Jessica Stein | Author of The Dream

The Story

A door between centuries. A love that bridges time.

Ana Vasquez has a good life. At thirty-one, she works in editorial acquisitions at a Chicago publishing house, has a comfortable apartment full of books, and takes the L train home every evening to a world of clean lines and scheduled pleasures. But lately, she has felt the hollow place—the sense that she is living one dimension short of what she could be.

Then comes the dream.

A room in sixteenth-century Marseille. Golden afternoon light. A man at the window with sea-grey eyes and a dimple she cannot forget. When Ana wakes with the amethyst pendant warm against her chest, she discovers it was never a dream at all—but a door.

Pierre Renaud is a merchant of Renaissance Marseille: precise, honest, and completely unprepared for a woman who arrives from five centuries hence speaking perfect French and asking questions no one in his world would think to ask. As Ana returns night after night to the harbor city, she discovers that the pendant's power comes with a cost—and that someone in her own time is determined to destroy the life she is building across the centuries.

"A gorgeous meditation on longing and belonging... Ana and Pierre's love story transcends its magical premise to become something deeply human." — [Publication]

The Characters

Two worlds. Four lives. One impossible love.

Ana Vasquez

The Dreamer

Thirty-one. Publishing editor. Chicago. She thought she was having vivid dreams. She was falling in love. Ana arrives in Marseille with the directness of a modern woman and discovers that the hollow place in her chest has a very specific address.

Pierre Renaud

The Merchant

Thirty-five. Import-export. Marseille, 1540s. Precise, honest, and completely himself. Pierre has built a life on the harbor through fifteen years of careful attention. He is not a man given to fantasy—which makes his certainty about Ana all the more absolute.

Lynnette

The Baker

Proprietor, Confiserie de la Rue Saint-Ferréol. She knows things about the city that no one should know. She recognizes Ana before Ana recognizes herself. She has been waiting for this moment since before Ana was born—in any century.

Steve

The Shadow

Twenty-eight. Office colleague. Chicago. He listens when Ana talks about her dreams. He borrows the pendant to "have it appraised." He believes that if he can eliminate the competition, Ana will finally see him.

Chapter One

The First Dream

Ana

He did not know I was there.

That was the first thing—the thing I would return to, later, when I was trying to understand what had happened to me in that room. He was not looking at me. He was not looking at anything, really. He was sitting in the tall chair by the window with the afternoon light cascading across him in long golden panels, one hand resting on the arm of the chair, his fingers moving in a slow, absent rhythm against the embroidered fabric—back and forth, back and forth—the way a person's hands move when the mind is somewhere else entirely. His gaze was directed toward the middle distance beyond the glass, toward the rooftops and the bright hard line of the harbor and whatever it was that men like him kept in the private rooms of their thinking. He was utterly, completely elsewhere.

I stood in the shadow of the doorway and watched him, entranced, unable to move.

The room itself was magnificent in a way I had only ever encountered in books—and I had read many. The ceiling was high and vaulted, traversed by thick timber beams darkened by decades of wood smoke. Tapestries hung from the stone walls on either side; one depicted a hunting scene with riders on horseback cresting a wooded hillside, the hounds stretched long and low across the stitched earth below them. The other was a pastoral scene of extraordinary delicacy—women in pale gowns gathered at the edge of a river, their hair unbound, their expressions carrying that dreaming half-awareness I had only ever seen in old paintings...

THE DREAM