I sat at the dining table for a long time, turning the card over in my hands.
Upstairs, my mother was waking up. Soon she'd come down, make breakfast, and we'd pretend that everything was normal. That I was just her daughter who'd been wrongly accused and miraculously freed.
We'd both pretend we didn't see the shadows that moved wrong sometimes. The way water seemed to follow me. The way I sometimes felt something vast and cold watching me from the corners of rooms.
The card was an answer. Maybe not a good answer. But an answer to questions I couldn't even fully form yet.
What am I? What did I do? What happens now?
I thought about Chance. About Detective James, Detective Reeves, DA Patterson. About the impossible ways they'd died. About my desperate prayer in a jail cell and something in the dark that had listened.
The Isles of Dreams. A place for people like me. People who'd broken the rules of reality and found themselves standing in the spaces between.
I slipped the card into my pocket as I heard my mother's footsteps on the stairs. I didn't know if I'd use it. Didn't know if I wanted to step further into this world of impossible things and raw magic and forces that answered desperate prayers.
But I knew I couldn't stay here forever, pretending everything was normal, feeling that vast cold presence in the corners of my vision, wondering every day if I was going mad.
The Isles of Dreams. I'd think about it. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week. Maybe tonight. The card felt warm against my chest, like something alive. Like something waiting.
"Morning, honey," my mother said, entering the kitchen. "Did you sleep okay?"
"Yeah, Mom. I'm fine." Another lie. The last one? Or just the first of many more?
I didn't know. But I knew that somewhere in a city I'd never heard of, there was a door waiting. A threshold between the world I knew and the world I'd accidentally touched.
And someday soon, I'd have to decide which side of that threshold I belonged on.