Ophelia did not answer straight away.

Her fingers kept worrying at the edge of the envelope, nail catching lightly against the hardened wax before slipping off again. She looked at Naomi’s letter, then her face, then down to her own breakfast as though the eggs might offer some miracle excuse not to continue. The silence stretched just a little too long to be natural.

“A few,” she said at last, voice small. Barely a whisper. “Dreams.”

Even then, the word seemed insufficient. Her mouth pressed thin. She adjusted her glasses though they did not need adjusting, buying herself another heartbeat or two. “Or not dreams, maybe. I do not know.” A weak, fleeting huff of breath left her nose. “That sounds ridiculous.”

Her shoulders drew in slightly, the instinctive shape of someone protecting something fragile before she was even sure she wanted it touched.

“It was only… strange.” Ophelia’s thumb flattened over the seal. “Too vivid.” She swallowed. “I was somewhere underground, I think. Stone walls. Candles. It smelled wrong.”

Her brow pinched, gaze unfocusing briefly as she tried to catch hold of details that seemed to wriggle the moment she reached for them. “There were people there. Waiting for something.” She paused, then corrected herself in a quieter voice. “No. Not something.”

That alone seemed to unsettle her enough that she glanced aside, toward the hall, toward safer and duller things. The scrape of benches. Murmured prayer. The clink of utensils against bowls.

“They called it a blessing,” she muttered, though her expression suggested she thought the word vile. “Or a gift. I do not know. They were going to…” Her voice caught. She looked down hard at the table. “There was a child.”

Her hand stilled.

For a moment, all the nervous little motions stopped entirely, and what remained beneath them was plain: not just fear, but revulsion.

“And then there was this… creature. Beast. I never saw it properly, not all of it, only enough to know I did not want to.” Another pause. “It was angry.”

Her brows knit, uncertain, as though she still did not trust her own memory of it. “I could feel it, I think. The anger. Like it was mine for a moment, or I was standing too close to it.” She rubbed at her wrist with her free hand.

“I woke up shaking.”

Her gaze flicked toward the envelope again.

“And then this.” The words were barely above a murmur. “With that ridiculous feeling that I had already seen it happen before it did.” Ophelia tried for a smile and failed halfway through, the expression turning thin and embarrassed. “I know how that sounds.”

She hesitated again, clearly resisting the urge to retreat from the subject entirely now that she had said this much. Naomi’s presence kept her there. Not because Ophelia was fully at ease, but because some part of her wanted to be.

“I did not want to say anything if it was only a foolish nightmare,” she admitted. “And I still do not know that it is not.” Her fingers tightened around the letter. “But it does not feel like nothing.”

She glanced up through her lashes, wary and uncertain in that particular way that invited comfort without ever asking for it outright.

“Have you ever had that?” she asked softly. “A dream that did not feel entirely like your own?”