HELENA

June 20, 2009

BARRY

October 25–26, 2007

He walks into his house and closes the front door, stopping again at the mirror by the coat rack to stare at the reflection of his younger self.

This isn’t real.

This can’t be real.

Julia is calling his name from the bedroom. He moves past the television, where the World Series is still on, and turns down the hallway, the floor creaking under his bare feet in all the familiar places. Past Meghan’s room, and then a guestroom that doubles as a home office, until he’s standing in the doorway of his and Julia’s room.

His ex is sitting in bed with a book opened across her lap and a cup of tea steaming on her bedside table.

“Did I hear you go out?” she asks.

She looks so different.

“Yeah.”

“Where’s Meghan?”

“She went to Dairy Queen.”

“It’s a school night.”

“She’ll be back by ten thirty.”

“Knew who to ask, didn’t she?”

Julia smiles and pats the bedspread beside her, and Barry enters their room, his eyes drifting over wedding photos, a black-and-white of Julia holding Meghan on the night of her birth, and finally a print over the bed of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, which they bought at MoMA ten years ago after seeing the original. He climbs onto the bed and sits against the headboard next to Julia. Up close, she looks airbrushed, her skin too smooth, only beginning to suggest the wrinkles he saw at brunch two days ago.

“Why aren’t you watching your game?” she asks. The last time they sat on this bed together was the night she left him. Stared into his eyes and said, I’m sorry, but I can’t separate you from all this pain. “Honey. What’s wrong? You look like someone died.”

He hasn’t heard her call him honey in ages, and no he doesn’t feel like anyone died. He feels…an intense sense of disorientation and disconnect. Like his own body is an avatar for which he’s still getting a feel for the functionality.

“I’m fine.”

“Wow, you want to try that again, but more convincing this time?”

Is it possible that the loss he’s carried since Meghan’s death is bleeding from his soul through his eyes and into this impossible moment? That on some lower frequency, Julia senses that shift in him? Because the absence of tragedy is having an inverse, proportional effect on what he sees when he looks into her eyes. They astound him. Bright and present and clear. The eyes of the woman he fell in love with. And it hits him all over again—the ruinous power of grief.

Julia runs her fingers down the back of his neck, which puts a shiver through his spine and raises gooseflesh. He hasn’t been touched by his wife in a decade.

“What’s the matter? Something happen at work?”

Technically, his last day of work consisted of getting killed in a deprivation tank, and sent back into whatever this is, so…

“Yeah, actually.”

The sensory experience of it is what’s killing him. The smell of their room. The softness of Julia’s hands. All the things he’d forgotten. Everything he lost.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.

“Would you mind if I just lie here while you read?”

“Of course not.”

And so he rests his head on her lap. He has imagined this a thousand times, usually at three a.m., lying in bed in his Washington Heights apartment, caught in that wearisome handoff between intoxication and hangover, wondering—

What if his daughter had lived? What if his marriage had survived? What if everything had not derailed? What if…

This isn’t real.

This can’t be real.

The only sound in the room is the soft scratch of Julia turning the page every minute or so. His eyes are closed, he’s just breathing now, and as she runs her fingers through his hair the way she used to, he turns onto his side to hide the tears in his eyes.

Inside, he’s a quivering heap of protoplasm, and it takes a herculean effort to maintain his mental composure. The pure emotion is staggering, but Julia doesn’t seem to notice the handful of times his back heaves with a barely suppressed sob.

He was just reunited with his dead child.

He saw her, heard her voice, held her.

Now he’s somehow back in his old bedroom with Julia, and it’s too much to take.

A terrifying thought creeps in—What if this is just a psychotic break?

What if it all goes away?

What if I lose Meghan again?

Hyperventilating—

What if—

“Barry, you OK?”

Quit thinking.

Breathe.

“Yeah.”

Just breathe.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Go to sleep.

Don’t dream.

And see if all of this still exists in the morning.

---

He is woken early by light coming through the blinds. Finds himself lying beside Julia, still wearing his clothes from last night. He climbs out of bed without disturbing her and pads down the hallway to Meghan’s room. The door is closed. He cracks it open, peers inside. His daughter sleeps under a mound of blankets, and it is quiet enough in the house at this hour for him to hear her breathing.

She is alive. She is safe. She is right there.

He and Julia should be in a state of grief and shock, just getting back to their house after spending all night in the morgue. The image of Meghan’s body on the slab—her crushed-in torso covered in a black bruise—has never left him, although his memory of it has taken on the same haunted complexion as the other false memories.

But there she is, and here he is, feeling more at home in this body with every passing second. That clipped line of memories of his other life is receding, as if he’s just woken from the longest, most horrific nightmare. An eleven-year-long nightmare.

That’s exactly what it is, he thinks—a nightmare. Because this is feeling more and more like his reality now.

He slips into Meghan’s room and stands next to the bed, watching her sleep. Bearing witness to the formation of the universe couldn’t fill him with a more profound sense of wonder and joy and overwhelming gratitude at whatever force remade the world for Meghan and for him.

But a cold terror is also breathing down his neck at the thought that this might be a delusion.

A piece of inexplicable perfection waiting to be snatched away.

---

He wanders through the house like a ghost through a past life, rediscovering spaces and objects all but lost in his memory. The alcove in the living room where every Christmas they put up the tree. The small table by the front door where he stashed his personal effects. A coffee mug he favored. The roll-top desk in the guestroom where he paid the bills. The chair in the living room where every Sunday he read the Washington Post and New York Times cover to cover.

It is a museum of memories.

His heart is beating faster than normal, keeping time with a low-level headache behind his eyes. He wants a cigarette. Not psychologically—he finally quit five years ago after numerous failed attempts—but apparently his thirty-nine-year-old body physically needs a nicotine bump.

He goes into the kitchen and fills a glass with water from the tap. Stands at the sink, watching the early light brushstroke the backyard into being.

Opening the cabinet to the right of the sink, he pulls out the coffee he used to drink. He brews a pot and loads what he can of yesterday’s dishes into the dishwasher, then sets to work completing the task that was his for the duration of their marriage—washing the remaining dishes by hand in the sink.

When he finishes, the cigarettes are still calling to him. He goes to the table by the front door and grabs the carton of Camels and throws them in the garbage bin outside. Then he sits on the porch drinking his coffee in the cold, hoping his head will clear and wondering if the man responsible for sending him here is watching him right now. Perhaps from some higher plane of existence? From beyond time? The fear returns. Will he be suddenly ripped out of this moment and thrown back into his old life? Or is this permanent?

He tamps down the rising panic. Tells himself he didn’t imagine FMS and the future. This is far too elaborate, even for his detective’s mind, to have dreamed up.

This is real.

This is now.

This is.

Meghan is alive, and nothing will ever take her away from him again.

He says aloud, the closest thing to a prayer he’s ever made, “If you can hear me right now, please don’t take me away from this. I will do anything.”

There is no response in the dawn silence.

He takes another sip of coffee and watches the sunlight stream through the branches of the oak tree, striking the frosted grass, which begins to steam.

