Claire was lying beside him in bed facing him, eyes closed in an untroubled sleep. He turned to take her hand and watch her sleep. Everything was silent except of the steady sound of their breathing. He felt so calm and at peace seeing her with him that the impossibility of the scene didn't occur to him. He held her hand with his right one and with the other stroked over her cheek slightly as not to disturb her sleep. She was about to open her eyes when suddenly… he woke up. And in this short moment between sleep and wake he could have sworn she was really lying there in his arms, still breathing and about to wake up herself. Her soft scent filling his nose and when he concentrated enough he could almost see her piercing blue eyes as soon as she would open them. And when he opened his own eyes carefully, willing her to be there he was only met with the dark, the empty space next to him and a silence that weighted heavier than he could ever remember a silence between them when she was still alive.
That were the happy dreams where he would get up early and sit at the windows until the morning, staring unseeing in the dawn over to Drover's and think about the woman he had lost. The picture of them with Charlotte that they had taken in Melbourne which was usually standing on his bedside table was in his hands, ever so slightly tracing her face. His mind filled with memories and wishful thinking. He could be at Drover's now, in the bedroom they would have shared. Sitting at their window and looking over to Wilgul or Killarney, Claire in their bed behind him sleeping peacefully. He would be able to wake her any moment and look into her beautiful eyes.
And then there were the sad, disturbing and irritating dreams that haunted him as well. In them the motion of him lifting her face in the car that day and looking into her dead unseeing eyes repeated itself again and again. She stared in the distance and saw nothing. There was dried blood under her nose, her hair tousled and she wore the light blue sweater. That was all he could see just before he enveloped her in his arms and cried into her shoulder. The motion, lifting her face, seeing her eyes, seeing the blood, understanding and hugging her, mixed with the image of Tess running on the farm that day, with Charlotte in her arms both of them crying. And with these dreams when he awoke and turned on the light, just before the dark turned to the light, he saw her face in front of his eyes. His Claire, with the blue sweater, tousled hair, the blood, the piercing blue eyes seeing right through him and matching her clothes. And below one eye a single tear. Of sadness. Of regret. Of wishful thinking. And of love.
After that he couldn't sit still in his room and miss her even more by recalling her face, he had to get out of the house. So mostly he ended up behind the house, chopping wood. That was how Dave and Nick often found him in the early morning.