I wake already screaming.
My own voice rips through the dark, raw and too loud for the size of the bedroom. My throat burns, and for a wild second I still hear another sound braided with the scream: tires clawing across wet pavement, high and thin, then stopping in a snapped-off silence that leaves my ears ringing.
I clamp my mouth shut and listen.
The house creaks in its usual places. The heater kicks on, a low mechanical sigh through the floor vents. My heart punches against my ribs, trying to match the distant freeway hum that reaches Maple Hollow even at this hour, a faint ocean of engines beyond the pine trees.
No tires. No crash. Just my pulse.
Sweat cools on my skin. The cotton of my tank top clings to my back. Candle smoke from two nights ago still faintly stains the air; I never scrubbed all of it out. The digital clock glares 3:19 a.m. at me, red numbers reflected in the black rectangle of my window.
Behind the glass, the cul-de-sac lies drenched and quiet. Fog grips the slope; the curve of the street sinks into it, no guardrail, no overpass, just trimmed lawns the HOA would applaud. One lone sedan at the far end noses out of a driveway, headlights streaking white across wet pavement and up the faces of houses. For half a second, that light paints my window, smears across my reflection, and my whole body flinches.
“Stop,” I whisper, palms pressed over my eyes. “Stop replaying.”
The phantom scream still vibrates in my throat. My hands shake. I throw the covers back and swing my legs to the floor, toes hitting the cold wood. I need air, or noise, or both.
Downstairs, my phone buzzes on the dining room table, that cheerful mechanical chime Maple Hollow parents use for school alerts and angelversary posts. I grab it on instinct. A notification from the neighborhood Facebook group lights the screen: someone sharing a photo of a candlelit walkway for a kid who overdosed three suburbs over. The caption talks about lessons and awareness. The comments talk about how blessed we are here, how safe.
I click the screen off before my brain can start sharp-editing their narrative.
The walls press close. Every framed photo has a reflective surface that throws back my face at odd angles in the half-light. Caleb at eight with front teeth missing, Caleb at sixteen in a hoodie by the reservoir with his friends half-cropped out. Glass over all of them, a barrier I can tap but never break.
I drop the phone on the table and head for the front door.
The night hits me with wet air that tastes of rain and sap. Pine needles glisten along the edges of the porch, tiny mirrors catching the spill from the streetlight. Far away, a truck growls on the freeway, the sound sliding over the neighborhood roofs. The fog hangs at knee height, hugging the sloped asphalt like a low tide.
And on the porch directly across the cul-de-sac, Liam sits on the steps.
He leans forward with his elbows braced on his knees, hood up over his hair, a lit cigarette glowing between two fingers. The ember flares when he draws on it. Smoke curls upward, thin and white in the cold air, then dissolves against the darker shadow of his house.
For a second, I freeze with one hand still on my own doorknob. That silhouette in my trance the other night had his slope of shoulders, his hunched focus, watching the road like a man waiting for impact.
I could retreat. Close the door, let the blinds slice the world into manageable strips again.
Instead, I step down onto the porch. The wood chills my bare feet through my socks. Liam’s head lifts. Even from here I feel the weight of his eyes snagging on me, traveling from my knees to my face and back again, checking for injury or threat.
“Couldn’t sleep?” His voice carries low across the wet street.
“No,” I say. One word, safer than the avalanche waiting behind it.
He stubs the cigarette out in a small portable ashtray at his feet and straightens a little. “You want one?”
“I quit when I got pregnant,” I say. “Didn’t go back.”
His mouth tilts. “Good call. The seventies parenting manual in my head says offer the grieving mom nicotine and whiskey. Modern version says herbal tea and mindfulness app.”
“I’ll pass on both,” I say. “I’m already mindful of all the wrong things.”
I start down my steps before I can reconsider. The damp air soaks into my sweater. Streetlight reflections shimmer in each puddle, like tiny screens playing looped footage of nothing. By the time I reach the middle of the cul-de-sac, Liam is standing.
“Hi,” I say stupidly, because we were two houses and a history apart yesterday, and now it is just us and the fog.
“Hi.” He searches my face. “You look like you ran a marathon in your sleep.”
