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the city.
    Then, last year a new set of vivid nighttime visions plagued her. She dreamt repeatedly that she was lying in bed next to Geoffrey, but there was another person lying between them, facing away from her. Upon awakening, she’d find only Geoffrey. The vision recurred until one night Geoffrey’s body was intertwined with the interloper’s. Marianne’s dream self shook the shoulder of the person between them. The stranger’s head rotated on her neck to face Marianne, grinning with kiss-swollen lips. Marianne screamed and flung herself backwards.  
    She awoke with a jerk, her heart pounding. She must have made a noise because Geoffrey was staring at her in the semi darkness, sleepy and irritated at being woken. “What’s the matter?”
    Shaken she asked, “Who is she? Who are you sleeping with?”  
    “What? What are you talking about?” He sat up straighter.
    “I dreamt you were with someone else,” she insisted. “Who is it?”
    A look of panic crossed his handsome features momentarily, and he said, “No one, baby. Only you. You having funny dreams again? You did that in college, and the shrink said they were the product of an overactive imagination. You’re just stressed.”
    The reminder of that unpleasant experience in college woke her the rest of the way with a jolt and stopped her tongue. In their senior year at college she’d made the mistake of telling him she had dreamt he was conspiring with a professor to overlook blatant plagiarism on his undergrad thesis and emerge with an A in the class, to boot. He’d looked scared and then dragged her to student counseling. After one session in which Geoffrey had talked a lot, and the young counselor had tried to convince her she was making things up to get attention, she’d never mentioned her ability to dream true again. Rumors at the end of the semester hinted that she’d been right.
    Last year, though, the nightmare had upset her so much she’d just blurted it out, although she wished she hadn’t said anything. She might not have had to live through six months of hell.
    A month later, during Geoffrey’s office Christmas party, she’d seen him fondling Sandra, his buxom coworker, in his darkened office. He’d tried to deny it, but Marianne had gotten mad and not given in. He became more and more bullying, first reading her electronic and postal mail then trying to buy her back with expensive gifts. Any time she tried to stand up to him, he’d get furiously angry, intimidating her, and she’d back down, cry, and apologize. For a while she just wanted things to return to the old way when he loved her. He insisted she not mention his indiscretion to anyone they knew, which seemed crazy to her since everyone seemed to know already. At last she could stand it no longer and demanded a divorce.  
    In the end, he agreed to a generous settlement, so he wouldn’t look bad to his boss and the rest of the company. He hinted to everyone that it was Marianne’s desire to grow and move on, not his indiscretion that drove the proceedings. Privately, he continued to intimidate her or buy her silence with sudden gifts.
    She moved out of their posh apartment on the Upper West Side and into a much cheaper place. When the ink on the divorce papers was dry, she thought it was over and done. Within a week he began turning up at their old haunts, sometimes with Sandra, sometimes alone. It began to feel like he was following her everywhere, mocking her with his new relationship and his success. She stopped going to the familiar places and sought out new ones, but he’d turn up there too after a few days. The dreams started again with a shadowy figure relentlessly pursuing her no matter where she went and waking her with a growing sense of fear.
    When an old client turned her down for a new contract for vague reasons, she suspected somehow Geoffrey had been involved. He was going to harass her until she gave up or cracked up. Her mom had been sympathetic and