Marlowe
The word from my dream — *Wrench* — sat with me through the following days like a splinter I couldn't quite work free, and I found myself watching the old mechanic with fresh, unsettled attention every time our paths crossed at the garage, uncertain what exactly I was supposed to be looking for.
I hadn't mentioned it to him directly yet. Something about the specificity of it felt too raw, too strange, to just casually bring up over a torque wrench and a stalled engine.
Family dinner arrived that weekend, an increasingly regular tradition since Dorian's hospitalization, and I found myself distracted through most of the meal, still turning the dream over, until Marla's sharp intake of breath across the table pulled my attention fully back to the present.
Dorian had gone pale, han
