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Adare woke knowing.
She felt it in her eardrums, in the same tiny hollows above her jawbones where she felt the first big snowfall. There was a delicate variation in the atmosphere, a faint thickening of the air. During the night, while she had slept, the world had changed.
In groggy segments between snooze buttons, as she drifted in the fog of sleep and dream for the nine minutes that was both shorter and longer than itself, she dreamed of her mother.
In one of the dream fragments Myra sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress sagged and Adare felt her body roll toward the woman who was her mother and not her mother. Ethereal, with black curls flowing around her face, the dream woman had high cheekbones and a sharp, smooth chin held up and to the side, backlit by a halo of streaming white light. The woman leaned in, smoothed Adare's cheek with a cool hand, and whispered.
Please.
The whispered plea mingled with the dawn seeping under the blinds and fluttered against Adare's eyelids. She couldn't tell whether the dream woman was pleading for something, or against it. She kept her eyelids closed and willed herself back into the darkness, away from the light, away from the world beyond her dream.
