Chapter Twenty-Nine

Scriiiiiiiitch.

The ending of The Dream is so loud I wake convinced it's happening in real time. I'm in a tent, after all, its walls sloping to the ground beside me. I sit up and whip my head back and forth, checking each side of the tent, certain I'll see a slash running from tip to grass.

Both are unblemished. Just two rectangles of orange fabric brightened by the predawn light.

Next to me, my phone springs to life with a familiar sound.

Ping!

Opening the trail cam app, I'm greeted by the sight of a loose sheet of paper caught on the breeze and skating across the lawn. The trail cam captured it mid-flight, the page hovering half an inch above the grass.

Odd.

I search for my pen and notebook, both of which had been in the tent with me when I went to sleep. I can't find them, even after looking through everything else in the tent. Under the pillow. Inside the sleeping bag. An anxious knot forms in my chest when, instead of the pen or notebook, I spot another single sheet of paper.

It sits near the foot of the sleeping bag, right next to the tent's flaps. When I pick it up, I notice how one edge of the page is ragged, like it's been torn from the notebook. When I turn it over, I see three scribbled words that send fear streaking through me.

HAKUNA MATATA DUDE

I find another torn page just outside the tent.

And still more pages farther into the yard.

Dozens of them.

Scattered across the patio.

Covering the grass.

All of them bearing the same phrase that seems like it's both mocking me and crying out for help.

HAKUNA MATATA DUDE

I stumble around the yard, gathering the pages, clutching them to my chest. One has somehow gotten snagged in the low-hanging branches of a tree on the edge of the woods. As I grab it and stuff it with the others, I spot the notebook itself sitting nearby on the forest floor. All but a few pages have been torn out. I pick it up, my gut churning.

These were some of my deepest, darkest thoughts, written down in the middle of the night. Now they've been defaced, scribbled over, tossed across the lawn. If this is Billy's doing, it's crueler than I ever expected of him.

And if it's my doing, as Ashley suspects, then I'm seriously fucked in the head. Because I have no memory of doing this. Nor can I think of any reason why I would do it.

But if it wasn't me, and it wasn't Billy, then who the hell was it? The only way to find out is to, as sportscasters used to say when I was a kid watching Jets games with my dad, go to the videotape. Or, in my case, the trail cam.

I return to the tent and my phone, which now shows several new photos taken by the trail cam, all of them depicting me gathering up the loose pages torn from my notebook. I swipe past them to the photo I saw this morning—the single page gliding over the grass. The one before that, taken several hours earlier, shows a raccoon crossing the lawn on the edge of the woods. After that comes another picture of me, an unflattering ass pic as I crawled into the tent late last night.

Between those three images is…nothing.

Either the trail cam malfunctioned, conveniently fritzing out for a few hours, or someone—Billy? me?—snuck up behind the camera and turned it off while the notebook was stolen and destroyed.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect it was Billy, because the time stamp on the most recent photo displays a very important date.

July 15.

Thirty years to the day that Billy was taken.

No wonder he resorted to such extreme tactics. He wasn't being cruel. He was being urgent. All in an attempt to emphasize the importance of this day. And those three words on every page? His final words? I suspect they're to remind me of everything that happened on this night thirty years ago.

Not that I need reminding.

I remember everything.

Everything but one vital, missing detail.

I'm still looking at the time stamp on the phone when it hits me—the solution I've been circling around ever since that first baseball landed in the backyard. In fact, it's been right there for decades, visiting me at night on a regular basis.

It's not enough to simply keep having The Dream.

If I'm going to remember—truly, irrefutably know—what happened that night, I'm going to need more than that.

Instead of having The Dream, I need to relive it.