The one that used to make everything feel fixable. "Nonsense. I'd know my daughter anywhere."
That does it. The sob catches in my throat, and I can't swallow it down.
Gabriel looks alarmed. "Cassia?"
"I'm fine," I lie, but my voice is shredded and the tears keep flowing down my cheeks
The father figure—because I can't let myself call him Dad, can't let myself believe—squeezes my hand gently. His grip is firm. Steady. Everything my father's wasn't at the end.
He waits with me while I break down, my sobs only interrupted by the faint sound of the music drifting in from the ballroom. Something in my soul insists it's okay to fall apart here—that maybe this echo of unconditional love is the last wish of a dying girl.
At some point, he moves to sit beside me. The chair creaks softly under his weight. He doesn't try to fill the silence or tell me to stop crying. He just… stays. And his presence is like a balm pressed against a wound that's never quite healed.
When the tears finally subside, he exhales as if he's been holding his breath for both of us.
"Rest," he says, giving my hand one last squeeze then standing slowly. "We'll talk later."
He smooths down his jacket, adjusting the cuffs with the same absent gesture Dad used to do before leaving for work. Then he pauses at the door, glancing back with an expression I recognize—half concern, half love.
"I'm glad you're all right, sweetheart."
When he leaves, the room feels smaller. Emptier. Like someone turned down the volume on everything.
I sit there, frozen, staring at the space where he stood.
My father is dead. I watched them lower his casket into the ground on a Tuesday in March. I stood in the rain while the pastor said words I didn't hear, and I went home to an apartment that still had his reading glasses on our coffee table.
He's dead.
But I just touched him. Smelled him. Heard him call me sweetheart like no time had passed at all.
And the worst part—the part that makes my chest feel like it's caving in—is that he looked happy. The father I lost years before he actually died.
I press my palms against my eyes, trying to stop the tears from coming back, but they won't listen. Seems to be a pattern for me these days…
"Cassia?" Gabriel's voice is quiet, careful. "You're pale again."
"Yeah." My throat's raw. "Just... processing."
"Are you in pain? Should I call for the physician again?" he asks, and the worry is written all over his face.
I shake my head quickly. "I'm fine. I'm just still a bit confused. Like my memories and emotions are all mixed up."
It's not entirely a lie. My memories are mixed up. Just not in the way he thinks.
The concern is evident in his eyes. He genuinely cares. They both do—Gabriel and that man who looks like my father. Their kindness feels dangerous, like if I lean on it too hard, I'll shatter completely.
Should I tell them the truth? That I have no idea who Cassia really is? That I don't belong here?