Coincidence. That's what it is.
I tell myself this while I make coffee, while I stare at the news article still open on my phone, while I close the article and open it again and close it one more time. The man in the thumbnail is dead. He was found near campus. I have dreamed about a face that could be his face, but dreams are made of fragments , pieces of things we've seen, half-remembered, rearranged by a brain that runs its own logic at three in the morning.
I have a good imagination. I have been photographing faces for four years. My brain files them away and pulls them out without asking permission. That's all this is.
I almost convince myself.
Almost , because there is a thing I'm not looking at directly, a thing sitting just to the left of the dead man in the news, a thing I have been not-looking-at for years. The dream has always been too specific for coincidence. The hallway, the smell, the water at the same distance, always. My own voice saying a name I can't keep.
Dreams that specific don't come from nowhere, dreams that specific come from something that happened.
And if something happened, then my father knows what it was.
And I am not ready to ask my father anything, so I put my phone face-down on the counter and drink my coffee and move on.
>>>
Dr. Voss has the kind of office that is designed to make you feel like it's okay to fall apart in it , warm lamp, soft chair, a small window that shows a square of grey sky. I've been referred to her through the university counseling center. This is our first session.
She has kind eyes and a very still way of listening that makes me want to be honest, which means I spend the first twenty minutes being extremely articulate about everything except the thing that matters.
I tell her about the nightmares, the fragments, the water. I tell her I've had this recurring dream since I was small and it has recently gotten more intense, which is true. I tell her I'm under some stress, my brother just left for a year abroad, I have a fellowship application in progress, there's a situation with an ex that I'm managing.
She listens to all of it. She doesn't interrupt.
When I finish she says, "Has anything changed recently? In your daily environment?"
"My brother left for a year abroad," I say. Which is what I already said. Which is true, which is also not what she's asking, and I know it, and I say it anyway because the honest answer is, "there is a man next door who looked at my photograph like he recognized something in it, and I don't know why I haven't stopped thinking about that, and I don't know why I'm not telling you this."
I don't say any of that. I don't say it because I don't understand it well enough yet to hand it to someone else.
Dr. Voss nods slowly. "You're very good at describing the shape of things," she says. "The edges."
"I'm a photographer."
"I know. I'm wondering if we might try to look at what's in the middle." She pauses. "When you're ready. There's no rush. But if the nightmares are intensifying, a more structured approach might help us surface what's underneath them." She says it gently. Not like a warning, like an offer.
"Okay," I say. "Yeah. Let's try that."
I mean it. I'm also aware that I just agreed to look at something I have been specifically not looking at for twenty-two years. I carry that awareness out of her office and down three flights of stairs and out onto the street, and I let the cold air hit my face, and I keep moving.
>>>
Back home, my fellowship portfolio is spread across the kitchen table.
This is the version of me I like best , prints and contact sheets and handwritten notes, three months of work laid out in a sequence I've rearranged six times this week. The Reyes Fellowship. Funded semester abroad. The kind of opportunity that comes once and requires you to be exactly good enough, and I don't know yet if I am, and the not-knowing lives in my chest like a stone I've been carrying so long I've stopped noticing the weight.
I sit down and I work, just that. No Joel, no dead men in news articles, no grey-eyed men with folders. Just me and the photographs and the specific, clean pleasure of deciding what belongs next to what.
This is who I am when no one needs anything from me. Fast. Focused. Entirely in it.
For two hours I don't think about anything else.
>>
My phone buzzes at four.
Rhett. One line, "friday confirmed. 7pm. I'll collect you."
I stare at it for longer than I mean to. It's a functional text. There is nothing in it except logistics. It tells me nothing about the man who stood in my apartment this morning cataloguing my walls, nothing about the two seconds he spent looking at the condemned building photograph, nothing about what he was doing at my fence at 3:18 a.m.
I type back,"Fine." I put the phone down. I pick it up. I reread his message. I put it down again.
"Collect you." Like I'm a parcel. Like this is completely normal.
I go back to my portfolio.
>>>
My evening lecture runs until eight. I pack up slowly afterward, I always do, it gives me time to think through what I shot during the practical session, what worked and what I'd do differently. The building empties around me. By the time I get outside the car park is mostly clear, the kind of quiet that makes every sound louder.
I hear him before I see him.
"Wren."
Joel is leaning against my car.
The first thing I notice is that he looks different. Thinner than the last time, which was three months ago when I told him for the final time that we were done. Something off in the set of his jaw, in the way he's holding his own arms. His eyes find mine immediately, like he's been watching the door.
"I just want to talk," he says. "Five minutes."
My stomach goes cold and still.
I don't think about it. I don't weigh it up or talk myself through it or decide. I already have my phone in my hand and I'm already scrolling to the contact I added this morning against my better judgment, and I press call before I've fully decided to, because something in the way Joel is standing by my car has bypassed everything rational in me and gone straight to the part that knows.
It rings once.
Rhett picks up.