I don't put much stock in dreams. When it comes to things like that, I'm kind of an agnostic. There are things that have happened in my life that feel like they could hold significance, as if guided by the invisible hand of some unknown, unknowable presence. I'm not willing to say outright that they don't matter or couldn't possibly have a paranormal origin, but I also can't bring myself to assign so much power that I let the belief in such things dictate how I see the world.

Maybe that makes me a fencerider. I feel the same way about God, never trusting myself enough to confirm or deny either way. It's above my paygrade to make that kind of call.

Recently, I had a strange dream. I've been plagued by hypnagogia for most of my life. That's a very fancy way of saying I have hallucinations whenever falling asleep or just waking up. They're usually called waking dreams. I'll find myself sitting up in bed dreaming over the room around me, seeing strange environments or unsettling figures made from the play of furniture and shadow. I sometimes get up and walk around in this state. Once when I was a teenager, I dreamed that the entire house had been transformed into a mass of melting plastic and there were animals and objects stuck in the goo. I woke up while trying to pry a mewling calico cat from the goop, only to find myself staring at a blank spot on the wall.

You can probably see why I don't pay much attention to dreams at this point.

This dream, however, was different from my usual spate of weird but generally innocuous hallucinations. I was lying immobile in bed. At the doorway, there was a man. The door opened from the wrong side and the man was tall. Impossibly tall, too big to fit as he stooped to peer into the room. His skin was dark, but not in a natural way with undertones and flecks of freckle or pigment variation. It was just…black. I couldn't see what he was wearing but the outfit looked white and blocky, as if a sack draped over his massive frame. If he had hair, it didn't make sense, just a mass of color and shape atop his head. Was it…water? Fire? It was organic and moving, that's all I can say.

From my bed, I could see his smile, but his face was wrong. It was melting, moving, the eyes and nose drifting across the plane of his skull. His mouth remained in a grin. He spoke but I couldn't hear it, a garble of sounds that didn't sound like a language. It didn't sound like anything, just a low, murmured tone spoken through closed teeth.

Eventually, accepting the man's presence as a dream, I drifted back to sleep. When I woke up again, he was still there. Smiling.

I told my girlfriend Melissa about it the next morning as soon as she woke up. It rattled me in a way dreams rarely did. I usually know what I dream about and why. My anxieties wind themselves like tinker toys to get ready for the night, playing through familiar themes and ideas that I know bother me. I've managed to steel myself against it over the years. I think they call it lucid dreaming? I'm not sure if that's the correct way to phrase it. But when a dream gets too far-fetched or scary or even annoying, my dream-self can usually snap myself out of it by announcing that I'm dreaming within the dream.

Sometimes I wake up immediately, like I've pulled the emergency ejection lever and been catapulted out. Others, I don't wake up but continue to move through the events of the dream unbothered by them despite my unconscious mind's best efforts to embarrass or scare me. Those dreams are honestly pretty funny, like I'm trapped in a game of chicken with my own brain.

This time, I couldn't recognize the man. He didn't look like anything I'd seen, or remembered seeing, in my waking hours. He didn't seem tied to anything I'd been worried about lately. He just didn't…seem like he came from me. You know? He was alien to me, like he came from someone else's dream, or got lost on the way to haunting someone down the hall from my apartment. Like he had nothing to do with me, and I was just there, half-awake in bed. Just passing by.

Melissa said that sounded very weird. I agreed, then went about my day. But it still bothered me to have a dream about a man who wasn't meant for me. It felt violating, in a way. Not for me, but for the person for whom the dream seemed to be for.

A few days later, while I was working, my girlfriend sent me a frantic series of text messages. Her aunt Bernie was in the hospital due to a sudden and very scary cardiac episode. I like Bernie quite a lot and enjoy spending time at her house for holidays and family get-togethers. She's anxious and all over the place but takes absolutely no shit and laughs all the time. She's also the rock of her family, mother to four children and grandmother to five, three of whom are babies. The thought of something happening to her honestly scared me.

Melissa and her mom went to the hospital immediately. I couldn't leave work but sent my love and well wishes. Bernie was okay, and is still okay now, on medication to control swollen blood vessels in her heart. The next day, after all the tests and exploratory procedures were completed, I went to the hospital with everyone to visit Bernie. She was in good spirits, laughing her big laugh, though the doctors still weren't entirely sure what was wrong yet. We hung around for a while talking and laughing. Then Melissa mentioned that Bernie had a strange dream about a strange man in her bedroom doorway a few nights prior. Maybe a premonition, or a warning.