HELENA

July 5, 2009

BARRY

November 2007

Each day is a revelation, every moment a gift. The simple act of sitting across the dinner table from his daughter and listening to her talk about her day feels like a pardon. How could he ever have taken even one second of it for granted?

He drinks in every moment—the way Meghan’s eyes roll when he asks about boys, the way they light up when they talk about the colleges she wants to visit. He cries spontaneously in her presence, but it’s easy enough to blame on quitting the cigarettes, on watching his little girl become a woman.

Julia’s antennae are slightly up. In these moments, he notices her watching him the way one might examine a painting hanging not quite straight.

---

Every morning, when consciousness first returns, he lies in bed afraid to open his eyes, fearing he’ll find himself back in his one-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights, with this second chance fading into oblivion.

But he’s always next to Julia, always watching the light come through the blinds, and his only connection to that other life exists in false memories, which he would love to forget.

HELENA

July 5, 2009

BARRY

December 2007

He is better at his job, partly because he remembers some of the cases and suspects, but mainly because he gives a shit. The powers that be try to promote him to a better-paying, supervisory desk job, but he declines. He wants to be a great detective, nothing more.

He stays off cigarettes, drinks only on weekends, runs three times a week, and takes Julia out every Friday night. It isn’t quite perfect between them. She doesn’t carry the trauma of Meghan’s death and the destruction of their marriage, but for him there is no escaping how those events corroded their bond. In his previous life, it took him a long time to stop being in love with Julia, and even though he’s back to before everything imploded, it’s not just a light switch he can flip back on.

---

He watches the news every morning, reads the papers every Sunday, and while he remembers the big moments—the candidate who will become president, the first tremors of a recession—the majority of it is granular and insignificant enough as to feel brand-new all over again.

---

He sees his mom every week now. She is sixty-six years old and in five years will exhibit the first symptoms of the glioblastoma brain cancer that will kill her. In six, she won’t recognize him or be able to carry a conversation, and she will die in hospice care soon after, a wasted husk of herself. He will hold her bony hand in her final moments, wondering if she is even capable of registering the sensation of human touch in the annihilated landscape of her brain.

Oddly, he finds no sadness or despair knowing how and when her life will end. Those last days feel untouchably remote as he sits in her Queens apartment the week before Christmas. In fact, he considers the foreknowledge a gift. His father died when Barry was fifteen from an aortic aneurysm, sudden and unexpected. With his mom, he has years to say goodbye, to make certain she knows he loves her, to say all the things that are in his heart, and there is immeasurable comfort in that. He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.

He’s brought Meghan along with him today, and his daughter and mother are playing chess while he sits by the window, his mother singing in that delicate falsetto that always stirs something deep inside of him, his attention divided between their game and the passersby on the street below.

Despite the old technology all around him and the occasionally familiar news headline, he doesn’t feel like he’s living in the past. This moment feels very much like now. The experience is having a philosophical impact on his perception of time. Perhaps Vince was right. Maybe it is all happening at once.

“Barry?”

“Yes, Mom?”

“When did you become so introspective?”

He smiles. “I don’t know. Maybe turning forty did it to me.”

She watches him for a moment, turning her attention back to the chessboard only when Meghan makes her next move.

---

He lives his days and sleeps his nights.

Goes to parties he’s already been to, watches games he’s already seen, solves cases he’s already solved.

It makes him wonder about the déjà vu that haunted his previous life—the perpetual sense that he was doing or seeing something he’d already seen before.

And he wonders—is déjà vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality?

HELENA

October 22, 2007

She is sitting at her old desk again in the musty depths of the neuroscience building in Palo Alto, caught in a transition between memory and reality.

The pain of dying in the tank is still fresh—the burn in her oxygen-starved lungs, the excruciating weight of her paralyzed heart, the panic and the fear, wondering if her plan would work. And then, when the memory-reactivation program finally engaged and the stimulators fired—pure exhilaration and release. Slade was right. Absent DMT, the experience of reactivating a memory was nothing more than watching a movie we’ve already seen a thousand times before. This is like living it.

Jee-woon is sitting across from her, his face coming into hard focus, and she wonders if he notices anything off about her, since she doesn’t have control of her body yet. But she’s catching words here and there—pieces of a familiar conversation.

“…very taken with the memory-portraiture article you published in Neuron.”

Her muscular control starts at her fingertips and toes, then works inward, up her arms and legs, until she can control her ability to blink and swallow. Suddenly, her body feels like something that belongs to her, and she is flooded with control, with the thrill of full possession, completely back inside her younger self again.

She looks around her office, the walls covered in high-resolution images of mice memories. A moment ago, she was 173 miles off the northern California coast, almost two years in the future, dying in the deprivation tank on the third floor of Slade’s oil platform.

“Everything OK?” Jee-woon asks.

It worked. My God, it worked.

“Yeah. I’m sorry. You were saying?”

“My employer is very impressed with your work.”

“Does your employer have a name?” she asks.

“Well, that depends.”

“On…?”

“How this conversation goes.”

Having this conversation for a second time feels both perfectly normal and mind-bogglingly surreal. It is, without question, the strangest moment of her entire existence, and she has to force herself to focus.

She looks at Jee-woon and says, “Why would I even have a conversation with someone when I don’t know who they’re speaking for?”

“Because your Stanford money runs out in six weeks.” He reaches into his leather satchel and takes out a document in a navy binder—her grant proposal.

As Jee-woon pitches her on coming to work for his boss for no-limit funding, she stares at that grant proposal, thinking, I did it. I built my chair, and it is so much more powerful than I ever imagined it could be.

“You need a team of coders to help you design an algorithm for complex memory cataloging and projection. The infrastructure for human trials.”

Immersive platform for projection of long-term, explicit, episodic memories.

She built it. And it worked.

“Helena?” Now Jee-woon is staring at her across the disaster zone that is her desk.

“Yes?”

“Do you want to come work with Marcus Slade?”

The night Reed killed himself, she crept down to the lab, and using a back-door access into the system she’d convinced Raj to embed before he left, mapped a memory of this moment—Jee-woon showing up at her Stanford lab. It had left a strong-enough neuronal footprint to be viable for return. Then she programmed the memory-reactivation sequence, the drug cocktail, and climbed into the tank at three thirty in the morning.

Jee-woon says, “Helena? What do you say?”

“I would love to work with Mr. Slade.”

He pulls another document out of his satchel and passes it to her.

“What’s this?” she asks, though she already knows. She signed it in what is now a dead memory.

“An employment and confidentiality agreement. Nonnegotiable. I think you’ll find the financial terms to be very generous.”

BARRY

January 2008–May 2010

And then life feels like life again, the days running together with a sense of sameness and acceleration, more and more of them passing without him ever thinking about the fact that he is living his life all over again.

HELENA

October 22, 2007–August 2010

The smell of Jee-woon’s cologne still lingers in the elevator as Helena rides up to the first floor of the neuroscience building. It’s been almost two years since she set foot on the Stanford campus. Since she set foot on land. The green of the trees and the grass almost moves her to tears. The way sunlight passes through trembling leaves. The smell of flowers. The sound of birds that don’t live at sea.

