Only The Dreams Know Him

Chapter 2: The Man I Am Now

I didn’t go back to sleep after the dream.

It stayed with me, heavy and close, like something that hadn’t fully let go. Every time I closed my eyes, I felt the knife again—the weight of it in my hand, familiar in a way that scared me.

I got out of bed and walked to the bathroom. The house was silent, the kind of quiet that presses in on you. The floor was cold beneath my feet, grounding me, reminding me I was awake.

I turned on the light.

The mirror faced me.

I stepped closer and studied the scar on my face—a thin line running along my cheekbone, just beneath my left eye. The accident left it there. Three months later, it still looked wrong, tight and dark, like my skin was holding onto something my mind refused to remember.

I touched it gently.

The doctor said it would fade.

I didn’t believe him.

My name is Adam Miller.

I’m twenty-nine years old. I know that because it’s written on papers, not because I remember growing into it. Since the accident, most of my past feels like it belongs to someone else.

I don’t remember the crash. I don’t remember the pain. I woke up in a hospital bed with bandages on my face and a silence where my memories should have been.

They told me I was lucky to be alive.

It didn’t feel like luck.

I live alone now, in a small house on the edge of town. I work from home, doing simple work that doesn’t require much thought. Numbers. Screens. Things that don’t ask who I was before.

I looked back at my reflection.

My eyes looked tired. Older than they should have been. There was something missing in them—something unfinished.

For a moment, the room felt wrong.

Too quiet.

I glanced down at my hands. My fingers looked normal, clean, but a strange tightness settled in my chest. I washed them anyway, watching the water run clear, waiting for something darker to appear.

Nothing did.

When I looked up again, my reflection met my gaze. For a brief moment, it felt like he knew something I didn’t—like he was holding onto a memory he wasn’t ready to share.

I stepped back.

“You’re fine,” I told myself.

The words sounded thin.

Later, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee growing cold in front of me, the dream returned in fragments—the body, the blood, the knife.

It felt too real to be imagined.

Not created.

Remembered.

I told myself nightmares happen after trauma. That the mind fills empty spaces when memories are missing. That this was normal.

But deep down, I knew something was wrong.

I had survived the accident.

I had lost my past.

And somehow, my dreams knew the parts of me that I didn’t.