The first thing is the sound. Tires screaming on wet asphalt, that high, animal screech that makes your teeth ache. Rain slamming the windshield in sheets. Wipers going manic, useless. “Emily, look at me.” His voice cuts through everything. Low. Steady. Like he’s standing right next to my ear and inside my chest at the same time. I turn my head. I always turn my head. He’s driving, one hand tight on the wheel, knuckles pale, the other reaching across the bench seat for my fingers. Yellow lines flash past under the headlights. The world is just black and rain and those lines and his hand. I don’t know his name. I know the curve of his mouth when he tries not to smile. I know the tiny pale scar at his jawline, like an old cut. I know the smell of his hoodie—salt and smoke and something like cedar. I know the way my whole body exhale-relaxes when his fingers lace with mine, like this is home. “You hear me?” he says. “This time you don’t let go.” The words punch a hole in my lungs. “What?” My voice sounds wrong, like it’s coming from underwater. His eyes flick to me. Dark, lit up for a second by an oncoming truck’s headlights. There’s something desperate in them. Angry, too. Not at me. At…everything. “You always let go,” he says. “You always wake up.” I try to pull my hand back, but his grip tightens. Warm. Solid. Real. “I don’t—” I start. The truck appears out of nowhere. Headlights. White, blinding, swallowing the windshield. Horn blaring. I don’t have time to scream. The impact is a sideways punch from God. Metal shrieks. The world flips, slow and sickening. Glass explodes around us like sharp rain. My body yanks against the seat belt. My hand tears out of his. For a fraction of a second, everything slows. We’re weightless. Floating. The cab is a snow globe of glass and blood. He’s still holding on to me. “Emily!” he shouts. Not Em. Emily. It sounds like a promise and a warning at once. “Don’t—” I feel it. That instinct, like a muscle memory. Terror slamming through me. The heat. The smell of gasoline. The animal part of me shrieking run. And my fingers—my traitor fingers—open. I let go. His face changes as my hand slips from his. A flash of something I can’t bear to look at—betrayal, or maybe just pure hurt. He reaches for me as we spin, but he’s already falling away, pulled by gravity and force and fate. “You did it again,” he says, voice tearing through the sound of metal. “You keep leaving me.” Then the world hits us like a wall and everything goes black. I jerk awake with a choke, half-sitting, heart slamming so hard I’m sure it’s going to burst out of my chest. For a second, I don’t know where I am. The smell of gasoline clings to the back of my throat. My right hand is curled in a claw, nails dug so deep into my palm it feels like bone. Then the fluorescent hum hits me. The low beep of monitors through the thin door. Somebody coughing down the hall. The chemical sting of disinfectant over stale coffee. Break room. ER. Night shift. Reality slams back in. I’m on the sagging couch, hospital-issued scratchy blanket twisted around my legs. The little wall clock above the microwave says 3:17 a.m. I swallow hard and force my fingers open. A crescent of red wells up in the center of my palm where I’ve broken skin. My hand is shaking. “Jesus,” I whisper. Not again. I press the heel of my left hand to my sternum, like I can shove my heart back into its cage. It doesn’t work. It never works. Same man. Same voice. Same goddamn road. Every night. I wipe my palm on my scrub pants and stand, knees wobbling. The tile is cold through my thin sneakers. I move to the sink, turn on the tap, let lukewarm water run over my hand until the blood thins and spirals down the drain. My reflection in the metal paper towel dispenser looks like a bad copy of myself. Dark hair in a messy knot, escaped strands plastered to my forehead with sweat. Eyes too big, too wide, that frantic animal look still there. “You’re fine,” I tell the girl in the metal. “You’re tired. That’s all.” She doesn’t look convinced. The door cracks open. Mia leans in, blond ponytail lopsided, mascara smudged under her eyes, holding a chart and a half-eaten granola bar. “Sleeping Beauty,” she says around a bite. “You’re up. Good. We just got another drunk with a head lac in bay four and I’m done playing babysitter.” I turn my right hand inward, hide the fresh mark against my scrub top. “How long was I out?” “Forty minutes. Maybe.” She squints at me. “You look like hell, Carter.” “Love you too.” She steps fully into the room and kicks the door shut with her heel. “Nightmares again?” She says it lightly, like she’s asking if I want coffee. I hate that there’s a rightness to the question. “Just the usual,” I lie. “Trauma brain doing trauma brain things.” “Uh-huh.” She