Miranda walked briskly back out into the hallway. This couldn't be happening. No, simply, it *wasn't* happening. This was a textbook example of a bad dream. In all likelihood she was lying in her bed at home. Any second now she would snap up, covered in sweat, with hours to go before she needed to set out on the freeway to Horswick. That was the only plausible explanation for what she had just seen.
But when she put her hand on the wall, the dingy wallpaper *felt* far too real. She remembered this exact texture from twenty years ago. The memory came back to her as if it had been twenty minutes, not twenty years. She was drunk after a night out with friends and vomiting in a paper bag. The kind they had on airplanes. It hadn't been how she expected to spend her Friday night, but college weekends rarely went as anyone expected. No, they tended to bring out a side of you that you didn't even know existed. That much was obvious.
She felt ready to vomit all over again. Two months. Was two months all it took to turn her daughter into someone she didn't recognize at all? A worse premise wriggled its way up to the surface of her conscious mind. *Maybe not. Two months? That's no time at all. No, to become THAT person, the one you saw in the photos, you need to start changing a looooooong time before. Who knows what she's been hiding from you?* She thought of the boy in the nightrobe who had walked by her before she got to Rachel's door. Had he been in one of the pictures? Or more than one? Maybe that robe was hiding the pelvis she'd seen in *that* photograph. For all she knew he had come right from Rachel's room, and it had been total coincidence that her daughter was alone when she arrived.
"Fuck you," she snarled at herself. And Miranda Byrne never swore. Too much thinking would drive her insane. Just being here was enough to make a person stop acting right, it seemed. No exceptions. She wasn't willing to accept that. If she stayed here much longer, though, she wouldn't have a choice. And so Miranda made a mad dash for the stairs, seeing as the elevator would be far too slow. Her feet hurt terribly as she flew down. In no time at all she was grounded again, and then she was outside in the brisk air of early afternoon. She breathed it in. Shut her eyes.
That was a mistake. Along came that image again, her darling Rachel with a stranger's weapon in her mouth. A fresh detail engraved itself with it. Rachel's hand slipping between her legs, touching... why! Why was she doing something like this? Didn't she know what would happen if it got out?
She needed a drink. An extra tall one, ideally. Muscle memory proved very useful as she marched down the Horswick street to one of the old student bars.