I felt cold and said, “Oh wow. That's crazy.”

Melissa mentioned that I had the same dream about a strange man. Bernie waved her hand knowingly.

“You see?” she said. “There you go.”

Simple as that.

I really don't know what to make of it. I haven't dreamed anything like that before or since. But despite how ominous the man was, it wasn't the worst dream I've ever had. The worst dream I've ever had still upsets me. A part of me wishes someone was there to wave it away. To sweep the whole thing aside and make it feel less painful.

A part of me wishes I could forget it ever happened at all.

In the spring of 2000, my family made the move from Florida to Texas, when my father was transferred from Miami back to his old work hub in Dallas. I was born and raised in Texas but for a summer spent at the family farmhouse in Missouri in 1996 and a year spent living at the southernmost part of Florida. Before that year-long detour near the ocean, residing in a drab working class neighborhood converted from former Air Force base housing, I lived in a one-road town in Wise County, Texas. Our local public library was a double wide trailer parked in a ditch. I was used to the sticks and backroads, living in places you only drive through but don't stop in.

Florida threw me for a loop. We lived near some strawberry fields, where a flock of peacocks had taken up residence after the animals escaped the zoo during Hurricane Andrew. It rained every day and the humidity was more than just a little unpleasant for someone who came up in the bone-dry plains. I had to keep an eye out for alligators in the canals so they wouldn't eat my retriever, Lily, because sometimes they would poke their heads out as you walked or drove by. I did get to see the manatees at the shore down the road from the house, though. That was pretty nice.

When we came back to Texas, I was even more confused to find myself in yet another drab suburb. This one was…cold. I don't know how else to say it. No matter how hot it got, or how close the sun felt as it hung swollen from the cloudless sky, it just always looked like winter. Brown grass, bare trees. Maybe that's just how I saw it. How it felt to be there.

The little gray house was a tight fit for a family of five, my parents, my younger brothers, and myself. It had brown wood paneling on the walls that made the house feel even smaller. There weren't a lot of windows and the few that were there didn't let in much light. I wanted to live in the old farmhouse from my one-road town, with its big rooms and windows. Light everywhere and a big yard outside to run around with the dogs in. I wanted tall trees.

I couldn't hide my dislike for the house, but no one else did, either. The move from Florida was abrupt for reasons I didn't quite yet understand. My father's job situation changed against his wishes, as the result of a conspiracy against him by the regional manager. Nothing was ever his own fault, you see. Everything that ever happened was the result of someone being spiteful or not appreciating him enough. This is what I was told at the time, anyway, seated around the living room with my family to listen to the story of how my father had been brought so low as to be transferred back to Texas.

With that, he flew back to Texas to find a rental house on short notice and get set up to go back to work. My mother, my brothers, and I stayed behind and readied ourselves to pack up again. We moved across the country without seeing the new house first, throwing everything into a moving van only to find a home that didn't fit it. My mother was angry at my father for picking the house. My father was angry at us for not liking it. I was thirteen and just trying to survive the whole thing, my father's demands of gratitude and my mother's constant scoffs and sighs.

Because tensions were high and the house was uncomfortable, rumors began to circulate about it being haunted. By that, I mean my brothers (who were about eleven and nine, respectively) began to talk about strange noises they heard at night and waking up to sounds of screaming. My mother said she saw figures late at night while she was up watching TV and drinking beer. Surely, they insisted, something was in the house. There was just no other explanation.

They said this about every house we lived in, of course. It was a peculiar pattern. From the old farmhouse in Wise County to the house we would later move into just a year later, we've been beset by the dead. I don't know how the belief began, only that it always did. Perhaps it started with my mother's sightings and spread to my brothers, who were eager to believe in something creepy. Perhaps it started with my brothers telling tall tales and my mother, sympathetic to dreams and spirits, was easy to convince.

It didn't matter much to me. When every house is haunted, it just feels like more noise to cut through. The dead never revealed themselves to me and I figured that was for the best. What was I supposed to do with that knowledge, you know? There were dead people hanging around the property, and I was still supposed to do chores and schoolwork.