eyes me, then tosses me the granola bar. I catch it with my left hand. My right throbs in protest. “Eat. You’re white as the walls.” I fumble with the wrapper. “Busy out there?” “Friday night in Seattle? What do you think?” She rattles off cases—OD, domestic, a kid with an asthma attack. Background noise. I half-listen, half-hear the echo of a man’s voice in my skull. You keep leaving me. I shove the granola bar into my mouth to shut it up. “Hey.” Mia bumps my shoulder with hers. “You sure you’re good to go back out? I can tell Reed you need another ten.” “I’m fine,” I say too fast. She lifts a brow. “Noah was asking where you were, by the way.” Something tightens low in my stomach. “Why?” “Because he’s a control freak and can’t stand when anyone’s not exactly where he thinks they should be?” She grins. “Or because he’s secretly in love with you and this is his weird way of flirting. Jury’s out.” I snort. The idea is ridiculous. And also…not entirely unpleasant. “Doctor Reed is in love with his charts,” I say. “And maybe his stethoscope.” Mia wiggles her eyebrows. “Yeah, well, he can auscultate me any day.” “Gross.” She laughs and swings the door open. “Come on, dream girl. Back to the circus.” Dream girl. The words stick to my skin. The hallway is a blur of scrubs and gurneys and harsh white light. I slide back into motion on autopilot—check vitals, change dressings, smile at families, dodge vomit. The usual. By four a.m., my heart rate has mostly come down. My hand only throbs when I flex it. I’m coming out of room nine when I see him. Noah Reed is at the nurses’ station, bent over a tablet. Dark hair pushed back off his forehead, jaw shadowed with stubble he hasn’t had time to shave. He’s still in his navy scrub top, sleeves pushed up, revealing the veins on his forearms. He looks tired. Everybody does at this hour. But there’s something else in the set of his shoulders. A tension that feels familiar. He glances up as I approach, like he felt me before he saw me. “There you are,” he says. His voice is low, even. Not the same as the man in my dreams. But there’s a note—some quiet steadiness—that hits the same part of me. I hate that. “Present and accounted for,” I say. “What’s up?” “Bay four’s sutured. I need you to keep an eye on the kid in six, his sats keep dipping.” His gaze flicks to my hands. “And you’re bleeding.” I freeze. “What?” He nods at my right hand. I look down. A tiny smear of red has seeped through the scrub fabric where I pressed my palm. “Shit.” I curl my fingers into a fist. “What happened?” He steps around the counter, close enough that I can smell coffee and that sharp hospital-soap scent on his skin. “Paper cut,” I say automatically. His mouth twitches like he doesn’t buy it. “Let me see.” “It’s nothing.” “Emily.” My name in his mouth does something weird to my chest. It’s not the same as in the dream. It’s smoother, flatter. But the syllables still scrape over some old place inside me. “I have patients,” I say, too sharp. “So do I,” he answers, just as sharp. “And I’d rather not have one of them be you. Two seconds.” He holds out his hand. Long fingers. Clean nails. A faint white line across the back of his knuckles, like an old burn. Something in my stomach flips. “Fine,” I mutter, and place my right hand in his. His skin is warm. Solid. Real. For half a heartbeat, another hand overlays it in my mind—callused, rougher, the wheel vibrating under his grip, rain beating on glass. I almost hear tires screaming again. I blink hard. Noah gently uncurls my fingers. The crescent cut in my palm is already clotting, but it looks angrier now, red against my pale skin. “You do this in your sleep?” he asks quietly. My head snaps up. “What?” He glances at my face, then back at my hand. “Mia mentioned…nightmares.” Of course she did. Heat floods my cheeks. Shame, anger, both. “My mental health is not exactly nurses’ station gossip material.” His jaw tightens. “That’s not what I—” “Forget it,” I say. “It’s nothing. I got startled, that’s all.” “By what?” You keep leaving me. I pull my hand back. “By you interrogating me at four in the morning, apparently.” A muscle in his cheek jumps. For a second, we just stare at each other, the noise of the ER dimming around us. There’s a question in his eyes I don’t want to answer, and a mirror I don’t want held up to my own. He looks away first. “Just…be careful, Carter.” He always calls me Carter at work. Emily in rare, softer moments. The shift between the two makes me feel like I’m glitching between timelines. “I’m always careful,” I say. He gives a short, humorless huff. “That’s what worries me.” Then he’s gone, back into the stream of movement, and I’m left standing there with my heart doing that uneven flutter, my palm stinging, my brain trying to shove the