Dreamed You, Found You

Chapter 3 ## The Third Night

**POV:** Sari

The children could tell something was wrong.

Sari tried to hide it. She was good at hiding things—her exhaustion, her loneliness, the way her chest ached when she thought about how far New York felt and how close the compound loomed. But children saw everything with the unfiltered honesty that adults had learned to suppress.

"Teacher," Arif said after class. He was sixteen, sharp, and possessed the uncanny ability to read her moods better than she could herself. "You're distracted today."

"I'm fine."

"You called Rani by the wrong name three times."

Sari blinked. "Did I?"

Arif raised an eyebrow. It was a look he'd inherited from their grandmother—patient, knowing, mildly exasperated. The kind of expression that said *I see through you, and I'm waiting for you to admit it.* "It's the dreams again, isn't it?"

Sari froze. She hadn't told Arif about the dreams. She hadn't told anyone except Ratna, and Ratna had responded by suggesting lavender tea and a long vacation—which was Ratna's way of saying *I love you, but I think you're imagining things.*

"What dreams?" she said carefully.

"The ones where you wake up crying." Arif leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, looking more like a concerned adult than a teenage boy. "I hear you through the wall, Sari. You whisper to someone in your sleep."

Her blood ran cold. "What do I say?"

Arif's expression softened. The teenager disappeared, and suddenly she saw the boy he'd been before—the one who'd held her hand when their parents died, who'd cried at the funeral, who'd grown up too fast because life had demanded it of him.

"A name. Adrian." He paused. "Who is he?"

The world tilted. Just slightly.

*I don't know,* she wanted to say. *I don't know, and that's the problem. I don't know who he is, where he is, or if he even exists. But I dream about him every night, and when I wake up, it feels like losing something I never had.*

Instead, she straightened her shoulders and did what she always did: she smiled. "Nobody, Arif. Just a dream."

Arif didn't look convinced. But he let it go, because that's what he did—he let her have her secrets, even when they worried him. It was the kindness he showed her, wrapped in teenage indifference.

"Fine," he said. "Keep your secrets. But if you need to talk..." He shrugged, the moment of vulnerability already retreating behind familiar armor. "I'm here."

"I know."

He left.

After he left, Sari sat alone in the classroom and opened her journal. The pages were filling up—forty-seven nights of the same dream, the same river, the same man. It had become a private archaeology, a record of something she couldn't explain.

*"Night forty-eight,"* she wrote. *"I said his name in my sleep. My brother heard me. He thinks I'm losing my mind. Maybe I am."*

She stared at the words. They looked absurd on the page—the kind of thing you'd read in a trashy romance novel or a psychological case study. Not real life. Not real life at all.

But then again, nothing about her life had been real since she'd come back to Sumberagung. The return itself had been a kind of dream—the one where you wake up and realize you're not where you thought you'd be, doing what you thought you'd do.

She'd had plans once. Big plans. A career in international development. A apartment in Brooklyn with good coffee and bad neighbors. A life full of possibility.

Then her grandmother had called. Then her grandmother had gotten sick. Then her grandmother had gotten better, but Sari had stayed, because by then she'd realized something painful: her grandmother wasn't the one who needed her.

Sumberagung did.

The village was dying. Slowly, quietly, in ways that didn't make headlines. The young people leaving for the cities. The elderly staying behind. The compound growing stronger while the community grew weaker. The water changing, the fish dying, the children getting sick.

And through it all, Mbah Ratu's compound humming in the distance like a threat she couldn't name.

She closed the journal. Looked out the window at the compound in the distance—the one with the generator that ran all night and the walls that kept secrets in.

Tonight, she decided, she would ask him who he was.

Tonight, she would find out if the dream was just a dream.

And if he didn't answer—

She didn't finish the thought.

---

The dream came at midnight.

This time, she was ready.

Rainforest. River. The shifting light—black and white, but with more color bleeding through tonight. Green in the leaves. Blue in the water. Brown in the earth. The world was waking up around her, becoming more real with every passing moment.

He was there. Standing in the river. Waiting.

"Adrian," she said.

His head tilted. Just slightly. Like he was listening.

She walked closer. Close enough to see the details she'd missed before: the sharp line of his jaw, the way his dark hair fell across his forehead, the tension in his shoulders. He looked like a man who carried the world and didn't ask anyone to help him carry it.

There was a sadness in him too. She could feel it—that deep, quiet grief that lived in people who'd forgotten how to be anything else.

She stopped at the edge of the water. The river lapped at her feet, warm and gentle.

"I need to know something," she said. Her voice was steady, even though her heart was not. "Are you real?"

Silence.

The dream held its breath.

"Because if you're not—" Her voice broke. She hated that. Hated the way her emotions betrayed her, even in a dream. "If you're just something my brain invented, I need to know. So I can stop."

*So I can stop caring about someone who doesn't exist.*

*So I can stop hoping.*

The thought hung between them like smoke.

He turned fully to face her. And for the first time, she saw something in his expression that looked like pain. Not the cold emptiness she'd sensed before. Real pain. Human pain.

He reached toward her.

She reached back.

Their fingers almost touched—

---

Sari woke with her hand outstretched, grasping at empty air.

The room was dark. The clock read 2:14 AM. Her fingers were tingling, as if they'd actually felt something—a brush of warmth, a hint of contact, the ghost of a touch that wasn't quite there.

She pulled her hand to her chest and curled it into a fist.

Almost.

They had almost touched.

And when she closed her eyes, she could still feel the phantom warmth of fingers that weren't there.

"Adrian," she whispered.

The geckos answered. It was enough.

Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow she would ask Ratna about shared dreams. Tomorrow she would research. Tomorrow she would find answers.

But tonight, she would lie here with the ghost of his touch on her skin and wonder what it would feel like to actually reach him.

If he was real.

If he was out there.

If somewhere in the world, a man with winter-sky eyes was dreaming about her too.

She fell asleep with that thought, and the dream came back.

He was still waiting.

And this time, she was sure he knew her name.