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was dreaming . She had the sudden need to get out of the room—to get out of the house—and put this disturbing news behind her.
    “You know, I need to get ready. I have a long day ahead of me.” She got up and gave her mom a kiss on the cheek. “Love you, Mom.”
    Aislen turned to head back up the stairs.
    “I love you, too, Buttercup,” her mom replied.
    Aislen stopped dead in her tracks. Her mother had never called her Buttercup before. The air in the kitchen turned electric, her skin bristled into a cloak of gooseflesh. A wave of nostalgia surged through her, the feeling that she had lost something precious, something she loved. It was the same longing ache she had felt in her dream when the unknown voice spoke to her in the desert.
    Aislen looked back at her mother, but Sabine was already looking back out the window, taking another sip of her coffee, seemingly unaware of the novelty of the pet name she spoke.
    Aislen turned and ran back up the stairs. She jumped in the shower and began scrubbing herself in the hottest water possible, trying to wash off her heebie-jeebies. She toweled off, dried her hair, and threw on a pair of scrubs.
    She stopped to check herself in the mirror. Her hair was slicked back in a neat pony, she wore no make up, and there were the damn freckles that would never fade. She leaned forward and looked closer at her reflection.
    There it was: the “butt-chin.” Strange. She had been looking at herself in the mirror for 24 years and had never noticed the shallow hollow of her chin. She reached up to the mirror and pressed the chin of her reflection.
    The warm humidity of the room suddenly chilled, dropping 20 degrees in an instant. Steam clouded over her reflection, and the mirror made a loud popping sound from the sudden shift in temperature. A tingle ran down her spine and Aislen became aware of a presence in the room with her.
    “I love your little butt-chin, Buttercup.” The voice from the dream desert whispered to her, reaching inside her chest and wrenching her heart. She wanted to run, but something—or someone—gripped her and pinned her before the mirror.
    “I’ll be here when you wake up,” a man’s mellow timbre whispered in her ear, as plain as if he were standing at her shoulder. Another deluge of emotion sluiced through her, filling her with the deepest sadness.
    There were no men in her life who would have ever touched her chin in such a way or have said such a thing. Aislen never had any boyfriends and her mom had only a very few dinner dates in all these years. They had no close, living relatives. And her father had never been in the picture.
    Well, he had been...once. Just one day. Aislen could barely remember it. She had only been three or four. But the memory pressed itself into her head now as if an invisible hand was forcing it inside.
    The memory of a small apartment, the doorbell ringing and her mom opening the door. When her mom saw who it was, she shut the door and spoke to the visitor through a narrow gap in a low voice. The person on the other side of the door spoke back, again in a low voice that Aislen could not hear. The exchange continued back and forth, the hushed, urgent tones took on a staccato rhythm.
    Aislen could tell her mother was not happy. Her voice had the same cadence and insistence that Aislen heard when her mother told her to clean her room, or to stop fussing in the car.
    Aislen heard a “no”, a “stop”, and a “don’t.” She moved closer to her mother, mostly to reassure her small self that everything was all right. She heard her mother tell the person that she wanted him to leave. A man’s voice on the other side of the door asked something with an attitude as firm as her mother. Mother kept saying “no”—a lot—and got angrier.
    “You can’t just walk out of our lives...out of her life...then just pop back out of the blue. Especially now. Aislen is old enough to know things—to remember things. This will confuse