I do know that ghosts and spirits were a sore spot for my father. It's a fraught topic, the way every topic surrounding my father is fraught. He has a story for why that is, the way he has stories for everything. It's one that I had heard many times over my childhood, about demonic possession and witnessing an exorcism in the family home as a child. Apparently my grandfather was possessed by a demon sometime in the 1970s. It was the kind of demon that gives people glowing eyes and makes them speak in tongues.

I have no idea if any part of that is true. It never sounded true. I suppose a guy claiming to exorcize demons came around and something loud and dramatic probably happened as a result. But a demon? A real demon, just hanging around my father's side of the family? I don't know, man.

I'm not entirely sure why he would be telling me these things, now that I look back at it. A seven- or eight-year-old has no business hearing about demons. That feels like a deeply traumatic and personal thing, not weird trivia to bring up during a car ride or a random Saturday afternoon.

My psychiatrist describes my father's personality, if you'll pardon such a popular phrase, as narcissistic. Everything with my father leads back to the mythology he's created for himself. Everything that everyone in the family does is an extension of him, and therefore his mythology. So talking about ghosts brought up his past, and so he never wanted to hear about ghosts. He would sometimes lash out when the subject came up. He lashed out about a lot of things, but spirits seemed to prompt a particularly strong response.

I am, once again, attempting to survive this.

Eventually, with all the talk of ghosts in the house, my family wore me down. What if I saw something, too? I could have. I had trouble sleeping and woke up a lot at night. Maybe that sound down the hall was something moving through the house? Maybe that blur in the corner of my eye was more than a waking dream? It was strange to be the only one who didn't see anything. Believing things could be fun. It could feel safer sometimes.

I distinctly remember writing a letter to try to communicate with the spirits in the house. I folded it up, said some invocation I made up on the spot, and burned it in the backyard with a stolen candle and lighter. It was a pretty good letter, too. The spirits never responded. To this day I don't know why I thought that would work.

Later, with a nervous energy I could no longer keep to myself, I told my mother what happened. I don't remember her response, although I omitted the part about the burning. In the end, I figured spirits worked the same way as birthday wishes. If you talk about it, it doesn't come true.

A lot of things in the house were like that, as it turned out. If I didn't talk about it, then it isn't true. My psychiatrist has heard a lot about that.

By the fall of 2000, I was having strange dreams. Recurring dreams were nothing new to me, nor were recurring nightmares. I was prone to dreams that repeated every few months or years. As an example, I had dreams throughout my childhood of being trapped in a damp cave with my brother, Ian. A pool of light gathered on a smooth rock formation from a hole in the cavern’s ceiling. Straying beyond the pale blue glow that poured in from above caused the darkness beyond it to strip the flesh from your bones.

In the dream, I had tried to test the limits of the sheltering glow with my fingertips and toes. The flesh peeled away from the digits as soon as I touched the shadows. I tried to warn Ian, but he didn't listen. When my back was turned, he went into the darkness, and suddenly fell back. He landed on the smooth rock as a skeleton, the meat plucked clean from the bone. I ran to his side and held him, screaming, crying, shaking the pile of bones to demand it bring my brother back. Once the sounds of my own sobs became too loud, I woke up.

I would have this dream at least three times that I can clearly recount.

Late 2000 was also the height of my sleepwalking phase, but just before I figured out how to wake myself up from a weird or bad dream. Finding myself wandering around the house in a daze, mumbling about nothing to my confused mother while she watched TV in the living room, was a pretty common occurrence.

But these dreams were different.

First of all, they had a schedule.

I had the same dream once a week (usually on a Wednesday, if memory serves) every week for four weeks. There were small variations in the dream from week to week. The precise sequence of events may vary a bit over time. Sometimes it was afternoon outside while at other times it looked like early morning. But the dream was always the same.

I stood in the house with the wood panel walls, the house I hated. It was empty, all the furniture gone and the blinds removed from the windows. There was too much sunlight coming in, streaks of light pouring into the house to illuminate the path of dust particles drifting through the air. Dust, like snow, fell to the floor but never settled. The house was far too big, its rooms stretched out and rearranged in new angles, the single hallway that connected the living room to the bedrooms multiplied by three with each new corridor rolling on forever.

