The Mistake

Emily was not doing too good. She was having nightmares, that was nothing new. But what was new, was that the bad dreams were more intense now.

It was no longer just barely there impressions of things that she barely remembered, when she woke up. Now the nightmares had a sense of clarity about them that had never been there before.

Drowning, suffocation, strangulation. 

That was the theme that they had taken and they were sticking with it. Each night she woke up in a pool of her own sweat, feeling like she could not breathe no matter how hard she tried. And instead of easing up, the nightmares were picking up pace. Her crafts drawer was steadily filling up. Proof of all of the hours she spent awake, a needle and thread in her grasp. Her hands moving steadily as she tried to chase away the phantoms of her sleep.

She had even gotten to the point where she was hiding her crafts away in her handbag and dropping them off in random donation baskets throughout the city. The locked drawer she kept them in now overflowing. 

Her mother was giving her more and more worried looks when she thought Emily was not looking.

Emily knew her mother, soon, she would go from just looking, to asking outright. And Emily did not like her chances of keeping her secret if her mother decided to come at her with the full might of maternal worry.

She had to do something, but just the thought of going back on sleeping pills had her breaking out in cold sweat. Sure, the pills knocked her out. Her body going into an all dark place. But that was the thing. On the pills, she slept, and once she slept, she could not wake up, they kept her under. Nightmare after nightmare she suffered through, but the pills would not release their hold on her. And on the nights where she did not dream at all, she woke up feeling like the world had been robbed of all its colour.

There was no joy, no rage. Just nothing in her.

But as the nights wore on, Emily began to think more and more about the pills. Taking them was not going to fix anything, but she was tired.

So very tired.

Maybe they would give her a break, just a little break. That was all she needed, just a bit of uninterrupted sleep. All she had to do was buy the pills, take them, and then maybe things would get better again.

In the end, she waited too long dithering, and she ended up making a monumental mistake at work. It was something that she had done a thousand times before. Something that she should have been able to do in her sleep. But she ended up making a mistake when she was wide awake.

She was setting up for a meeting with a client that Derek had been trying to woo for weeks. And while going over the presentation slides, Emily ended up deleting some of the slides.

It should not have been a big deal, they had backups for everything. And the file's backup would have come in handy if she had realized in the moment that she had made a mistake.

But she had not.

Instead she followed Derek into the meeting, and sat back while he presented. She only realized that something was wrong when he tried to go for the next slide and nothing happened.

His eyes sought hers in the room, a question in them.

'What is going on?' And Emily could only give him an apologetic look back.

'I am sorry,' She projected as hard as she could, and then she moved. The client had not yet noticed that something was wrong.

No one thought it odd when the CEO's PA went over to his laptop and started typing, her fingers flying over the keyboard.

In a show of trust, Derek kept talking, extending key points he had already talked about and adding to them.

In that time, Emily managed to find the saved file and bring it up. The projected screen flickering only briefly before coming back up. Something easily explained away when the lights flickered seconds later. The client thinking it was the power, instead of her using her phone to mess with them.

Derek finished off the presentation without a hitch and by the end of it, they were signing a contract. The client deciding from just that one presentation that they like what they saw.

From then on, it was all smiles, handshakes and cheering. But Emily, despite her own smile, could not share in the joy.

She had nearly messed it up, and as she looked over at Derek, she knew that her mistake would not be overlooked.

She was in a world of trouble.