The Game You Played Read Online Free Page A

pills in the drawer were the only ones Luke knew about.
    I never took any of the antidepressants. I flushed two of those tablets down the toilet every day. I only wanted the sleeping tablets. I took one of those from the packet in my bedside table every night, and two from the secret stash in the shoebox.
    Luke would never understand why I was taking so many of the pills. These were a new type of sleeping tablet that Dr Moran—my psychiatrist—had switched me to a couple of months back. I’d begged her for something stronger. The pills I’d had weren’t working. I wasn’t sleeping.
    The new pills had had unexpected side effects. They’d given me extraordinarily vivid dreams. Dreams that were of Tommy. Always of Tommy. I couldn’t see him anymore in real life, but I could visit him in dreams. I could see him and smell him and touch him. I could even direct the dreams to some extent.
    I’d asked my psych about the episodes, and she’d mentioned lucid dreams . In a lucid dream, you were conscious that you were dreaming and you could make things happen within the dream. Everything was sharp and real and intense. I could be in the middle of a field of wildflowers, with Tommy in my lap, listening to him try to sing a song (he’d hum most of the words). I could walk with him down a city street, his tiny hand in mine, just walking and experiencing the world together. I could put him to sleep in his bed and brush his streaky blond hair back from his forehead. I’d never realised how precious those small things were when Tommy was here.
    The worst times were when I’d wake from a dream of Tommy. My heart would tear in two all over again. I’d curl myself up tightly and bawl (being careful not to wake Luke).
    I’d become an addict to my dream world.
    Last Saturday had marked a whole six months of Tommy being gone. Six months. My dreams were my only path back to him.
    I must have alarmed Dr Moran in some way when I’d spoken to her about the dreams because she’d said that it might be an idea to switch back to the old sleeping pills.
    A week ago, the pills stopped having the same effect. I’d sleep dreamless sleeps. I was in darkness, searching, but finding nothing.
    In desperation, I took an extra tablet.
    That night, I’d woken outside in our courtyard. In the moonlit darkness. I’d been watching Tommy play with his set of trucks. He’d loaded the pebbles from the garden into the dump truck and giggled hysterically as he tipped the pebbles out again (everything was hysterically funny to toddlers).
    Even inside the dream, it’d seemed wrong that I was allowing him out here at night. Bad mothering. But he was so happy, I didn’t have the heart to tell him to come in. When I tried to pick him up, he somehow slipped through my fingers. 
    Then I’d woken fully. Alone in the courtyard.
    It was the first time my dreams had physically taken me to another location.
    I should have stopped the pills then.
    But I couldn’t stop.
    I’d woken in different rooms of the house every night of the past week.
    Once at the front gate of the house.
    But I had Tommy back again.
    I lived for the nights. I’d spend all day in a depression so deep, I was buried in it.
    Every week since Tommy had gone missing, the news websites seemed to have some new snippet of information about what might have happened to Tommy. But none of it led to anything. My hopes would be raised and crushed. Raised and crushed.
    Speculation. So much speculation. Maybe it was the mother. Maybe it was the father. Maybe he fell into the harbour, after all, and became entangled in the ropes of a boat and then had been taken so far into the heart of Sydney Harbour that no one would ever find him. And the media reminded people that the harbour was full of sharks.
    The police talked of lonely, desperate women who took other people’s children sometimes. They talked of people who were prepared to pay a kidnapping ring to snatch the child they want and pretend to