The nightmare always started the same way. Sunshine warmed my face and I couldn’t stop smiling. My son, Wyatt, walked beside me, his sweet little face excited as I took him to his favorite place in the world, the park near our apartment.
I wore a bright yellow and white striped sundress, one my mother and Wyatt had picked out for me on Mother’s Day. Yellow daisies with green stems were embroidered into the hem. Wyatt’s little blond head barely came to my waist, and his hand was warm and soft, so small and sweet in my own.
His father was long gone, a college boyfriend who’d heard the wordpregnant and bolted like a coward. Not that it had been a big loss. The sex had been lackluster. No spark. No one had ever managed to light my fire. I hadn’t heard from him, nor seen him since, and I refused to put his name on Wyatt’s birth certificate. To me, he’d just been a sperm donor who couldn’t get me off.
Wyatt was mine, and I would do anything for him. Lie, cheat, steal, kill. He was my baby with pale blue eyes and dimples that made my chest ache.
Birds sang and a light breeze stirred the top of the trees. Wyatt lifted his head and smiled up at me…my heart nearly burst with love, and everything shifted.
We were in the car. Screeching tires. Explosion of glass. My baby screaming, then sobbing…then silent.
Blood. Everywhere.
The hospital, stark white walls and frowning nurses with pity in their eyes.
Wyatt’s small, broken body lying unconscious in the recovery room, the doctor telling me he might lose his leg. Never walk without pain. Never run. Never play on the playground he loved so much.
My heart pounded, as it always did, but I knew this dream well. When I looked around, I expected to see my exhausted mother sleeping in the cramped chair in the corner of Wyatt’s hospital room wearing wrinkled clothing and worry lines around her sharp blue eyes. Wyatt’s eyes. He’d gotten them from her.
Instead of the hospital room and my mother’s worried expression, a man stood behind me, his dark eyes looked as confused as I felt.
My hand burned, the odd birthmark I’d always had itching and red hot as if I’d been stung by a wasp. It hurt, but not badly. More…startling.
“Who are you?” he asked, his voice a dark rumble in my dream.
I blinked slowly and the hospital room faded. Wyatt faded until it was just me…andhim. And God help me, he was hot. Sex-on-a-stick, I want to lick him all over, hot.
As dreams went, this was much better than Hospital 101, the dream I had almost every night. I knew that in the real world Wyatt was safe in his bed, that the car accident had been three months ago, that my mother was watching over him until I could return from this dangerous, desperate assignment. Wyatt wasn’t here. This wasn’t real. None of this was real.
But the man stood, motion
