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tree, still decorated although I myself don’t celebrate Christmas, and as I’m looking at it, the tree, in its planter tub (it’s a live tree, I discover), starts to tip over and the entire root ball comes out of the planter and the tree ends up on the floor.
    A heavy wind rises, the room is now open on one wall to the outside, I’m thinking it’s like a lanai, I’m standing next to another tree in another planter tub when the force of the wind actually snaps the trunk of this tree, completely severing the top half, which blows across the room and outside.
    Suddenly my friends are there and I’m explaining, I didn’t really break these trees, it just happened. The woman reassures me that it’s okay, the man—I have no real sense that they’re husband and wife, just a couple, I’m not even sure they’re friends.
    Anyway, I tried to reset the Christmas tree into its planter, and at that moment there were half a dozen people in the large kitchen preparation area, it’s like something out of The Great Gatsby, people milling around at individual workstations. One woman is kneading bread, and my woman friend who owns the house is working at something, maybe a salad, and she continues to reassure me that the tree damage is not at all my fault, when the man becomes Sylvester Stallone and begins to threaten me because I broke his trees.
    Another senseless violent dream.
    Okay, I woke up just as that dream ended, okay, sure, I’m breaking up a home, or…Nathan is breaking up a home. Smashing the furniture, just as he’d smashed all of Leon Begay’s property a year before, destroying Leon’s possessions after his murder, making Leon’s house chindi.
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    Naked, I went outside, dove into the swimming pool. The Glock still lay on the bottom. I’d retrieved it three times, but Nathan kept throwing it back.
    Took the Glock into the kitchen. Dreams will do that to you, push you toward protection from what’s in the dreams. Didn’t even bother turning on a light, I’d stripped the Glock down so many times. I laid everything out on the black granite countertop, pieces of the Glock.
    Lost somewhere after I played with the slide mechanism for ten minutes or so, and I turned on the kitchen TV, flipped through channels, and came across a scene from Bambi, my god, I hadn’t seen that movie in years.
    Distracted after a while, not really caring about Thumper on the ice, I got Mary Emich’s file again, read through it, looking for any reason to just blow her off. She still meant nothing to me, except…
    I wanted my PI license.
    That’s what it came down to, so I made that choice. I’d let Nathan leave without me, I’d do the minimal amount of work to satisfy Bob Gates, I’d rejoin Nathan and make things right again between us.
    I could control anything, I believed.
    Without realizing what he’d done, Bob Gates stuck me in a bad place. If I took his offer, Nathan might leave me for keeps. If I went with Nathan, not only might I not get my PI license back, but the state licensing bureau might look into my past arrest record that I’d never revealed when applying for the license.
    Stuck with conflicts between three new cases.
    Case file: I investigate bad cop in TPD.
    Case file: I investigate my love for Nathan, willingness to compromise same.
    Case file: I consider hacking into state PI licensing bureau files, and whatever other databases were involved, to wipe out digital records of my past.
    I didn’t like my choices.
    What PI investigates herself?
    I was losing control of my life.
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    I went back into the bedroom and laid beside Nathan. Snuggled my head onto his naked belly and Jesus Christ, I don’t believe it, I swear I’m sleeping but I’m aware, I am lucidly aware of walking through another dream.
    At last, a dream where I’m actually going to visit somebody I know, except…I