A week after the gala, Leo’s nights became a blur of images. He would wake up tangled in his sheets, heart pounding, from nightmares that were less about fear and more about a persistent, unsettling familiarity.
During the day, these visions bled into his waking hours. He saw a dusty room, cobweb-laden, within an old cottage he barely remembered visiting, an ancestral Holloway property they were rarely allowed near.
In the center of this dream-room, a heavy wooden chest sat, solid and dark. It wasn’t menacing, but it pulsed with an insistent, silent pull.
I watched him, pale and distant.
“It’s just the stress, Leo,” I told him, trying to sound reassuring. “Too much happened at the party.”
He shook his head, his eyes fixed on something I couldn’t see.
“It’s real, Mama,” he whispered, his voice small. “The chest… I have to find it.”
My own exhaustion made me want to dismiss it. I saw him running his hand over the worn fabric of his pajama pants, a new nervous habit.
The dismissal felt like a tiny ache in my chest, a small cruelty I inflicted on him out of my own fear and worry. But I had so much else to think about.
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