“Close,” I say. “Night terror.”
His shoulders drop a fraction. “Right. Sorry. You okay?”
I wrap my arms around myself, fingers digging into my elbows. “Define okay.”
He huffs a small, humorless laugh. “You want to sit?”
I hesitate, then climb his steps and perch two risers below him, leaving a neutral scrap of wood between us. From here I can see past his shoulder into his front windows. Glass panes show only darkness and the faint blue blink of a router light. No monitors on, no recording devices that I can see. The smart house is sleeping.
“I woke up convinced I heard tires,” I say. “The screech. Right before a crash.”
He nods once. “Your brain recorded that frequency manually. It likes to hit replay at three in the morning.”
“You say that like you know it.”
“I do.” He rests his forearms on his knees again, hands loose. “Used to be sirens for me. Lately it’s brakes. Or metal.”
Micro-hook: I did not mention metal.
I watch his profile. The porch light carves a soft line from cheekbone to jaw. “What do you dream about?” I ask. “When you can’t sleep. Or when you can.”
He flicks a glance at me, then out at the cul-de-sac.
“Crashes,” he says. “Surprise.”
“Details,” I press. “I write for a living. Vague never helped anyone.”
He goes quiet. The distant freeway fills the space, a steady roar undercut by a lone motorcycle whine.
“There’s one that keeps coming back,” he says. “I’m not in the car. I’m watching. Sometimes from a bridge, sometimes from the side of the road. Same blind curve, different geography. Headlights come in too fast, hit a guardrail that doesn’t do the job. Metal folds instead of bending. Not a clean bounce, more like… teeth biting down.”
My breath catches. I taste copper at the back of my tongue.
“I hear that sound too,” I say. “In mine.”
He nods, still staring ahead. “Then there’s water. That’s the part I can’t shake.”
“Water,” I echo.
“Yeah.” He rubs his palms together like they are cold. “I hear this rush, like a wave in a tunnel. Then it’s everywhere. Over my shoes, around my calves, then higher. I’m never sure if it’s real water or just the sound of blood in my ears. The car doesn’t make sense anymore, because it’s both on a dry road and filling up. My chest locks up right around there. I wake up before anyone drowns.”
He glances at me again. “Your turn.”
The porch step feels narrower beneath me. I grip the edge with my fingers.
“Mine changes,” I say. “Sometimes I’m in the car with Caleb. Sometimes I’m watching from the trees. Tonight I wasn’t in it at all. I just heard the tires and that horrible metal snap and I ran, but my legs wouldn’t move fast enough. Typical nightmare physics. The crash was always ahead of me.”
I focus on the wet street instead of his face. “There’s water in mine too,” I add. “But not a lake or anything. It’s like it appears inside the car. I know that makes no sense. I hear it rushing in around my ankles, then my throat. And I smell it.”
“Smell it how?” he asks quietly.
“Like cold metal and algae and spilled beer,” I say. “And this sweet chemical note from the air freshener Caleb liked, those stupid cardboard trees. Black Ice. He thought that was classy. The water carries all those smells at once. By the time it reaches my mouth, I’m breathing an accident through a straw.”
He exhales, long and slow. “Yeah,” he says. “That.”
“We never talked about water before,” I say. My voice comes out thin. “Or Black Ice. Or the way the metal folds instead of bends.”
Liam flexes his hands, knuckles pale. “You’ve read the same reports I have,” he says. “You’ve watched footage. Your brain builds things from those scraps. Mine too. That’s one explanation.”
“Is it your favorite?” I ask.
“It’s the one that hurts less,” he says. “The alternative is that I watched something once that rewired me, and every new crash tacks more scenes onto the same reel.”
“The alternative is that we were both there,” I say, before I can stop myself.
The words hang between us, heavier than the fog.
He looks at me fully now, porch light reflecting off his eyes. “We know you were there,” he says. “On foot. The bodycam shows that.”
“We know the edited version shows that,” I say. “Everything else is up for debate.”
He flinches at “edited,” a subtle twitch at his jawline. He recovers quick.
“You talked to Ruiz,” he says. Not a question.
“I did.”
“And?”
