The Color of Heaven - 09 - The Color of Time by Julianne MacLean

floor.
    I definitely needed to take something for this headache, so I rose from bed and shuffled out into the corridor, then padded down the main staircase to the kitchen on the ground floor.
    When I switched on the lights, there was a buzzing sound again and everything flickered.
    I wondered if there was a problem with the wiring. This was an old house after all—a money pit, to be honest, and I certainly wasn’t rolling around in disposable cash. If I had any sense, I would call a real estate agent and put this place on the market.
    But who was I kidding? I was a hopeless case when it came to letting go of things. I had been living there for over a decade. This was all I had left of him.
    It was not until that moment, as I moved toward the cabinet by the fridge where I kept all my medicines and first aid items that I remembered the dream I’d just had.
    A rush of grief moved through me and I stopped in my tracks. I felt dizzy all of a sudden and had to sit down on one of the chairs at the kitchen table.
    Good Lord, I’d dreamed about Ethan…about the summer we first met, and the summer after that.
    It all came flooding back to me—all the strange disconnected elements of the dream, the thrill of seeing him in the hospital that first day when he came to check on Jenn after she was hit by the car. The panic I’d felt when I learned I was pregnant after returning home to Montana. Not being able to see him for most of the year while he was at Yale. That had been torture.
    Then I remembered how the dream had taken a bizarre turn and morphed into a frightening nightmare—where I walked into this very house to find Ethan lying dead on the floor in the front parlor, in a pool of blood. In the dream, his father had pushed him.
    Thank God it was just a dream.
    Yet, something about it felt so real …
    Rising to my feet, I ran into the front parlor to inspect the white marble fireplace—in particular, the corner where Ethan had hit his head. Why in the world would I dream something like that? What did it mean? I felt a sudden overpowering urge to pick up the phone and call Ethan, to make sure he was okay, but it was the middle of the night. We were no longer together. He’d think I was insane.
    Feeling half panicked, half in a daze, I returned to the kitchen and withdrew the basket of pills and ointments from the top shelf of the cupboard. I quickly rifled through the boxes of anti-histamines and Band-Aids, found the Tylenol, and filled a glass with water at the sink. My hands were shaking. I stared at my palms.
    After swallowing two pills, I turned off the lights in the kitchen and climbed back up the stairs with the glass of water in hand.
    Maybe I should think about selling this place, I thought miserably as I slid back under the covers. There were simply too many ghosts here.

Chapter Twenty-three

    “That’s really weird,” my best friend and co-worker, Cassie, said to me as she moved behind the bar, slid the cash tray into the register drawer and pushed it closed. “Although maybe it’s not. I’m sure lots of women dream about their ex-husbands dying in some sort of freak accident. And his father, too. Wasn’t he a real piece of work?”
    “He wasn’t the warmest of men,” I replied as I lifted one last upturned chair off a tabletop and set it down on the plank wood floor, then straightened the red and white tablecloth.
    Though Cassie and I had only known each other for a few years since I started working at the pub—it felt as if we’d known each other forever because our connection had been instantaneous.
    Looking around the pub to make sure everything was in order, I moved to the door and flipped the sign to “Open.”
    It was only 11:00 a.m., but the lunch crowd would soon trickle in.
    “It was probably one of those stress dreams,” Cassie suggested as she slid the drawer closed on the antique register. Then she turned to the mirror behind all the bottles of booze and swept her curly red hair back