Realm Of Illusion

Dr. Brooke Sullivan knows how sleep betrays the mind. She catalogs hallucinations, prescribes routines, and keeps nightmares at arm's length. When Jason Matthews vanishes, and his apartment looks as if someone polished out every trace of a life, Brooke follows a single frayed clue: an old carnival photograph and a ticket marked Realm of Illusions. Her professional certainties crack-light bends, masks move, and the lullaby from her childhood returns to whisper: remember, Brooke. As patients' nightmares slither into waking hours and the boundaries between clinic and carnival dissolve, Brooke must reconcile the clinician she presents to the world with the child who once looked into a funhouse and never stopped listening. To save Jason and the others she once dismissed as "parasomnias," Brooke must enter the Realm itself and face the architecture of her guilt. She has thirty-something hours of ordinary time-and a lifetime of buried memory-before the carnival closes the door for good. The question is not whether she'll find the missing, but who she'll be when she comes back.