“He noticed the reupload too,” I say. “He filed it away in a quiet drawer. He is pulling it out again now. Carefully.”
Liam blows out a breath that fogs in front of his mouth. “Good,” he says. “He’s one of the better ones.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“About us?” he asks. “About whether either of us is misremembering being there together?”
“About whether you’re dreaming these things because you helped shape mine,” I say. “Or because they’re shaping you from the same source.”
He leans back against the railing, head tipped toward the sky. Mist catches in his hair. “You want honesty?” he asks.
“That would be a nice change of pace.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I know I have a lifetime pass to crash imagery. Sister, work, late-night deep dives into other people’s tragedies. I know I read all the reports on Caleb’s case, watched any footage I could get my hands on. Including you in the headlights.”
I swallow.
“Maybe that built the dreams,” he says. “Maybe talking to you tuned them to your frequency. Brains echo. They sync up. Ask any therapist with a waiting room full of couples who have started finishing each other’s sentences.”
“We’re not a couple,” I say quickly.
He makes a short, rough sound. “No,” he says. “We really are not.”
“But?” I press, because I cannot leave it there; I never do.
“But we are two people who stand on opposite sides of a piece of glass with the same wreck on the other side,” he says. “Sometimes the reflections line up. Doesn’t mean the glass wasn’t installed by someone trying to sell us a certain view.”
That line slices right through my chest. I wrap my arms tighter, like I can hold my organs in place.
“You get anything we can use in court out of those dreams?” he asks, softer. “Any plates, faces, logos, distinct markers that aren’t drowned in symbolism?”
“No,” I say. “Just sensations. Screeching, folding, flooding. My own lungs burning.”
“Then that’s what they are right now,” he says. “Sensations. Evidence of harm, not evidence of crime.”
“Still harm,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “Still harm.”
A silence settles, heavy but not empty. His porch light flickers once, a motion sensor confused by fog. Somewhere down the block, an automatic sprinkler system ticks on for a minute then off, watering lawns already dripping from the rain because the HOA schedule says so.
“You ever talk about this with Navarro?” he asks. “The water? The fact that your dreams and the documented footage are out of sync?”
“She thinks dreams can be symbolic,” I say. “That I’m trying to put myself in the car because that gives me control. Responsibility feels better than randomness.”
“She’s not wrong,” he says quietly.
“On paper.” I stare at his dark windows. “In practice, I don’t know where memory stops and story starts anymore.”
“Welcome to the human condition,” he says. “I write narratives too, remember. Just in reports instead of chapters.”
I remember his lips on mine in the glow of his monitors, the taste of red wine and ruined professionalism. I remember pulling back and wanting more in the same movement. Dangerous comfort is a muscle memory in my body now.
“You know what scares me most?” I ask.
“Spiders,” he says. “HOA fines. Matching neighborhood holiday wreaths.”
A small laugh escapes me, that painful kind you get at funerals. “That I feel less crazy when I talk to you,” I say. “And you might be the person bending my reality to fit your investigation.”
He looks at me for a long second. “That scares me too,” he says.
The honesty in that lands harder than any reassurance.
“Go back inside,” he adds. “Get some sleep if you can. Or at least horizontal rest, which my old therapist swore counted.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll sit a while,” he says. “Listen to the neighborhood breathe. Make sure no one crashes into our perfect little circle of ornamental trees.”
I stand, knees stiff, and move down the steps. At the bottom I pause and look back.
“If you dream anything new,” I say, “anything concrete… you’ll tell me?”
“If you do the same,” he replies.
We let that bargain sit there, unsigned but real.
I cross the wet street. The fog parts around my shins and then closes, erasing my path like I was never there. At my door, my reflection stares at me from the glass panel: pale face, damp hair curling, eyes too wide. Behind that reflection, I catch the faint shape of Liam still on his steps, cigarette ember a tiny red planet in the dark.
I rest my hand on the doorknob and hold it there, suspended between window and house, between shared nightmare and solitary bed.
If our dreams are converging, I think, either we are moving toward the truth together—or I am letting the key suspect rewrite my mind from the inside out.
I go inside without deciding which possibility terrifies me more.