I was not alone in the house. A girl was there, too. She was my age, blonde like me but blonder, her eyes blue like mine but bluer still. Her face was sad and eyes full of grief. The girl wore a red velvet dress, white petticoat, white stockings, shiny black Mary Jane shoes, and a big velvet bow atop her head. I know it was velvet from the way the material moved in the sunlight and dust settled in its folds. The red was more auburn than red, like old blood. At the time, she looked old to me, mid-century or older. Now, I think of a Christmas dress for a little girl or a young child's Sunday finery. Not necessarily out of time but out of place for a teenager in 2000, dressed up all pretty in velvet and bows.

We were locked in the house together. The doors and windows would not open. I knew that I had to escape but I didn't know why. Whenever the dream began, I stood in the living room by my front door, facing the single window set high in the wall. The girl faced me with hands hanging limply at her sides, sunlight streaming all around her like a halo of gold and dust.

With dry lips and a low, cracking voice, she said, “I don't want to hurt you.”

Each time she spoke, I instinctively moved away. The hunt began. I averted my eyes and sought a place to hide. The angles made by the newly stretched house gave me corners to hide behind. Now, there were people in the house with us. A man, some children. Two young boys. I don't remember them clearly. I just know that they were trapped in corners in different parts of the house that I couldn't reach. They spoke in whispers, asking what to do. Asking how to get out. I whispered back that we had to find the back door. The back door was unlocked, as I knew through some sort of unshakable dream intuition. It was just missing from where I knew it to be, drawn away from its usual place and put somewhere deep inside the house’s new layout.

We had to find it.

And we had to survive her.

Each of the four dreams began and ended the same way. What happened in the middle could change as me and the other trapped people moved through the house, but every event brought us to the same place. We looked for the back door to get out. We did not make it.

The hunt, insofar that I could call it that, had rules. We couldn't look at the girl. She couldn't touch the corners of the room. We had to run from corner to corner to make our way through the house. The girl moved slowly through the rooms, always standing in the sunlight, never touching the corners or shadows. Her steps were silent but she murmured something, the words broken, barely audible. I knew she was speaking to me.

If she saw us, she caught us. If she caught us, we lost.

We always lost.

But I survived.

I remember telling my mother that I was having a strange dream. We could talk about that kind of stuff. Our house was haunted, after all. I stood in the dim little kitchen one afternoon while she cooked lunch. My mother poked and prodded at seasoned ground beef sizzling in the cast iron skillet. I didn't really eat meat. It was a point of contention sometimes. Most things were where I was concerned.

That day, I watched on as my mother cooked and explained my recurring dream. I was puzzled but…amused? Fascinated? Excited? It's hard to say. The dreams were so scary and weird. They were happening once a week, like clockwork. The whole thing seemed impossible.

My mother agreed that it was weird, but we were surrounded by ghosts. Maybe it was the spirit of a previous resident? Maybe a girl died there in the 1950s or 60s? I don't think that's possible, since the housing development was more recent, but who was I to say?

Maybe this is what came of my letter.

Maybe I invited this in.

I like my psychiatrist Fariba quite a lot. She's an Iranian combat vet counselor who works for Veteran Affairs and will tell you what she thinks whether you like it or not. We get along well.

Seeing her, first weekly while in my PTSD program and now every three months as part of my condition management, is genuinely pleasant. It wasn't always in the early days when I was about to crawl out of my skin. Back then, I would spend half the session with my eyes closed as I recalled the things that kept me up at night, as if that would change anything.

Now, we can talk and joke. She can tell things that she says she wouldn't tell other patients because I can see the humor in it. I don't think of my psychiatrist as a friend, of course. That would be weird. But it is nice to have someone who's on my side.

During our last session a month or so ago, she said, “Oh, I've been doing some homework for another patient, and I'm rereading The Narcissistic Family.” She let out a grim little laugh and continued, “It made me think of you.”

I laughed. “Well, It's nice to be thought of.”

I didn't really know much about narcissists until I returned to therapy last year for my PTSD program. It's another one of those psychology or sociology terms that broke containment and now everybody on the internet accuses each other of being. Talking about my past in terms of who had which condition or what personality disorder always kind of felt hollow. I didn't think it made much of a difference. Labeling the kind of abuse with new words seemed like the autobiographical equivalent of rearranging deck chairs.

Out of curiosity about what prompted my psychiatrist to think of me, however grimly, I looked into the book she mentioned. I'm a little annoyed that it actually contained some useful information that lent itself to my personal history. Sometimes being a hater doesn't pay off, I guess.

