She stared at the pregnancy test with the two pink lines. She was pregnant. It was unbelievable. She had put the test in a zipper baggie, so she could look at it whenever she needed proof again. Unbelievable.

She’d made a doctor’s appointment to confirm it. She’d even made up excuses to explain it to her friends and employees. She’d say she dated someone briefly and broke it off, then found out she was pregnant. But the real explanation? Even she was not sure.

What did happen? She’d only had sex in a dream! Alinora had always felt real to her. Was it real? Like another dimension? That people get sucked into when they’re stressed? She laughed a little hysterically, and put the test back in her nightstand drawer.

She started pacing her house again. She wound up in the living room, staring out the back window, at the thick trees behind her yard. Feeling somehow they knew something. They were a part of it.

“Snap out of it,” she said to herself as she started to pace again. “They’re just trees.”

The other dimension theory made sense. Except that this was real life and not science fiction. Was there any way to make this make sense in reality?

* * *

“Rape,” Dr. Carpenter said to her gently.

“What?” Lily asked, incredulous. “I wasn’t raped.”

“I’m saying you could have been raped and not remember,” Ellie said.

“I think I’d remember being raped,” Lily said, clearly offended.

“There is something called dissociative amnesia. When a traumatic event, like rape, happens, sometimes a person forces the memory to the back of her mind, because she’s not ready to deal with it. You could have been raped and repressed the memory,” Ellie smiled soothingly at her.

Lily looked stunned. Had she even created the world as a way to deal with a rape? Maybe Ellie was right. “You think Alinora could be some kind of stress reaction to rape?” She started to quietly cry.

“Yes, that’s possible,” Ellie said. “If not for the test results your OB/GYN sent over to confirm your pregnancy I might have suggested you had a false pregnancy, brought on by your total belief that Alinora and Caleb are real.”

“That sounds nicer,” Lily said with teary eyes.

“Yes, I’m sorry, I know. When you first told me, I was kind of hoping for that explanation.”

“But isn’t there anything else it could be?” Lily asked. “I don’t feel like I was raped. Wouldn’t I feel…. bad?”

“As repressed emotions from a rape start to resurface, you will start to feel bad, yes. You may just be repressing them right now,” Ellie said.

Lily looked troubled.

“There is one more explanation I can think of,” Ellie said. Lily looked hopeful. “But it’s pretty far out there.” She looked uncomfortable about suggesting it to Lily.

“What is it?” Lily asked anxiously. “I’m open minded,” she said. Hoping Ellie could finally see the truth. Other dimensions, something.

Ellie took a deep breath. “A great number of therapists don’t even believe in the existence of this, and frankly I’ve never dealt with it before, but I have been reading up on it lately.”

Lily was on the edge of her seat.

“There’s a possibility you could have Dissociative Identity Disorder,” Ellie said cautiously.

“What?” Lily was surprised and disappointed. “Multiple personalities?”

“That would explain how you got pregnant with no memory of having sex. One of your other identities could have had sex,” Ellie said, “If this is the explanation that is.”

Lily shook her head and leaned back in her chair. Unbelievable, she thought to herself.

“So, what would cause a person to sprout personalities?” Lily asked wearily.

Ellie smiled a little, then explained. “Well, multiple personalities are typically formed in childhood. So a traumatic event would have had to happen to you as a child. To make you split into separate identities. And then you would still have the personalities, or alters, and one of them has been having sex.”

“What kind of traumatic event?” Lily asked.

“Well,” Ellie hesitated, “typically sexual abuse. Other kinds of abuse could cause it too. Physical violence, for instance.”

“So, you’re telling me that no matter what, I was at some point sexually assaulted. Either in childhood or now?” Lily asked with her stomach turning in knots.

“Yes,” Ellie said quietly. Her bell timer on her desk went off. “You can give that some thought in the next few days,” she said as she got up. “It’ll be okay, Lily. We’ll find a way together to make things okay again. Alright?”

Lily got up and wiped the tears off her cheeks. “Okay,” she said, not really believing it. She nodded at Ellie as she walked out of the room.

“See you Thursday,” Ellie said after her.

* * *

“Unbelievable,” Lily said to herself as she curled up in bed that night. Lately in Alinora she and Caleb had been celebrating. Happy. Going to the festival in the village, going to the waterfall. Picking wildflowers, eating fruit off the trees in the garden. Making love. How could that be made up in her mind as a response to rape?

She let tears leak out of her eyes as she closed them. She opened them what seemed like minutes later. She was standing in her kitchen in Alinora. Renaissance gown of blue and white. Caleb walked up to her and wiped the tears from her cheek.

“Sad?” he said.

She looked up at him as if waking from a daze. She smiled. “Not anymore,” she said.

He put his arms around her and she hugged him back. She felt perfectly happy and safe here. Everything was going to be alright.

* * *