37. False Comforts

1712 Words

[CAMI] I dream of a world where I was never born. My mom’s healthy, glowing. She keeps her job at the university and spends her weekends teaching yoga instead of drowning herself in cheap wine. Claire never touches the shadows, but she meets Jake in some ordinary way, and they never marry, but they still find each other at coffee shops and birthdays, graying together over decades of inside jokes. No one’s running. No one’s bleeding. No one’s hiding behind a gun. Then the dream dissolves, and I wake to emptiness. The sheets beside me are cool, the dent in the pillow smoothed out. I push up on my elbows, disoriented, blinking against the pale light bleeding in through the curtains, the patter of the fountain silenced by the glass windows. Zeke was here, wasn’t he? The room was darker t

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