The dark was not empty.
Gareth had expected empty — the flat, clean nothing of unconsciousness, the simple absence of input — but what arrived instead was the opposite.
Images.
Not dreams. The specific, unmanaged replay of a brain that has taken damage and is running its most important files without being asked to — compiling everything it considers essential, stripping everything it considers peripheral.
His mother at the kitchen table. Four o'clock in the morning, before the bakery opened, the dough spread, her hands moving with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been doing the same motion for years. The flour on her forearms. The way she pushed the hair from her face with the back of her wrist to avoid getting it in her eyes.
His mother kissing his forehead while he was asleep.
'I'm doing this for you.'