The fall day is bright and warm, and she keeps looking at the screen on her flip phone, staring at the date because a part of her still doesn’t believe it’s October 22, 2007.

Her Jeep is waiting for her in the faculty parking lot. She climbs onto the sun-warmed seat and digs the key out of her backpack.

Soon, she’s burning down the interstate, the wind screaming over the roll bars. The oil platform feels like a gray, fading dream, and even more so the chair, the tank, Slade, and the last two years, which have, because of something she built, not even happened yet.

At her house in San Jose, she packs a suitcase with clothes, a framed photograph of her parents, and six books that mean the world to her: On the Fabric of the Human Body by Andreas Vesalius, Physica by Aristotle, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy by Isaac Newton, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and two novels—Camus’s The Stranger, and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

At the bank, she closes her savings and checking accounts—a little under $50,000. She takes $10,000 in cash, puts the remaining $40,000 into a brokerage account, then walks out into the noonday sun with a white envelope that feels woefully slim.

Near Highway 1, she stops at a convenience store to gas up her Jeep. When the transaction is complete, she throws her credit card in the trash, lowers the soft-top, and climbs in behind the wheel. She doesn’t know where she’s going. This is as far as she planned last night on the rig, and her mind is racing with both exhilaration and terror.

There’s a dime in one of the cup holders. She flips it in the air and catches it against the top of her left hand.

Heads, she goes south.

Tails, she goes north.

---

The road winds along the craggy coastline, the sea yawning out into gray mist several hundred feet below.

She speeds through cedar forests.

Past coastal headlands.

Across windswept balds.

Through towns that barely warrant a name—tiny outposts on the edge of the world.

Her first night, she stops a couple hours north of San Francisco at a refurbished roadside motel called Timber Cove, which is perched on a cliff that overlooks the sea.

Sits alone by a fire pit with a glass of wine from a bottle that was made just twenty miles inland, watching the sun drop and considering what her life has become.

She takes out her phone to call her parents but hesitates.

At this moment, Marcus Slade is expecting her imminent arrival on his decommissioned oil platform to begin work on the chair, no doubt believing that the knowledge of its true, mind-blowing capability rests solely with him. When she fails to show up, he’ll not only suspect what she’s done, he’ll turn the world inside out looking for her, because without her, he doesn’t have a prayer of building—or, in a sense, of rebuilding—the chair.

He might even use her parents to get to her.

She sets the phone on the ground and crushes it under the heel of her boot.

---

She pushes north up Highway 1, taking a short detour to a place she’s always wanted to see on the Lost Coast—Black Sands Beach in Shelter Cove.

Then on through redwood groves and quiet seaside communities and into the Pacific Northwest.

A couple days later, she’s in Vancouver, heading up the coast of British Columbia, from city to town to village to some of the most beautifully desolate country she’s ever laid eyes on.

Three weeks later, while meandering through the wilds of northern Canada, a storm catches up with her as night is falling.

She stops at a roadside tavern on the outskirts of a village that’s a relic from the Gold Rush days, settles onto a stool at a wood-paneled bar, and drinks beer and bullshits with the locals as a fire burns in a massive stone hearth and the first snow of the season whisks against the window glass.

---

In some ways, the village of Haines Junction, Yukon, feels every bit as remote as Slade’s oil rig—this hamlet in the farthest reaches of Canada, tucked into an evergreen forest at the foot of a glaciated mountain range. To everyone in the village, her name is Marie Iden—first name inspired by the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and whose work led to the discovery of radioactivity, the last name by one of her favorite thriller writers.

She lives in a room above the tavern and gets paid under the table to tend bar on weekends. She doesn’t need the money. Her knowledge of future markets will turn her investments into millions in the years to come. But it’s good to keep busy, and it might cause questions if she has no apparent source of income.

Her room isn’t much—a bed, a dresser, and one window that overlooks the emptiest highway she’s ever seen. But for now at least, it’s all she needs. She makes acquaintances, no friends, and enough wanderers pass through the bar and the town to afford the occasional twenty-four-hour-lonely-heart liaison.

And she is lonely, but that emotion appears to be the norm here. It didn’t take her long to clock Haines Junction as a refuge for a distinct class of people.

Those looking for peace.

Those looking to hide.

And, of course, those hoping for both.

She misses the mental stimulation of her work. Misses being in a laboratory. Misses having a goal. It eats her up inside to wonder what her parents must make of her disappearance. She feels guilty every hour of every day that she isn’t building the memory chair that could preserve core memories for people like her mom.

It has crossed her mind that one solution to all of this would be to kill Slade. It’d be easy enough to get close to him—she could call Jee-woon, say she’s reconsidered the offer. But she doesn’t have it in her. For better or worse, she simply isn’t that person.

So she comforts herself with the knowledge that every day she remains in this secluded corner of the world, undiscovered by Slade, is a day she keeps the world safe from what she has the potential to create.

---

After two years, she procures fake credentials and identification documents from the Dark Web and moves to Anchorage, Alaska, where she volunteers as a research assistant for a neuroscientist at the university—a kind man who has no idea that one of his underlings is the preeminent research scientist in the world. She spends her days interviewing Alzheimer’s patients and recording their deteriorating memories over weeks and months as the disease progresses through its cruel, dehumanizing stages. The work is hardly groundbreaking, but at least she’s lending her intellect to a field of study she’s passionate about. The boredom and purposelessness of her time in the Yukon had driven her to the brink of depression.

There are days she wants desperately to start building the MEG microscope and the reactivation apparatus as a means for capturing and preserving the memories of the people she interviews, who are slowly losing themselves and the memories that define them. But the risk is too great. It could alert Slade to her work, or someone might, as she apparently did, accidentally make the leap from memory reactivation to memory travel. Humans cannot be trusted with technology of such power—with the splitting of the atom came the atomic bomb. The ability to change memory, and thereby reality, would be at least that dangerous, in part because it would be so seductive. Was she herself not changing the past now, and at her first opportunity?

But the chair has been unmade, she has vanished, and there is no threat to memory and time but the knowledge in her own mind, which she will take to the grave.

The thought of killing herself has occurred to her on more than one occasion. It would be the ultimate insurance policy against Slade finding her and forcing her cooperation. She’s gone so far as to make potassium chloride tablets in the event that day ever comes.

She keeps them with her at all times, in a silver locket around her neck.

---

Helena parks in a visitor’s space near the entrance and steps out into the sweltering August heat. The grounds are well kept. There are gazebos and water features and picnic areas. She wonders how her father is affording this place.

She checks in at the main desk and has to write her name on a visitor’s sign-in form. As the admin makes a copy of her driver’s license, Helena looks around, nervous.

She’s been three years on this new timeline. Slade’s false memories of their time together on his oil platform would have found him early in the morning on July 6, 2009, the same moment (in the previous timeline) when she died in the deprivation tank and returned to the memory of Jee-woon coming to her lab at Stanford.

