Rachel came awake with a jolt of cold terror so familiar it made her sick.
She was small. Eight years old, no more. Her limbs felt clumsy and short and the world sat higher than it should. She was standing outside a heavy carved door in the Creighton estate, in the east wing her mother had shut herself into during the worst of it. Sun fell through a high window and caught the gold in her own childish hair. The corridor floor was polished to a mirror. The air was too still, and smelled of stale perfume and something sharp underneath, like the air before a storm.
Her hand was already reaching for the handle. She had relived this moment a thousand times in bad dreams. It never went differently.
The door swung inward a hand's width. Through the gap she saw the room, and in it, her mother.
