A shriek rips through the blackness.

I struggle to process it in the muddy depths of sleep. A fire alarm, maybe, or a car backfiring? It is familiarly unfamiliar, a continuous rasping cry, insisting itself on me even as I beg it to retreat.

But then my brain starts to clear and I recognise it: the rawness of my own voice, echoing back at me in the disorienting dark.

“Where is she? Where is she?”

The sound is coming from me.

I rake through the bed sheets, animalistic. “I fell asleep. I must have fallen asleep.” The pads of my hands pressing into the softness around me, searching the emptiness, finding… nothing. “She was here, right here, in my arms! Did I roll over? Did I… Oh, God, did I–”

“Beth? Beth! Elizabeth !”

At the sound of the name in full, I freeze, a Pavlovian reaction t

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