If Slade wasn’t looking for her prior to that, he will be now. In all likelihood, he’s paid off someone here to alert him if Helena ever turns up.

Which she just has.

But she didn’t come here ignorant of the risk.

If Slade or one of his men tracks her down, she’s prepared to handle it.

Reaching up, she clutches the locket hanging from her neck.

“Here you are, hon.” The admin hands Helena a visitor’s badge. “Dorothy’s in Room 117, end of the hall. I’ll buzz you through.”

Helena waits as the doors to the Memory Care wing slowly open.

The smells of cleaning products and urine and cafeteria food comingle to conjure the memory of the last time she set foot in an adult-care facility—twenty years ago, during the final months of her grandfather’s life.

She passes a common area, where residents in a heavily medicated stupor sit around a television showing a nature program.

The door to 117 is ajar, and she eases it open.

By Helena’s math, it’s been five years since she last saw her mother.

Dorothy is sitting in a wheelchair with a blanket over her legs, staring out the window toward the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. She must have seen Helena in her peripheral vision, because she turns her head slowly toward the doorway.

Helena smiles.

“Hi.”

Her mother stares at her, unblinking.

No sign of recognition.

“Is it all right if I come in?”

Her mother lowers her head in a gesture that Helena takes for assent. Moving inside, she shuts the door after her.

“I like your room very much,” Helena says. There’s a muted television showing a news channel. Photographs everywhere. Of her parents in younger, better times. Of her as a baby, as a child, as a just-turned-sixteen-year-old sitting behind the wheel of their family’s Chevy Silverado, on the day she got her driver’s license.

According to the CaringBridge page her father made, they moved Dorothy into memory care after last Christmas, when she left the stove on and nearly caught the kitchen on fire.

Helena sits down beside her mother at the small, circular table by the window. There’s a bouquet of flowers that’s old enough to have shed a carpet of leaves and petals around the vase.

Her mother’s frailness is birdlike, and the late-morning light that strikes her face makes it look as thin as paper. Though only sixty-five, she looks much older. Her silver hair is thinning. Liver spots cover her hands, which still look remarkably feminine and graceful.

“I’m Helena. Your daughter.”

Her mother looks at her, skeptical.

“You have a really nice view of the mountains.”

“Have you seen Nance?” her mother asks. She doesn’t sound anything like herself—her words coming slowly, and with considerable effort. Nancy was Dorothy’s older sister. She died in childbirth more than forty years ago, before Helena was born.

“I haven’t,” Helena says. “She’s been gone a while now.”

Her mom looks out the window. While it’s clear over the plains and the foothills, farther back, black clouds have begun to coalesce around the high peaks. Helena thinking—this disease is some sadistic, schizophrenic form of memory travel, flinging its victims across the expanse of their life, tricking them into thinking they’re living in the past. Cutting them adrift in time.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been around to see you,” Helena says. “It’s not because I didn’t want to—I think about you and Dad every day. But these last few years have been…really hard. You’re the only person in the world I can tell this to, but I was given a chance to build my memory chair. I told you about it once, I think. You were the reason I built it. I wanted to save your memories. I thought I was going to change the world. I thought I’d gotten everything I ever dreamed of. But I failed. I failed you. And all the people like you, who could’ve used my chair to save a part of themselves from this…fucking disease.” Helena wipes her eyes. She can’t tell if her mother is listening. Maybe it doesn’t matter. “I brought something awful into the world, Mama. I didn’t mean to, but I did, and now I have to spend the rest of my life in hiding. I shouldn’t have come here, but…I needed to see you one last time. I need you to hear me say I—”

“It’s going to storm in the mountains today,” Dorothy says, still watching the black clouds.

Helena lets out a deep, trembling breath. “Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“I used to hike in those mountains with my family to a place called Lost Lake.”

“I remember that. I was there with you, Mom.”

“We would swim in the freezing water, and then lie out on the warm rocks. The sky was so blue it was almost purple. There were wildflowers in the meadows. It doesn’t seem that long ago.”

They sit in the silence.

Lightning touches the summit of Longs Peak.

Too distant to hear the thunder.

Helena wonders how often her father comes to visit. Wonders how hard it must be for him. She’d give anything to see him again.

Helena brings all of the photos over and takes her time showing each one to her mother, pointing to faces, saying names, recalling moments from her own memory. She starts to pick out memories she thinks her mother would count as her most special and important, and then realizes it’s far too intimate a choice to make for another person. She can only share her own.

And then the oddest thing happens.

Dorothy looks at her, and for a moment, her eyes have become clear, lucid, and fierce—as if the woman Helena has always known has somehow fought through the tangle of dementia and ruined neural pathways to see her daughter for a fleeting breath.

“I was always proud of you,” her mother says.

“You were?”

“You are the best thing I ever did.”

Helena wraps her arms around her mother, tears streaming.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you, Mom.”

But when she pulls away, the moment of clarity has passed.

She’s staring into the eyes of a stranger.

BARRY

June 2010–November 6, 2018

One morning, he wakes up and it’s Meghan’s high school graduation.

She is salutatorian; she gives a great speech.

He cries.

And then an autumn comes when it’s just him and Julia and a very quiet house.

---

One night in bed, she turns to him and says, “Is this how you want to spend the rest of your life?”

He doesn’t know what to say to her. Strike that. He knows. He had always blamed Meghan’s death for his and Julia’s demise. It was their family—the three of them—that united him and Julia. When Meghan died, that bond disintegrated in the span of a year. Only now is he able to admit that they were always doomed. His second journey through their marriage has just been a slower, less dramatic death, brought on by Meghan growing up and pulling back and making her own way in life.

So yes, he knows. He just doesn’t want to say it.

This relationship was meant for a specific time, and no longer.

---

His mother dies exactly the way he remembers.

---

Meghan is already at the bar when he arrives, sipping a martini and texting someone. For a moment, he doesn’t see her, because she is just another beautiful woman at a chic Manhattan bar, having an early evening cocktail.

“Hi, Megs.”

She sets her phone facedown and slides off the stool, embracing him harder than usual, pulling him in close, not letting go.

“How are you doing?” she asks.

“It’s fine, I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

She studies him dubiously as he takes his seat at the bar and orders a San Pellegrino with a small dish of limes.

“How’s work?” he asks. She’s in her first year as a community organizer for a nonprofit.

“Insanely busy and amazing, but I don’t want to talk about work.”

“You know I’m proud of you, right?”

“Yes, you tell me every time you see me. Look, I need to ask you something.”

“OK.” He sips his limey mineral water.

“How long were you unhappy?”

“I don’t know. A while. Years maybe.”

“Did you and Mom stay married because of me?”

“No.”

“You swear?”

“I swear. I wanted it to work out. I know your mother did too. Sometimes it just takes a while to finally call it a day. You may have contributed to our not noticing how unhappy we were, but you were never the reason we stayed.”

“Have you been crying?”

“No.”

“Bullshit.”

