Re: dream: graham/jake
[If it was a lie, it was one Graham was willing to turn a blind eye to simply because he wanted it to be the truth. So many times, in the waking world, he'd told himself that Jake understood. That he knew. That he was a good boy on a good path, and he didn't hate him. He desperately wanted to believe that he knew his father wasn't a bad man, that he'd just made mistakes, that he loved both him and his mother. Leaving him with his grandparents, it had been an act of love rather than an absence of it.]
I know you do, Jake. [Maybe that was a lie, too. How could a little boy grow up understanding why his father wasn't around? Why his mother was dead? That he hadn't been enough, because Graham had lost most of his sanity when he lost Lorelei. He'd lost most of himself. Jake was really all he had left.
Fear, he wouldn't have understood fear. Not of her. The other ghost, the dead man who'd collared him like a dog and laughed when his wife's blood spilled, he was fear, but not her, not his Lorelei.] You see her? [He was surprised. Surprised, and oddly hopeful. Like he wasn't alone, maybe he wasn't so crazy, not if Jake could see her too, the pale dead woman with murky eyes and lips frozen in a faint smile. A memory dragged out of the grave.]