This was the first time I ever heard of narcissistic family structures and the roles members are cast within them. The supportive spouse, the golden child, the lonely child, and the scapegoat. I didn't know that there was documented language to describe a home where the children live to serve the parents and protect their feelings. I didn't know that the roles could change within the home at any given moment to suit the parents’ whims. It makes a lot of sense, though, when I think back on the way things were.

Sometimes I was my father's pumpkin, his only daughter and precious little girl. Those were rare, of course. Most of the time, I didn't exist, or willed myself to not to. If he didn't see me, he wouldn't say anything, wouldn't mock or belittle me. Then I would be safe.

And sometimes, in a handful of very scary moments across my life, I was my father's enemy.

When I dreamed of the girl inside my house, I could see what she had become. Like the house, her shape was pulled in different directions, making something terrifying and new from familiar geometry. She was a child like I was a child, soft and malleable and made of flesh. Blue eyes, blonde hair, velvet on her skin. But what she became inside the house was monstrous.

I dreamed myself into a corner of an empty room, lit starkly by bleaching sunlight. There I sat with my cheek pressed against the wall. On the other side, in a way that made no sense with the layout of the house, the girl drew close on all fours. She crept with an animal precision, each muscle shifting, tensing and relaxing, beneath the folds of her dress. I could not see her myself but through my intuition I saw her eyes. Their pupils shrank to pinpoints, the blue impossibly blue, the white like Clorox.

I could hear her breathing. She sucked in air as if winded, a wet, labored sound. My heart raced as it grew louder and closer. Her lips were cracked and nearly bleeding. Her breath was heavy and damp.

“I never wanted this,” she murmured wetly.

Louder and closer.

“I never wanted to hurt anyone.”

Closer and closer.

Her cheek pressed to the wall. I shook and held my breath.

“I just want to be alone.”

Through the wall, I felt the tears rolling down her cheeks. They were red. Her dry lips pulled back to reveal sharp teeth.

“Can you help me?”

Then the dream changed. I was somewhere else in the house, hiding behind a wall. In the next room, the girl had captured the man.

I dreamed of the girl for a month, and then never again. At the time, I believed she was a spirit. It made sense enough. Every house I ever lived in was haunted. We were followed by spirits. My family built up mythology the way my father did and still does. We could not simply live in a house. It had to be special, the way my father was special and my mother was special for being chosen by my father and my brothers were special because they were my father's sons.

I wasn't special. I mean, I was, but not in good ways. I couldn't go to real school because I was too anxious and depressed. Too fragile. That's why I had to be homeschooled. I was always too self-sufficient, and so my parents left me to my own devices. They didn't want to get in my way, they said, and so I just took care of my brothers and our many dogs and the crickets I caught and tried to keep in a terrarium. I was too smart, so once I was old enough to read and write, my mother left me to teach myself while she focused on my brothers.

If I was ever special, it was because I said or did something that reflected well on my father. It was like being bathed in sunlight when that happened, when my father looked at me with anything but a sneer. Golden light on my skin, like it could last forever.

For a moment, I felt warm and bright all over. Maybe things will be different now, I thought. Maybe this time he will start loving me. The last time I had this thought, I was twenty-five years old, standing in the kitchen while my father talked to me like I was a person worthy of his attention.

I don't have those thoughts anymore.

My dreams always ended the same way. The girl was crouched on the floor. I was behind a wall, peeking around it to see inside the next room. The man was on his back with his neck torn open by the ragged saw of teeth. Nearby, I could hear the boys weeping quietly in sniffles and hiccups. We all saw the same thing.

The girl fed from the man with blood smeared across her face and fingers. She knelt over his body and lovingly cradled it. Sometimes she ran a fond hand through the man's hair. Red tears flowed from her half-closed eyes as she drank. He grew quiet, cold, and still.

Between bites of flesh and thick swallows of blood, the girl looked down upon her prey tenderly and said:

“I'm so sorry.”

“I never meant to do this.”

“Can you help me?”

“Please, help me.”

“Help me.”

I could do nothing, frozen, helpless. If I met her eye, I would be caught. If I tried to stop her, I would be caught. The man was dead. The boys were next. I could only watch it happen.

Again and again.

Then never again.