She’s good. He signed the separation agreement in his lawyer’s office an hour ago, and barring something unforeseen, a judge will sign a divorce decree within the month.

It was a long walk here, and, yes, for much of it he was crying. That’s one of the great things about New York—no one cares about your emotional state as long as there’s no blood involved. Crying on the sidewalk in the middle of the day is no less private than crying in your bedroom in the middle of the night. Maybe it’s because no one cares. Maybe it’s because it’s a brutal city, and they’ve all been there at one time or another.

“How’s Max?” Barry asks.

“Bye, Max.”

“What happened?”

“He saw the writing on the wall.”

“What writing is that?”

“ ‘Meghan is a workaholic.’ ”

Barry orders another mineral water.

“You look really good, Dad.”

“You think?”

“Yeah. I can’t wait to start hearing your terrible dating stories.”

“I can’t wait to start experiencing them.”

Meghan laughs, and something about the way her mouth moves makes him see the little girl in her face again, though only for a fleeting second.

Barry says, “It’s your birthday Sunday.”

“I know.”

“Mom and I still want to take you out for brunch.”

“Are you sure it won’t be weird?”

“Oh, it will be, but we want to do it anyway if you’re up for it. We want to be OK again.”

“I’m in,” Meghan says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I want us to be OK too.”

---

After drinks with Meghan, he grabs a bite at his favorite pizza joint in the city—an Upper West Side hole-in-the-wall that’s not too far from his precinct. It’s a midnight kind of place with attitude, bad lighting, and no seating—just a bar that lines the perimeter of the restaurant, everyone standing, holding greasy paper plates with massive slices and giant cups of oversweetened soft drinks.

It’s Friday night and loud and perfect.

He considers a drink, but decides drinking alone post-signing-divorce-papers is too pathetic, and heads for his car instead. Drives the streets of his city feeling happy and emotional and overwhelmed by the sheer mystery of being alive. He hopes Julia is OK. He texted her after he signed the papers. Wrote that he was glad they were going to be friends, and he would always be there for her.

As he sits in traffic, he checks his phone again to see if she responded.

Now there’s a text from her:

His heart is full in a way it hasn’t been in as long as he can remember.

He looks up through the windshield. Traffic still isn’t moving, even though the light ahead is green. Cops are diverting cars away from the street ahead.

He rolls down his window and shouts to the nearest cop, “What’s going on?”

The man motions for him to move along.

Barry hits his grille lights and bloops his siren. That gets the young patrolman’s attention. He comes running over, all apologies. “Sorry, they got us closing down the street ahead. It’s pretty chaotic.”

“What happened?”

“Lady jumped off the building on the next block.”

“Which one?”

“That skyscraper right there.”

Barry looks up at a white Art Deco tower with a crown of glass and steel, a knot forming in the pit of his stomach.

“What floor?” he asks.

“I’m sorry?”

“What floor did she jump from?”

An ambulance screams past, lights and sirens blaring as it barrels through the intersection straight ahead.

“Forty-one. Looks like another FMS suicide.”

Barry pulls his car over to the curb and climbs out. He jogs across the street, flashing his badge at the patrolmen cordoning off the area.

He slows down as he approaches a circle of cops, EMTs, and firemen, all gathered around a black Lincoln Town Car whose roof has been spectacularly crushed.

Walking over, he had steeled himself to see the grotesque effects a four-hundred-foot fall wreaks on the human body, but Ann Voss Peters looks almost serene. The only visible external damage is a small trickle of blood from her ears and mouth. She landed on her back, and in such a way that the smashed roof of the Town Car appears to be cradling her. Her legs are crossed at her ankles, and her left arm is crossed over her chest and resting against her face, as if she’s merely sleeping.

An angel fallen from the sky.

---

It wasn’t that he’d forgotten. His remembrance of Hotel Memory, his death in the deprivation tank, and return to the night Meghan died was always there, on the outskirts of awareness—a bundle of grayed-out memories.

But there was also a dreamlike quality to the last eleven years. He was swept up in the minutiae of living, and with no tangible connection to the life he’d been ripped out of, it was all too easy to relegate what had happened to the deepest recesses of consciousness and memory.

But now, sitting in a café on the banks of the Hudson River with Julia and Meghan on the morning of his daughter’s twenty-sixth birthday, he has a blinding awareness of being in this moment for a second time. It all comes back to him in a rush of memory as clear as water. He and Julia sat at a table not far from this spot, imagining what Meghan would be doing if she were alive today. He had posited she would be a lawyer. They had laughed about that and reminisced about the time she drove his car through the garage door, before comparing memories of a family vacation to the headwaters of the Hudson.

Now his daughter is sitting across from him, and for the first time in a long while, he is floored by her presence. By the fact that she exists. The feeling is as strong as the early days of his return to the memory, when every second shone like a gift.

---

Barry shudders into consciousness at three in the morning, roused by a pounding in his apartment. He rolls out of bed, slowly emerging from a shroud of sleep as he staggers out of his room. Jim-Bob, his rescue, is barking fiercely at the door.

A glance through the peephole snaps him wide-awake—Julia is standing in the bleary light of the hall. He turns the dead bolt, throws the chain, pulls the door open. Her eyes are swollen from crying, her hair is catastrophic, and she’s wearing a trench coat over a pair of pajamas, her shoulders dusted with snow.

She says, “I tried to call. Your phone was off.”

“What happened?”

“Can I come in?”

He steps back, and she enters his apartment, a manic intensity in her eyes. Gently taking her arm, he guides her over to the sofa.

“You’re scaring me, Jules. What’s wrong?”

She looks at him, trembling. “Have you heard of False Memory Syndrome?”

“Yes, why?”

“I think I have it.”

His stomach tightens. “What makes you say that?”

“An hour ago, I woke up with a splitting headache and a headful of memories of this other life. Gray, listless memories.” Her eyes fill with tears. “Meghan died in a hit-and-run when she was in high school. You and I divorced a year later. I married a man named Anthony. It was all so real. Like I had really lived it. You and I had brunch yesterday at that same café on the river, only Meghan wasn’t there. She’d been dead eleven years. I woke up tonight, alone in my bed, no Anthony, realizing that, in actuality, you and I had lunch with her yesterday. That she’s alive.” Julia’s hands are shaking violently. “What’s real, Barry? Which set of memories is the truth?” She breaks down. “Is our daughter alive?”

“Yes.”

“But I remember going to the morgue with you. I saw her broken body. She was gone. I remember like it happened yesterday. They had to carry me out. I was screaming. You remember, don’t you? Did it happen? Do you remember her dying?”

Barry sits on the couch in his boxers, coming to the realization that this all makes some terrible kind of sense. Ann Voss Peters jumped off the Poe Building three nights ago. He had brunch with Meghan and Julia yesterday. Which means that tonight is the night he was sent back into the memory of the last time he saw his daughter alive. Catching back up to this moment must have unleashed all of Julia’s memories of that lifeless timeline when Meghan died.

“Barry, am I losing my mind?”

