Castaway
Copyright© 2015 by Colin Barrett
Chapter 1
There are days when I wake up sure that none of it ever really happened. Just a vivid dream, I think. An awful lot of detail for a dream, but it can't have been anything else.
Can it?
Then I look over and see Cam by my side in bed, still sleeping. She's always still asleep when I wake up, she's an inveterate late riser. I tease her about it sometimes, and she just sticks out her tongue at me and tells me she plans to keep right on doing it. "If I don't have to wake up early, why should I?" she asks me. I can't argue with the logic.
It'll probably wind up being my job to get Gilda off to school, when the time comes. It's also my job to give her her morning bottle and play with her a while. My job and my joy. Cam takes care of the middle-of-the-night thing and I do mornings, that's how we agreed and that's how it is.
So I get up and walk to the connecting door and there's Gilda, also still asleep but stirring enough that I know she's ready to wake up and get fed. And on those days I'll just pause in the doorway and gaze at her perfect tiny body and that adorable little face, and my mind will flash back to all the events that led to this beautiful little child coming into being. And then my thoughts will run—I know it's an odd connection, but the linkage, to me, is always there—to my own career, and how drastically it's taken off and soared.
And that's when I know for sure that it was no dream. Yes, it really happened. I have all the proof I need, for me. OK, so it wouldn't convince anybody else, but that's not important. I know.
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