SEATTLE — The best days, Brandon Roy says, are when he can take his kids down to Madison Park Beach on the shores of Lake Washington. He brings his own chair, crosses his legs and lets the day unfold. The kids might swim. Or ride bikes. Or he might join them and throw the football or baseball around.



“To me,” Roy says, “that’s living.”



He is alive, and he never lets himself forget it, even if his dreams tell him differently.



He has been tortured by nightmares so intense he sometimes wakes gasping for air. Other times he is drenched in sweat. After the worst dreams, he will peel himself off the sheets, blanket his soaked bed with towels, then crash into his pillow and agonize how a former NBA All-Star could be so haunted.



“Every dream,” he says, “ends in a fatality.”



Usually, it is his death, and every time the scene is from that very real April night in 2017 when two gunmen —...