It's the sound of her pleading that still gets to me when this subject comes up, rarely though it has. Warm blood cooling on her face and speaking on the edge of a sob. The silence was as oppressive as the sunlight pouring through the windows and piercing it left me shaken. Vampires weren't supposed to weep. They did not walk in the daylight and cry and beg for help from the corpse of someone she missed.

But a child could.

Once the four weeks passed, I told my mother one last time about my dreams. I think we were seated on the couch in the evening, watching TV or something. My mother was always watching TV. Either that or playing The Sims on the family desktop computer.

This time, she listened to my story and then gave me an odd look.

“Oh. You know, your dad had the same dream.”

My stomach lurched. “What? Wait, the same dream?”

“Yeah, he told me about it. A girl is in the house and she's eating people.”

I felt cold that evening, like when Melissa told me her aunt had the same dream I did. I wanted to ask my father about this but he barely spoke to me, and reacted so poorly whenever ghosts and things came up. My mother said she'd tell my father about this. Hearing her say that, I regretted saying anything at all. Now my mother was playing telephone between us, telling my father that I was seeing ghosts in my dreams. I feared his reaction the way I braced myself for every snarled comment or insult.

My mother spoke to my father in private. A few days later, once I had worked myself into a lather about this, they came to me and sat me down at the kitchen table. The kitchen was too small for a proper dining room table, so we made do with a black folding table and three folding black chairs wedged in around it. We sat together in silence. My brothers were sent away to occupy themselves in their room. They wanted to know what was going on but my mother shooed them away.

The air was heavy. Across the table, my father looked solemn. Stern. My palms were sweating on the table. I felt like I was awaiting punishment or news of a death. I never did anything right, unless I did in those rare instances of intelligence or utility. My father had no kind words for me. Instead, he told me a story.

He dreamed of a girl inside our house. She was young and blonde-haired and blue-eyed. He was trapped in our house with our family. Together, they tried to find an unlocked door, traveling the maze made of our home for a way out. The girl followed them. Stalked them, more like. Whenever she caught someone, she consumed them through tears in a miserable act of cannibalism.

She didn't want to hurt anyone, she said.

She never wanted to be this way, she said.

One by one, the girl ate them. I began to feel ill as I listened. Something cold and electric crawled over my skin, like anticipation gone sour. The girl ate each of my brothers, then my mother. Finally, she consumed my father.

Shaken, I jumped at the chance to say:

“I had the same dream.”

“I know,” he replied. “That's what your mom said when I told her about it.”

It didn't make any sense. Why would I share my father's dream? He barely tolerated me. The shock of it filled me with an abrupt stab of pride. It must have meant something. There must have been a reason for this to happen.

My head swam. I babbled, explaining my dreams. He had one dream, I had four. His girl was a cannibal, mine a vampire. She said the same things. Begged for the same help. Looked the same.

Looked like me.

“You see?” my mother said. “It has to be the ghost.”

That became a myth as told by my mother. The time my father and I dreamed of the ghost girl haunting our house. It was a fun novelty like all the family's ghost stories were. My father's grim expression never fell that day, or anytime since when we spoke of dreams or spirits.

He didn't say it. I didn't ask. The question was so obvious that it didn't even occur to me.

If my father dreamed of our family, in our home, stalked by the monster living inside it, where was I?

To this day, I don't put a lot of stock in dreams. They're strange, syrupy things, meant for other people but that stick to me anyway. I've learned to not take it so personally when it happens. People can't control what they dream about, even if I don't ask to see it, or know what to do about it once I have. Assuming I believe in any of this at all.

Again, it just doesn't seem like that call should be left up to me. You know? Who am I to decide if people can share dreams? What do I know about anything?

But sometimes a dream can still tell you the truth.

My father and I don't talk much. That's fine with me. When we do talk, he calls me up to say what he wants to say at me. Whether I respond doesn't really matter because it isn't about me. Then he gets off the phone as quickly as possible, saying that I'm too busy to talk and throwing in an assurance that the family still loves me.

“Sure,” I say. “Love you, too.”

It isn't what I want to say to the man who dreamed of his daughter feeding on his wife and sons. What I want to say isn't worth it. He knows what I saw. I know what stories monsters tell themselves so they can sleep at night. The lies about what happens in their homes.

And I sleep well knowing that the girl escaped the house too.