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worried that I'd forgotten to check, and would go to quadruple-check that the door was locked and the windows were secure. All so that this wouldn't happen. I wouldn't wake up, terrified because uninvited guests had decided to drop by. My heart took its time slowing down to a steady canter. I raised my knees to my chest and blinked my eyes clear, tightly weaving together my fingers over my knees as I waited patiently for this scenario to play itself out. If things ran true to form, Kyle would come racing up the stairs and into the bedroom any moment now to herd out his children like a shepherd recapturing two stray sheep. Then he'd offer me a genuine and heartfelt apology that was essentially meaningless. Yes, he was sorry, but it'd happened again: his children were inside my home. I was of the mind that woven into the letters of sorry was the meaning: “it won't happen again.” If it did happen again, you probably weren't that sorry.
    Maybe I will ask him for the spare keys to my flat back, I thought, because any more of these little “visits” and my life expectancy is going to be severed in half.
    A minute passed. And another. No Kyle.
    I glanced beyond the children, into what I could see of the living room, just in case he was lurking in there, too embarrassed to cross the threshold of my room. Nothing. It was empty.
    I refocused on the children. Jaxon had stuck his thumb in his mouth. I'd never seen a six-year-old boy do that. His other hand worried at the bottom of his Spider-Man pa-jama top, twisting it around and around his forefinger, as though trying to burrow into the thin stretch- jersey material. His navy-green eyes, ringed with shades of brown, were glazed over and were staring fixedly at a point near my feet.Summer had Hoppy, her blue bunny, in her hands and was twisting at Hoppy's left ear. Twisting it forwards, twisting it backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards, backwards, as though trying to wring something out of it. She was facing me but her eyes weren't seeing me. They were staring through me, focused on the headboard behind me. Her cheeks were marked by thin, shiny tracks of tears.
    Oh.
    In that instant I knew I should be throwing back the covers, spinning my legs over the side of the bed and stepping down onto the rug beside the bed, standing up, pulling on clothes, going over to the main house.
    I knew what I should be doing, but I couldn't. This was how nightmares began. How I became immersed in a horror I couldn't stop. A moment when the sense of disaster began whispering in my ear, writing across my chest. If I moved, it might become a reality. If I didn't move, I could be wrong. Kids were always being woken up by bad dreams that made them cry. Dreams that drove them out of their beds and into their parents’ rooms. I could be wrong about this.
    “What's the matter?” I asked.
    Summer rubbed at her eye with the palm of her hand. She was so pale the dark green and blue veins that branched out from her neck and curved over her jaw line stood out like jagged, badly penned tattoos. Jaxon continued to suck at his thumb, his line of sight never straying from my feet.
    Even as I willed her to say “I had a bad dream” my heart rate began to gallop. Speeding in my chest, faster than it had when I turned on the light a few minutes ago. It battered in my ears, pounded in my head, drummed in my throat. Please say bad dream, please say bad dream.
    “You have to come to our house,” Summer said, her voiceso weary it sounded as though it was about to collapse under the weight of its troubles.
    “Why?” I asked.
    Her eyes persisted in staring through me, as her small rosebud lips opened. “You have to come to our house,” Summer repeated. “My daddy won't wake up.”

CHAPTER 5
    W ill he be blue?
    Lying on the sofa? On the floor? Was it his heart? Did someone get in the house and do something to him? Did he decide it was all too much and end it all? Will he be cold? How long has he been gone?