Twenty-three-year-old Maeve Holland has been in a hospital bed for four weeks after stepping into the road on her way to a job interview she dreaded. Her mother Vivien visits every day and talks to her, and Maeve, in a dream she does not know is a dream, is living in a cottage by the sea she has never seen. The cottage is built from a photograph her mother kept by the bed for twenty years, and the man she finds there, Alastair, is built from the part of her that has been holding on. The two of them fall in love, slowly and with growing unease. The dream grows — a city, a bookshop, a hospital, a door — and Alastair begins to suspect that he is not a visitor but a piece of her, and that if she wakes, he will be gone. A literary fiction novel about consciousness, trauma, and the most loving thing you can do for someone you love. Read the free preview chapters online on SweetNovel.