Everything was wrong.

Bree’s expectation was that, just like every other morning, she’d wake to find herself in her husband’s strong arms. In the first dreamlike seconds of waking, she’d believed that that was exactly where she was, snuggling back into the hard body behind her that made her feel so safe and so loved. Only, her smile began to wane as the fog of sleep lifted more with each passing second, and the discrepancies piled up. There was a softness against her back that she didn’t recognise, and the arms around her—well, yes, they were strong, and they were muscular, but they were softer as well. And then, she noticed the difference in the rhythmic breathing behind her, followed by the tickle of hair that wasn’t her own against her neck, and then that was finally when the mounting panic became an inescapable urge to wriggle away and look at who, exactly, was holding her.

A woman. It was a woman. A strange woman was in her bed, holding her with a lover’s familiarity.

Bree let out a clipped little scream. “Peter?!”

The woman in her bed frowned and peered at Bree through bleary eyes that were still heavy with sleep. “Babe…? Was that you?”

“Babe,” Bree echoed, shaking her head. “Who the fuck are you?! Where’s Peter?”

“Oh, shit.”

Whatever Bree had said, the woman in her bed seemed to have been sufficiently alarmed by it to bolt out from under the covers and towards the bedside table. Bree was subjected to a glimpse of her naked body before wrenching her eyes shut and stumbling backwards against the dresser all at once. The framed photos sitting atop were shaken in the process, some falling to the ground—she opened her eyes again to try and prevent them from falling, only to be aghast at what she found: they were all the locations she remembered, but instead of herself and Peter, they featured herself and the stranger who was now rifling through the bedside table muttering about how “it’s all okay,” and that she “shouldn’t worry.”

“What the fuck is happening,” Bree breathed, fingernails digging into wood. “Get the fuck out of my house before I call the police! Peter! Peter, where—”

“Babe, it’s me, Jade,” she panted between expletives as she lobbed things from the table drawer onto the floor. “It’s—You’re having a flare-up, but it’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“Stop saying that everything’s going to be okay!” Bree cast her eyes around the room, hoping to find some shred of normality to cling to, but everything was wrong. This wasn’t her room. These were her things, but this wasn’t her room. “Why are you in my fucking bed?”

“Finally,” Jade hissed, procuring some kind of device that looked like an epipen filled with a clear liquid before rounding the bed toward Bree.

In response, Bree brandished a hairbrush, eyes flitting to the door just beyond Jade. “Stay the fuck back and answer me! Why are you in my fucking bed? Who the fuck are you, Jade, and where the fuck is my husband!”

Jade took a breath and held up her free hand. When she spoke again, it was slowly and quietly, which did lull Bree into an unwanted sense of comfort, but it also made her feel condescended to. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry, it’s—it’s just been a little while, um… we’ll go over it one thing at a time, okay?”

She wasn’t a fucking child. She didn’t need to be spoken down to. She wanted to admonish her for that, but the questions—the demands—were piling up, all competing for the same breath. “You’ve got some explaining to do,” Bree pressed.

“So, I’m Jade Murillo, okay? And you’re Bree Murillo. We’ve been married for over two years,” she said, starting to smile, starting to reach out with a hand, only to stop it in mid-air when Bree quivered away.

“Murillo? No, I—Listen, I’m Bree Sampson, I took my husband Peter’s surname.”

Jade nodded far more understandingly than Bree was comfortable with. “Bree, you have a condition called… it’s… well, it’s a type of cognitive-temporal misalignment, and it means that once in a while, you vividly remember a reality that doesn’t exist.” She surveyed Bree’s face before continuing. “One of the recurring features of that false reality is that you’re married to a man named Peter.”

“No, I am,” Bree insisted. “I’m a heterosexual woman married to a hard-working man with an office job, not—not—!” She let out a desperate whine. “Not some… woman with tattoos and an eyebrow piercing!”

Jade grimaced. “I know it’s really scary, Bree, but I have a medicine that the doctors gave me. It’s gonna help you feel better, okay? It’s gonna get rid of all the confusion.”

Bree cackled, shaking her head furiously. She was eyeing that gap between her and the door again. “Oh, no. No, no way, no, you’re—Peter! Peter!”

Chaos unfolded in a heartbeat. Bree lobbed the hairbrush and dashed for the door with her arm outstretched. Her heart thumped painfully in her chest. She barely made it two steps before she felt a strong arm around her waist again, yanking her backwards into Jade’s sturdy body. No amount of kicking her legs and trying to push away seemed to help. All she could hear was the thunder in her own ears interspersed with the sound of “shh, shh, shh,” the same woman who was threatening to drug her into forgetting the truth, treating her as though she were a dog who didn’t know what was good for it.

“Let me go, let me go, let me fucking go!” Bree screamed, thrashing desperately against not even both arms, just one—just one muscular arm around her waist was somehow impossible to surmount. It didn’t make sense. None of it made any sense.

“Everything’s gonna be better in a moment,” Jade cooed so softly, her voice warm like honey, and it wasn’t fair; it didn’t make sense that the woman restraining her would talk to her with such intimacy.

Jade hoisted her arm up against Bree’s midsection, effortlessly securing her grip. Bree was about to scream again, but the breath left her in a useless gasp at the same time as she felt a sharp scratch in the soft of her neck.

“Wait… I… Peter, I…”

To wake from such a realistic dream and be met with reality was a strange and jarring experience. She could count the seconds by how the clouds over her mind parted and gave way, inch by inch, to a clear blue sky. The chill of abject terror and confusion still lingered; fleeting memories haunted her of a man who seemed more and more like a stranger, but the liquid clarity coursing through her was relentless in its work, scouring his face from her thoughts and from every single memory. It had all felt so real, but the details of her life with that man were now so ephemeral, and before long, she struggled to remember what there even was to remember at all.

A mere ten seconds is all it had taken for everything she’d screamed bloody murder about to be proven as delusion, and she was left only with burning hot shame in its absence. Sniffling, the terror only truly began to fade when she recognised the warmth around her as the pleasant sanctuary of her wife’s arms. Jade was resting her chin on top of her head, rocking them both gently back and forth.

“Jade?”

“Hey, sweetheart,” her wife said. “I’m here.”

“I-I’m sorry.” Bree’s voice wavered on the edge of bursting into tears. “I’m so sorry, I-I didn’t mean any of it. I love you. I love you so much, I—”

“Shh, shh, it’s okay. I know. I love you too.”

Bree felt adrift at sea the moment her wife let go of her, but it was only in order for her to be taken by the arm, turned around, and brought back into a proper hug. Sniffling into her wife’s chest, the scent brought peace and comfort that chased away the last remnants of the nightmare. What need did she have for memories of a life never truly lived, when she could look up at her wife and see her future?