She had forgotten what it felt like to wake before the alarm.
For nearly a year, every night had ended the same way. Sleep would arrive reluctantly, lingering only long enough to convince her it was safe before abandoning her to the same familiar nightmare. She could never remember all of it afterwards. Only fragments remained. A door she couldn’t open. Someone calling her name from somewhere she could never reach. The certainty that she had left something terribly important behind, though she never knew what it was.
Morning offered no relief. She had grown accustomed to beginning each day already exhausted, carrying herself through conversations she barely heard and meetings she scarcely remembered. Friends told her to rest. Others suggested stress. Strangers recommended herbal teas, meditation, fewer hours staring at a screen. She smiled politely at every suggestion because it was easier than admitting the truth.
She wasn’t afraid of sleeping.
She was afraid of where sleep kept taking her.
It was this quiet desperation, more than anything else, that eventually brought her aboard the Nightcar. She had heard whispers about it from people who spoke as though recalling somewhere they weren’t entirely certain had existed. No one could ever explain where the train travelled, only that those who needed it somehow found it, usually at the exact moment they had stopped looking.
She boarded with no expectations.
Hope, she had learned, could be every bit as exhausting as disappointment.
She chose a seat beside the window, more out of habit than preference. Darkness slid silently across the glass, reflecting only the faint outline of a woman who looked older than she remembered becoming. There were shadows beneath her eyes that no amount of sleep had managed to erase, and she realised, not for the first time, that she could no longer remember the last dream that hadn’t frightened her.
She didn’t notice the cat until a soft weight landed beside her.
A small black cat regarded her with calm amber eyes, neither cautious nor affectionate, simply curious. Without asking permission, she stepped into the woman’s lap and settled there as though she had every right to be.
The woman smiled despite herself.
“You’ve made a terrible mistake,” she whispered, absent-mindedly stroking the cat’s impossibly soft fur. “I’m not very good company.”
The cat blinked once.
Then, with surprising determination, climbed higher until she was stretched across the woman’s chest, her head tucked just beneath her chin.
The warmth caught her off guard.
It wasn’t remarkable. Cats were warm. She knew that. Yet somehow this felt different. It was the kind of warmth she vaguely remembered from childhood, before life had become something to endure. The warmth of falling asleep in the back seat while someone else drove. Of waking beneath a blanket she didn’t remember pulling over herself. Of discovering, just for a little while, that the world had continued without asking anything of her.
Her hand came to rest against the cat’s back.
The steady rhythm of that tiny heartbeat was strangely reassuring.
For the first time in months, she stopped waiting for sleep to betray her.
When it finally came, it arrived so gently that she never noticed crossing into it.