And then it hits him—if Julia has those memories, so does Meghan.

He looks at Julia. “We have to go.”

“Why?”

He stands. “Right now.”

“Barry—”

“Listen to me—you’re not losing your mind, you’re not crazy.”

“You remember her dying too?”

“Yes.”

“How is that possible?”

“I promise I will explain everything, but right now, we have to go to Meghan.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s experiencing the same thing you are. She’s remembering her own death.”

---

Barry takes the West Side Highway, heading south through a snowstorm out of Washington Heights and the northern reaches of Manhattan, the road abandoned at this time of night.

Julia is holding her phone to her ear, saying, “Meghan, please call me when you get this. I’m worried about you. Your father and I are coming over right now.” She looks across the center console at Barry, says, “She’s probably just sleeping. It is the middle of the night.”

They ride through the empty streets of lower Manhattan, cutting across the island into NoHo, the tires sliding on the slick pavement.

Barry pulls to a stop in front of Meghan’s building, and they climb out into the pouring snow.

At the entrance, he presses the buzzer for Meghan’s apartment five times, but she doesn’t answer.

He turns to Julia. “Do you have a key?”

“No.”

He starts ringing other apartments until someone finally buzzes them in.

Meghan’s building is a sketchy-looking prewar walk-up. He and Julia race up six flights of a gloomy stairwell to the top floor and run down a dimly lit hall. Apartment J is at the end—Meghan’s bicycle is leaning against the window to the fire escape.

He bangs on the door with his fist. No answer. Taking a step back, he raises his right leg and front-kicks the door. A spike of pain shoots up his leg, but the door only shudders.

He kicks it again, harder this time.

It bursts open, and they rush inside into darkness.

“Meghan!” His hand fumbles across the wall and hits the lights, which illuminate a tiny studio. There’s a sleeping alcove on the right—empty. An efficiency kitchen to the left. A short hallway leading to the bathroom.

He starts toward it, but Julia rushes past him, shouting her daughter’s name.

At the end of the hall, she drops to her knees, says, “Honey, oh God, I’m right here.”

Barry reaches the end of the hall, and his heart falls. Meghan is lying on the linoleum floor and Julia is down on the ground next to her, running her hand across her head. Meghan’s eyes are open, and for an agonizing second, he thinks she’s dead.

She blinks.

Barry carefully lifts Meghan’s right arm, checking the pulse in her radial artery. It’s strong, maybe too strong, and quite fast. He wonders—does she recall the trauma of being struck by a two-ton object traveling sixty miles per hour? The moment her consciousness stopped? Whatever came after? What would it be like to remember your own death? How would someone even recall a state of unbeing? As blackness? Nothingness? It strikes him, like dividing by zero, as an impossibility.

“Meghan,” he says softly, “can you hear me?”

She stirs, staring up at him now, and her eyes look full, as if she actually sees him.

“Dad?”

“Mom and I are right here, honey.”

“Where am I?”

“In your apartment, on the floor of your bathroom.”

“Am I dead?”

“No, of course not.”

“I have this memory. It wasn’t there before. I was fifteen, walking to Dairy Queen to see my friends. I was on the phone, wasn’t thinking, went to cross the street. I remember the sound of a car engine. I turned and stared into the oncoming headlights. I remember the car hitting me and then lying on my back, thinking how stupid I was. I didn’t hurt that much, but I couldn’t move, and everything was going dark. I couldn’t see, and I knew what was coming. I knew it meant the end of everything. Are you sure I’m not dead?”

“You are here with me and Mom,” Barry says. “You are very much alive.”

Meghan’s eyes flit back and forth, like a computer processing data.

She says, “I don’t know what’s real.”

“You’re real. I’m real. This moment is real.” But even as he says it, he isn’t sure. Barry studies his ex, thinking how she looks like the Julia of old, that black weight of Meghan’s death back in her eyes.

“Which set of memories feels more real to you?” he asks Julia.

“One isn’t more real than the other,” she says. “It’s just that I’m living in a world that aligns with my daughter being alive. Thank God. But I feel like I’ve lived through both of them. What’s happening to us?”

Barry releases a long exhale and leans back against the shower door.

“In the…I don’t even know what to call it…the past life where Meghan died, I was investigating a case involving False Memory Syndrome. There were things that didn’t add up. One night—this night, actually—I found this strange hotel. I was drugged, and when I woke up, I was strapped into this chair and facing a man who threatened to kill me if I didn’t recount the night Meghan died.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea. I don’t even know his name. Later, I was put into a deprivation chamber. He paralyzed me, and then stopped my heart. As I was dying, I started experiencing these intense flashes of the memory I had described to him. I don’t know how, but my fifty-year-old consciousness was…returned to the body of my thirty-nine-year-old self.”

Julia’s eyes go a mile wide; Meghan sits up.

He says, “I know it sounds crazy, but I was suddenly back in the night Meghan died.” He looks at his daughter. “You had just walked out the door. I rushed after you and caught up to you seconds before you would’ve crossed the street and been hit by a speeding Mustang. Do you remember that?”

“I think so. You were weirdly emotional.”

“You saved her,” Julia says.

“I kept thinking it was all a dream, or some strange experiment I would be pulled out of at any moment. But days went by. Then months. Then years. And I just…I fell into the grooves of our life. It all felt so normal, and after a while, I never really thought about what had happened to me. Until three days ago.”

“What happened three days ago?” Meghan asks.

“This woman jumped off a building on the Upper West Side, which was the event that had set me down the road of that false-memory case to begin with. It was like waking up from a long dream. A lifetime of a dream. Tonight was the night I was sent back into that other life.”

Whether the expression on Julia’s face is disbelief or shock, he can’t tell.

Meghan’s eyes have gone glassy. She says, “I should be dead.”

He brushes her hair behind her ears the way he used to when she was a little girl.

“No, you’re right where you should be. You’re alive. This is what is real.”

---

He skips work that morning, and not just because he only got back to his apartment at seven a.m. He fears his colleagues’ memories of Meghan’s death will also have emerged last night—an eleven-year stretch of false memories where his daughter wasn’t alive.

When he wakes, his phone is blowing up with notifications from half his contacts list—missed calls and voicemails, frantic texts about Meghan. He doesn’t respond to any of them. He needs to talk with Julia and Meghan first. They should be on the same page with what they’re telling people, although he can’t imagine what that page might look like.

He walks into the NoHo bar around the corner from Meghan’s apartment to meet his daughter and his ex, finds them waiting for him in a corner booth, close enough to the open kitchen to feel the heat of the stove and hear the clang of pots and pans and food sizzling on a griddle.

Barry slides in next to Meghan and tosses his coat across the bench.

She looks worn out, bewildered, shell-shocked.

Julia isn’t much better.

“How you doing, Megs?” he asks, but his daughter just stares back at him, her face a blank wall.

He looks at Julia. “Have you spoken to Anthony?”

“I tried to call him but haven’t been able to get through.”

“You OK?”

She shakes her head, eyes shimmering. “But this isn’t about me today.”

