In my dream, my late dad said, “Don’t wear that dress he gave you.” When I woke up, my whole life quietly shifted.
The day before my 50th birthday, my deceased father came to me in a dream and told me, “Don’t wear the dress from your husband.” I woke up in a cold sweat, the kind that makes the sheets cling to your skin. It was true. My husband had recently bought me a dress, and when the seamstress brought it to me, I would soon cut the lining open and freeze in horror.
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My name is Olivia Sutton, but everyone calls me Liv. I live just outside Atlanta, Georgia, in a quiet subdivision where the lawns are neat, the mailboxes all look the same, and most houses light up proudly with American flags on summer holidays. From the outside, my life looked solid: a job in accounting, a husband, a grown daughter with a family of her own.
Inside, everything was about to crack.
I woke with a sharp gasp, as if I’d been violently pulled from deep, black water up to the surface. My heart pounded so hard I felt it might leap right out of my chest. The cotton of my nightgown clung to my back, damp with sweat. For a moment I didn’t know where I was.
Bedroom. Atlanta. My house. My bed.
I forced my hand toward the lamp switch and flicked it on. Warm light spilled across the nightstand, the pale walls, the familiar framed photo of my dad in his favorite flannel shirt, standing beside a grill in our old backyard, a tiny American flag stuck in the flowerpot behind him from one Fourth of July barbecue.
Next to me, on his side of the king-size bed, my husband, Marcus “Mark” Sutton, slept peacefully. He lay on his side, facing the wall, breathing evenly. He didn’t even stir at my sudden awakening.
For a second, I just watched him, trying to anchor myself in reality.
It was just a dream. Just a dream.
But my hands were still shaking.
I slipped my legs out from under the quilt, careful not to jostle the mattress, and padded out of the bedroom. The hardwood floor was cool under my bare feet as I walked down the hallway. In the kitchen, the stainless steel appliances glinted in the low light from the stove hood. The clock on the microwave glowed 4:58 a.m.
I grabbed a glass from the cabinet, my fingers clumsy, and turned on the tap. The water hissed into the glass. I took a gulp, then another, but the lump in my throat wouldn’t move. I lowered myself into a chair at the kitchen table and pressed my palms over my eyes.
As soon as I closed them, the dream snapped back into focus like someone hitting replay.
He was standing in the doorway of our master bedroom.
My father.
My daddy, who had died of a heart attack three years earlier in a small hospital in Macon. The last time I’d seen him alive, he’d been lying in a hospital gown, tubes everywhere, still trying to squeeze my hand so I wouldn’t worry.
But in the dream, he looked like he did in his sixties, when he still mowed his own lawn and insisted on grilling every Memorial Day weekend. He wore the gray sweater I’d knitted for him for his 60th birthday, the one he’d proudly worn at every family gathering until the elbows were almost thin.
His face was serious. Not angry, exactly. Just…urgent. His dark eyes, so familiar, stared straight at me with a kind of sharp alarm I had never seen before.
“Liv,” he said softly.
The sound of his voice was so clear it made my heart stutter. It wasn’t dream-muffled. It wasn’t distant.