dream back into its box. By the time my shift ends at seven, I feel like I’ve been awake for a week. Outside, the sky is that gray-blue that never quite becomes daylight. A misty drizzle hangs in the air, turning the streetlights into smeared halos. The air tastes like salt and exhaust. I zip my jacket up to my chin and start the fifteen-minute walk home. The city is quiet, just a few early commuters, a distant ferry horn from the bay. Halfway down the block, I pass the billboard. It’s old, the colors faded, edges curled. An ad for some “Historic Lighthouse Tours.” The picture is of a weather-beaten lighthouse on a rocky spit, waves crashing around it, the sky low and bruised. My feet stop. My breath does, too. I know that lighthouse. The angle. The cracked paint. The missing railing on the top balcony. It’s behind him in the dream. Way off, a blurred shape beyond the wet highway and the falling car. But I know it, the way you know the layout of your childhood kitchen in the dark. You’re tired, I tell myself. That’s all. You probably saw the billboard before. Your brain borrowed it. That’s what brains do. Except— I’ve been walking this route for two years. I’ve never noticed this billboard. I would have. I’m obsessive like that. A gust of wind blows mist into my face, cold and sharp. I drag my eyes away, force my legs to move. The old red-brick apartment building looms up ahead, windows dark, the lobby light a weak yellow rectangle. Inside, the elevator grumbles and shudders as it drags me up to the fourth floor. The fluorescent in the hallway flickers, buzzing like an angry wasp. My key sticks in the lock like always. Home is small and quiet. Beige walls. Secondhand furniture. A sink full of dishes I haven’t touched in two days. I drop my bag, kick off my shoes, and stand there in the silence, listening for…something. Nothing but the hum of the fridge. I tell myself I should shower. Eat. Do literally anything but crawl into bed and close my eyes. I go straight to the bedroom. The blackout curtains make it almost midnight-dark. I peel off my scrubs, pull on an old T-shirt, and slide under the covers. The sheets are cold, smelling faintly of detergent and the ghost of my own sweat. I grab my phone from the nightstand and open the Notes app. The last entry stares back at me. DREAM MAN: - same road - same truck - scar on jaw - said “you always let go” My thumb hovers over the keyboard. I should stop. That’s what my therapist said last year, before I quit going. Stop feeding it. Don’t give it that much space. I type anyway. tonight: lighthouse? My chest feels tight. Stupid. It’s a dream. It’s neurons misfiring. It’s not— Sleep hits me like a trapdoor opening under my feet. One second I’m staring at my phone screen. The next, I’m standing on the side of that same endless road, rain soaking through my T-shirt, hair plastered to my neck. The highway stretches out in both directions, slick and black and empty. He’s there, leaning against the rusted blue pickup truck like he’s been waiting hours. Hood up, hands in his pockets. When he lifts his head, rain runs down the curve of his cheekbone. “You finally made it,” he says. My throat closes. “I just fell asleep.” He laughs once, bitter and soft. “For you. For me, it’s been…longer.” I move toward him without thinking. My body knows the distance, the way my feet fit the cracks in the asphalt. My hand aches where I cut it. “I saw a lighthouse,” I blurt. He goes still. The rain seems to pause in the air between us. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “You did.” His eyes flick over my face, searching, hopeful and resigned all at once. “So what are you going to do this time, Em?” he asks. “Hold on? Or let go?” The question slices through me. My hand throbs, real pain in a not-real place. “This isn’t real,” I whisper. “You’re not real.” He steps closer, close enough that I can feel the heat of him through my soaked shirt. His fingers brush my wrist, exactly where Noah held me earlier. The same spot. The same pressure. “Tell that to your hand,” he says. I look down. There, in the dream, across my palm, is the exact same crescent of raw, angry flesh. My stomach drops. I jerk awake with a gasp. My bedroom ceiling looms above me in gray morning light. The rain is real now, tapping at the window. My heart is pounding. My phone is on my chest, screen gone dark. I lift my right hand. The cut is there. Same shape. Same place. Beading a fresh dot of blood. I stare at it until my vision blurs. Somewhere, far off in the building, a door slams. Footsteps echo down the hall outside my apartment, steady and slow, stopping right outside my door. A knuckle raps once. Twice. “Em,” a man’s voice says through the thin wood. Low. Steady. So familiar my bones recognize it. “Open up.”