They order food and a round of drinks.

“What do we tell people?” Julia asks. “I’ve gotten over a dozen calls today.”

“Same here,” Barry says. “I think for now we stay with the idea that this is FMS. At least that’s something they might’ve heard of.”

“Shouldn’t we tell people what happened to you, Barry?” Julia asks. “About that strange hotel and the chair and you living those eleven years for a second time?”

Barry remembers the warning he was given on the night he returned to the memory of Meghan’s death.

Tell no one. Not your wife. Not your daughter. No one.

“This knowledge we have is actually dangerous,” he says. “We have to keep all of this to ourselves for now. Just try to live a normal life again.”

“How?” Meghan asks, her voice unraveling. “I don’t even know how to think about my life anymore.”

“Things will be weird at first,” Barry says, “but we’ll fall back into the grooves of our existence. If you can say nothing else about our species, we’re adaptable, right?”

Nearby, a waiter drops a tray of drinks.

Meghan’s nose begins to bleed.

He feels a glint of pain behind his eyes, and across the table, Julia is clearly experiencing something similar.

The bar goes silent, no one talking, everyone sitting frozen at their tables.

The only sound is the music coming through the speakers and the drone of a television.

Meghan’s hands are trembling.

So are Julia’s.

And his.

On the television above the bar, a news anchor is staring into the camera, blood running down his face as he searches for words. “I, um…I’m going to be honest, I don’t exactly know what just happened. But something clearly has.”

The image changes to a live shot that overlooks the southern border of Central Park.

There’s a building on West Fifty-Ninth Street that wasn’t there a moment ago.

At well over two thousand feet, it’s easily the tallest thing in the city, and constructed of two towers, one on Sixth Avenue, the other on Seventh, which connect at the top to form an elongated, upside-down U.

Meghan makes a sound like a whimper.

Barry grabs his coat, slides out of the booth.

“Where are you going?” Julia asks.

“Just come with me.”

They move through the stunned restaurant and back outside, where they pile into Barry’s Crown Vic. He fires the sirens and they speed north up Broadway, then onto Seventh Avenue. Barry can only get them as close as West Fifty-Third before the street becomes impassable with traffic.

All around them, people are getting out of their cars.

They abandon Barry’s cruiser and walk with the crowd.

After several blocks, they finally stop in the middle of the street to see it with their own eyes. There are thousands of New Yorkers all around them, faces lifted skyward, many holding up their phones to take photos and videos of the new addition to the Manhattan skyline—the U-shaped tower standing on the southern end of Central Park.

Meghan says, “That wasn’t there a moment ago. Right?”

“No,” Barry says. “It wasn’t. But at the same time…”

“It’s been there for years,” Julia says.

They stare at the marvel of engineering called the Big Bend, Barry thinking that, up until this moment, FMS has flown largely under the radar—isolated cases wreaking havoc on the lives of strangers.

But this will affect everyone in the city, and many around the world.

This will change everything.

The glass and steel of the building’s west tower is catching parting rays of the setting sun, and memories of Barry’s existence with this building in the city are flooding in.

“I’ve been to the top of it,” Meghan says, tears running down her face.

It’s true.

“With you, Dad. It was the best meal of my life.”

When she finished her bachelor’s degree in social work, he took her to dinner at Curve, the restaurant at the top with spectacular views of the park. It wasn’t just the view that attracted them; Meghan had a food crush on the chef, Joseph Hart. Barry distinctly remembers riding an elevator that transitioned from a vertical ascent to a forty-five-degree climb through the initial angle of the curve to a horizontal traverse across the top of the tower.

The longer he stares at it, the more it feels like an object that is a part of this reality.

His reality.

Whatever that even means anymore.

“Dad?”

“Yes?” His heart is pounding; he feels unwell.

“Is this moment real?”

He looks down at her. “I don’t know.”

---

Two hours later, Barry walks into the low-rent bar near Gwen’s place in Hell’s Kitchen and climbs onto the stool beside her.

“You all right?” Gwen asks.

“Is anybody?”

“I tried to call you this morning. I woke up with this alternate history of our friendship. One where Meghan died in a hit-and-run when she was fifteen. She’s alive, right?”

“I just came from seeing her.”

“How’s she doing?”

“Honestly? I don’t know. She remembered her own death last night.”

“How is that possible?”

He waits for their drinks to come, and then tells her everything, including his extraordinary experience in the chair.

“You went back into a memory?” she whispers, leaning in close.

She smells like a combination of Wild Turkey, whatever shampoo she uses, and gunpowder, Barry wondering if she came straight here from the range, where she is a sight to behold. He’s never seen anyone shoot like Gwen.

“Yes, and then I started living it, but with Meghan alive this time. Right up to this moment.”

“You think that’s what FMS really is?” she asks. “Changing memories to change reality?”

“I know it is.”

On the muted television above the bar, Barry sees a photograph of a man he recognizes from somewhere. At first, he can’t tie the recognition to a memory.

Barry reads the closed captioning of the news anchor’s reporting.

[AMOR TOWLES, RENOWNED ARCHITECT OF THE BIG BEND, WAS FOUND MURDERED IN HIS APARTMENT ONE HOUR AGO WHEN—]

“Is this Big Bend building a product of the chair?” Gwen asks.

“Yes. When I was in that weird hotel, there was this guy, older gentleman. I believe he was dying. I overheard this conversation where he said that he was an architect, and when he got back into his memory, he was going to follow through on a building he always regretted not pursuing. In fact, he was scheduled to go in the chair today, which is when reality changed for all of us. I’m guessing they killed him for breaking the rules.”

“What rules?”

“They told me I was only supposed to live my life a little better. No gaming of the system. No sweeping changes.”

“Do you know why he’s letting people redo their lives? This man who built the chair?”

Barry slugs back the rest of his beer. “No idea.”

Gwen sips her whiskey. The jukebox has been turned off, and now the bartender unmutes the television and switches channels. Every network has been running nonstop coverage since the building appeared this afternoon. On CNN, an “expert” on False Memory Syndrome has been dredged up to speculate on what they’re calling the “memory malfunction” in Manhattan. She’s saying, “If memory is unreliable, if the past and the present can simply change without warning, then fact and truth will cease to exist. How do we live in a world like that? This is why we’re seeing an epidemic of suicides.”

“You know where this hotel is?” Gwen asks.

“It’s been eleven years—at least in my mind—but I could probably find it again. I know it’s in Midtown, assuming it’s still there.”

“Our minds aren’t built to handle a reality that’s constantly changing our memories and shifting our present,” Gwen says. “What if this is only the beginning?”

Barry’s phone vibrates in his pocket against his leg.

“Sorry about this.”

He pulls it out and reads a text from Meghan:

He slides off the stool.

“What’s wrong?” Gwen asks.

And starts running for the door.

---

Meghan’s cell keeps going straight to voicemail, and in the aftermath of the Big Bend’s appearance, the city streets are still clogged.

As Barry drives toward NoHo, he grabs his radio’s hand mic and calls New York One to request that a unit in the vicinity of Meghan’s apartment stop by for a welfare check.

