“Man?” Both Faith and Zoë stopped and looked at her.
Amy took Zoë’s drawing pad and flipped the pages to the sketch of Stephen—Stephen the Dark, she thought. “Him. He heard me in my dream.”
“You had a dream about my man?” Zoë asked. “I’m not sure that’s legal. I think that if I conjured him, he’s mine. You already have one hunk, so you can’t have mine.”
“What was your dream?” Faith asked, her face serious as she sat down opposite Amy. “And was he the one who hit you?”
Amy glanced at the two women and saw that they both had lost their look of amusement. “No, no, and double no,” she said. “The man didn’t hit me. No man, not in life or in a dream, has ever hit me, so you two can stop looking at me like that. It was my sister—the sister in the dream, that is—who hit me and I was in bed with her.”
Zoë and Faith were silent for a moment, then Faith said, “I’ll get the eggs out while you start talking.”
Amy groaned. “No, really, it was just a stupid dream. I’m sure it’s not part of Jeanne’s therapy that we have to tell our dumb dreams.”
“Are you kidding? She loves dreams,” Zoë said. “I got to the point where I made them up just to entertain her. I liked to see how fast she could write to get them down.”
Faith gave Zoë a look of disgust. “And you wonder why the court ordered you into therapy.” She looked back at Amy. “Even if Jeanne hated dreams, I think I can speak for both of us by saying that we’d like to hear your dream about being in bed with your sister and that man.”
“He wasn’t in the bed.”
“Oh,” Zoë and Faith said in unison, and they sounded so disappointed that Amy laughed—but that hurt her swollen, bruised face, so she stopped.
“Okay,” Amy said, “I’ll tell, but it was nothing, really.” She smiled. “Stupid. That’s what my sister kept calling me. I think she really hated me.”
“All sisters do,” Faith said as she broke eggs into a bowl.
“That’s the second time you’ve said something rotten about sisters,” Amy said. “What makes you so down on them?”
“When my mother died, I found out that my father had been married before and had two daughters older than me. Let’s just say that when they found out I’d married a rich man, they were all over me.”
“Were they in your bed and did they hit you?” Zoë asked.
“No.”
“Then I’d rather hear Amy’s story,” Zoë said.
Actually, Amy didn’t mind telling her dream because she hoped that the telling would take it out of her head. Even though she was now awake and in the sunlight and it was the twenty-first century, it still felt real.
“Interesting,” Zoë said when Amy had finished talking. “My guess is that you had the dream after you hit your nose. It was a story to explain the accident.”
“I guess so,” Amy said, looking down at her bowl of cereal. “But I’ve never had a dream that had odors in it. I can still smell that horrible man’s bad breath. Yuck!”
“What about the hero’s breath?” Faith asked.
“Hero? Oh, you mean the—”
“The tall, dark, and handsome demigod,” Zoë said.
“Hardly that,” Amy said as she carried her empty bowl to the sink and washed it. “What shall we do today besides buy sheets?” Turning, she looked at both of them, but neither Zoë nor Faith spoke.
“Did I miss something?” Amy asked.
“Actually, Faith wants to spend the day with a hairdresser and get her hair cut and dyed flaming red.”
“Really?” Amy asked, eyes wide.
“I thought I might,” she said shyly. “I mean about the cut part, not the flaming red.”
“I think that’s wonderful. And what about you, Zoë?”