"I didn't expect you to change your mind anytime soon," Annie said, snuggling back into his embrace. They'd spoken briefly about Sammy's prospective learner's permit—which was somehow still a thing even for people who would never actually drive a car—and the result had been quickly settled into a Let's Get This Over With now that neither of them had any strong objections.

"Gotta let her grow up sometime," Carl murmured into the back of her head.

"Feels like last week she was starting kindergarten," Annie said, running her thumbs over his hand.

"She had that little blue backpack and wanted me to go to class with her," Carl recalled with a chuckle. "Haven't thought about that in a while."

Annie sighed, then went quiet.

This was it.

Carl recognized the moment.

They'd come home with Sammy being adorably excited and rubbing her boundless enthusiasm off onto both Bobby and Rebecca after giving Carl another one of her big, whole-hearted hugs that made his day and strained his back, and there had been some homework-doing from the girls and not-so-subtle comments from Rebecca about how she had gotten her permit on her sixteenth birthday since her mom hadn't prevented it, to which Carl had replied that he had been the one against Sammy getting her license, and it had been a rare moment of awkward embarrassment from the younger Strickland woman when she found this out.

But now the Rocky Road had been put away, the girls were in bed, Rebecca had gone back to her room to browse the net or whatever before she went to sleep, and both Annie and Carl were in bed with the lights out, and she was finally going to tell him what had been bothering her. He'd puzzled over it for most of the night, but she was being oddly opaque and not giving him even a hint.

"Carl," Annie began in a quiet voice, "if… If something you couldn't explain happened to you, something that was maybe impossible, what would you do?"

Carl considered the strange question.

There were a couple of strange things about this. Annie wasn't one to be so evasive anymore, for starters. No, that had mysteriously ended when she'd come back from her two weeks at Cheryl's after delivering her ultimatum. From then on, she was almost always refreshingly direct in a way that Carl really appreciated. No matter whether it was a difficult or an embarrassing topic, she'd force herself onward in a visible way, pausing for a moment just as she had just prior to asking this question.

In addition, she tended not to ask him to solve her problems. Annie had made it very clear early on in their relationship that she wanted someone to complement her, not to rescue her. She was perfectly capable of living her life without anyone else butting in, as she demonstrated daily. It wasn't even something that needed describing in Carl's estimation: if she saw a problem that needed solving or a task that needed accomplishing, she just did it.

These thoughts raced through Carl's head as he thought over his wife's question. "How impossible are we talking?" he asked, thinking that maybe he needed a clearer idea of what was bugging her.

Annie tensed for a moment before relaxing. "It's…" She paused, then went silent again.

Carl squeezed her a little, and she moved her hands to squeeze his right one in return, which was draped over her middle.

"Do you believe in magic?" Annie asked at last.

Magic? Carl frowned. This wasn't what he'd been expecting. Still, though, if Annie was asking then she must have a reason. Maybe…

Then he remembered it, because of course he would.

Nobody paid as much attention to details involving his wife as Carl Weathers.

Annie had been reading some bestselling fantasy novel over the weekend. As she tended to do about all things, she likely was considering it on a deep level as she read. To that end, some idea she had come up with had probably been deeply unsettling, and she was starting to think of it in the context of real life.

Carl recalled having such things happen to him many years ago. Back when he was younger, he used to get obsessed with various cool series he watched or read. He'd spent weeks at one point imagining what it would be like to be an intergalactic bounty hunter. He'd tried—just one time—running with his arms outstretched behind himself in order to see whether it made him faster. At one point, he'd even gotten interested enough in a superhero to try calculating some of the physics that would be required to enact some of his feats of strength, finding himself deeply disappointed when, in fact, it couldn't possibly have worked in the real world without the sort of hoop-jumping-through that he didn't approve of.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

This was likely a similar situation, though, knowing Annie, the scale was much different and more impactful. Some especially well-written novel had captured her imagination, and she was evaluating how it was affecting her worldview. There was no concrete scenario, and it was all hypothetical.

"No, but I'm open to your idea," he said, offering her a blank slate to work off of in whatever concept she wanted to discuss.

"Suppose it was real," Annie said slowly, "and you didn't know about it. But then you saw it, and you knew you were either going crazy or you'd seen magic. What would you do?"

"Hm." This was a hard one. It was an interesting problem, that's for sure. Carl was almost interested enough to ask which book she was reading, but then he remembered he wouldn't have time to read it anyway and focused once more on the scenario that had been posed to him. "Do I have any proof that—"

"No," Annie said, shaking her head a little on the pillow. "You only have your memories of what you saw, heard, and felt."

"Hm." Carl thought about it, and then he thought about it from another angle. "Why are there only two options?"

"Huh?"

"Well, I've seen maybe-magic once, right?" Carl asked. "I have no proof, so there's nothing I can do one way or another, and the only real conclusion would be to think I was crazy."

"Oh," Annie said, curling up under the covers.

"But," Carl said, getting into it now, "that would be a waste, because I've only seen it once. People see—or don't see—weird things all the time. For example, I was talking to John at the office, who works in security. He was a cop for a long time, and one time he got called in to check out a deer that had been on a local highway route for most of a day. But when he got there, it wasn't a deer, it was a dead person."

"What."

"There's actually a psychological phenomenon that occurs sometimes when people see profoundly disturbing things," Carl continued. "I, uh, can't remember the exact name of it, but it's like the brain blurs over what you're seeing and replaces what you saw with something that's less disturbing. So people driving by this body for like, eight hours were just seeing it as a deer."

"Um…" Annie shifted next to him. "What's this have to do with what I was asking?"

"My point was that I could think I was crazy, sure, but people have seen—or not seen—weird stuff all the time and not been crazy. Seeing something weird once doesn't make you crazy; it could just mean you fell asleep for a minute and didn't realize, or your brain didn't process something right because—"

"So you don't think I—you would be crazy if you thought you saw… I don't know, maybe like… A portal to another world? Just as an example." Annie asked, tensing once more.

"No, I'd probably think I was having a really vivid daydream," Carl said.

"What if you were sure it wasn't a daydream?" Annie persisted.

"I don't know," Carl said, feeling like he was getting into the idea now, "maybe I got drugged somehow? Or I ate some expired food or whatever and had a weird reaction? Or even somebody could be pranking me and somehow putting images into the AR display in my glasses."

Annie was quiet for a short while, then she let out a deep sigh and relaxed. "Yeah, that makes sense," she said. She rolled over in his arms and gave him a quick, faintly-minty kiss. "Thanks, Carl."

"Sure," Carl said, adding a tight hug to his reply. "I mean, if it happened again after that, I'd have to wonder, of course, but having something weird happen one time with no evidence wouldn't make me think I was crazy. I'd just be suspicious and take precautions in case it happened again."

"Precautions…"

"Yeah, like in your portal example maybe I'd grab a rock or something from the other side of the portal if I could," Carl said. "Then at least I'd have proof."

"Right…"

He yawned. "That was a kinda cool scenario though. How'd you think of it?"

Annie finished her own yawn. "It, um, just came to me…"

"You should try writing a book sometime," Carl said. "I know you said you wanted to at one point. You've always got such great ideas."

"Y-yeah," she said, "maybe." She rolled over again. "I'm gonna sleep. Big day tomorrow." She picked up his hand and drew it to her lips to give it a kiss on the knuckles. "I love you, Carl."

Carl grinned sleepily. "Love you too, Annie."