“New York One, 158, are you talking about the 904B on Bond Street? We have multiple units and fire companies already on scene and ambulances en route.”

“What are you talking about? Which building?”

“Twelve Bond Street.”

“That’s my daughter’s building.”

There’s silence over the airwaves.

Barry tosses the hand mic, hits the lights, and screams through traffic, weaving in and out of cars, around buses, tearing through intersections.

As he turns onto Bond Street several minutes later, he abandons his car at the police barricade and runs toward fire engines shooting streams of water at the façade of Meghan’s building, where flames are curling out of windows on the sixth floor. The scene is pure chaos—an array of emergency lights and cops putting up tape to keep the residents of neighboring buildings at a safe distance while the occupants of Meghan’s building flood out of the front entrance.

A cop tries to stop him, but Barry rips his arm away, flashes his badge, and pushes on toward the fire engines and the entrance to the building, the heat of the flames making his face break out in beads of sweat.

A firefighter staggers out of the entrance, whose door has been ripped off its hinges. He’s carrying an older man, and both their faces are blackened.

A fire lieutenant—a bearded giant of a man—steps in front of Barry, blocking his path. “Get back behind the tape.”

“I’m a cop, and that’s my daughter’s building!” He points up at the flames peeling out of the top floor window at the far end. “That’s her apartment flames are coming out of!”

The lieutenant’s face falls. He takes Barry by the arm and pulls him out of the way of a train of firefighters carrying a hose toward the nearest hydrant.

“What?” Barry asks. “Just tell me.”

“The fire started in that apartment in the kitchen. It’s spreading through the fifth and sixth floors right now.”

“Where’s my daughter?”

The man takes a breath, glances over his shoulder.

“Where’s my fucking daughter?”

“Look at me,” the man says.

“Did you get her out?”

“Yes. I am very sorry to tell you this, but she died.”

Barry staggers back. “How?”

“There was a bottle of vodka and some pills on her bed. We think she took them and then tried to make tea, but lost consciousness soon after. Something on the counter got too close to the burner. It was accidental, but—”

“Where is she?”

“Let’s go sit down and—”

“Where is she?”

“On the sidewalk, on the other side of that truck.”

Barry starts toward her, but suddenly the man’s arms are gripping him from behind in a bear hug.

“Sure you want to do that, brother?”

“Get off!”

The man lets him go, Barry stepping over hoses, moving in front of the truck, closer to the fire. The commotion dies away. All he sees are Meghan’s bare feet poking out from underneath the white sheet that’s covering her, which is soaking wet and almost translucent from the spray of the fire hoses.

His legs fail him.

He sinks down onto the curb and breaks as the water rains down on him.

People try to talk to him, to get him to come with them, to move, but he doesn’t hear them. He stares straight through them.

Into nothing.

Thinking—I’ve lost her twice now.

---

It’s been two hours since Meghan died, and his clothes are still damp.

Barry parks at Penn Station and starts walking north from Thirty-Fourth Street, just like he did after returning from Montauk on a midnight train, the night he stumbled into Hotel Memory.

That night, it had been snowing.

Now it’s raining, the buildings cloaked in mist above their fiftieth floors, and the air cold enough to cloud his breath.

The city stands strangely silent.

Few cars on the road.

Fewer people on the sidewalks.

The tears are cold on his face.

He pops his umbrella after three blocks. In his mind, it’s been eleven years since the night he wandered into Hotel Memory. Chronologically, it happened today, just in a false memory.

As Barry reaches West Fiftieth, it’s raining harder, the cloud deck lowering. He’s confident the hotel was on Fiftieth, and he’s pretty sure he headed east.

He keeps catching glimpses of the two bases of the Big Bend, luminous in the rain. The curve is hidden in the clouds a couple thousand feet above.

He’s trying not to think of Meghan in this moment, because when he does, he crumbles all over again, and he needs to be strong, needs his wits about him.

Cold and so tired, he’s beginning to wonder if perhaps he walked west that night, instead of east, when a red neon sign in the distance catches his attention.

McLachlan’s Restaurant

Breakfast

Lunch

Dinner

Open 7 Days

24 Hours

Barry moves toward the sign until he’s standing under it, watching the rain fall through the red illumination.

He picks up his pace.

Past the bodega, which he remembers, and then the liquor store, a women’s clothing store, a bank—all closed—until, near the end of the block, he stops at the entrance to the dark driveway, which slopes down into the subterranean space beneath a neo-gothic building, wedged between two higher skyscrapers.

If he walked down that driveway, he’d arrive at a garage door built of reinforced steel.

This is how he entered Hotel Memory all those years ago.

He’s absolutely sure of it.

There’s a part of him that wants to run down there, charge through, and shoot every fucking person he sees inside that hotel, ending with the man who put him in the chair. Meghan’s brain broke because of him. She is dead because of him. Hotel Memory needs to end.

But that would most likely only get him killed.

No, he’ll call Gwen instead, propose an off-the-books, under-the-radar op with a handful of SWAT colleagues. If she insists, he’ll take an affidavit to a judge. They’ll cut power to the building, go in with night-vision gear, do a floor-to-floor sweep.

Clearly, some minds, like Meghan’s, cannot handle the changing of their reality, and the collateral damage is also tragic—in addition to his daughter, three people died in her building from the fire, and over the radio on his drive to Penn Station, he heard more reports of people—unbalanced by the appearance of the Big Bend—wreaking havoc in the city.

Healthy minds are being made unwell; unwell minds are being driven over the edge.

He pulls out his phone, opens contacts, scrolls to the g’s.

As his finger hovers over Gwen, someone shouts his name.

He glances across the street, sees someone running toward him.

A woman’s voice yells, “Don’t make that call!”

He’s already reaching into his jacket, thumbing off the button to his shoulder holster, getting a solid grip on his subcompact Glock, thinking she probably works for whoever built the chair, which means—fuck!—they know he’s scoping the building.

“Barry, don’t shoot, please.”

She slows to a walk, raises her hands.

They’re open, empty.

She approaches cautiously, barely five feet tall, wearing boots and a black leather jacket beaded with raindrops. A shock of red hair comes to her chin, but it’s damp. She’s been waiting for him in the rain. The thing that disarms him is the kindness in her green eyes, and something else, which strikes him—oddly—as familiarity.

She says, “I know you were sent back into the worst memory of your life. The man who did that is Marcus Slade. He owns that building. And I know what just happened to Meghan. I’m so sorry, Barry. I know you want to do something about it.”

“You work for them?”

“No.”

“Are you a mind reader?”

“No.”

“Then how could you possibly know what happened to me?”

“You told me.”

“I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

“You told me in the future, four months from now.”

He lowers the pistol, his brain twisting itself in knots. “You used that chair?”

She looks up into his eyes with an intensity that sends a cool electricity down his spine. “I invented the chair.”

“Who are you?”

“Helena Smith, and if you go into Slade’s building with Gwen, it will lead to the end of everything.”