What kind of person lives behind your eyes?

That was how I felt at that moment. I no longer had any idea what to believe about Dylan Moran. Eve had told me things about myself that seemed impossible, and yet they also made sense in a crazy way. If my personality had split apart, if another side of me was living a different life that I knew nothing about, then maybe my mind was projecting that second Dylan Moran into my hallucinations.

I was seeing myself. Talking to the other version of myself. Somehow, my brain was bringing my second personality to life, and what I knew about that personality scared me. When I was him, I didn’t know what I was capable of doing.

Why are you here?

To kill.

I needed something I could hold on to, some kind of driftwood in the sea that would keep me afloat. I needed Karly, or at least a reminder of her. So I took a cab north along the lakeshore toward the house where Karly’s parents lived. There were faster ways out of the city, but I asked the driver to take the slow route along Sheridan Road, and I told him I’d make it up to him in the tip. Karly and I had taken this road many times when we were visiting her parents. She liked to see the neighborhoods change, from the green fields of Lincoln Park to the academic neighborhoods of Loyola and Northwestern, and then to the lakeside mansions of Evanston, Kenilworth, and Winnetka.

Personally, I just thought she wasn’t in a hurry to see her mother.

Susannah Chance lived in a stone mansion that dated to the 1930s. It looked like a Tudor castle, with bay windows, tall austere chimneys, and sharp gables. Yes, Karly’s father lived here, too, but this was the House That Susannah Built. Karly’s father, Tom, was a published poet and high school English teacher who would have been just as happy living in a one-bedroom apartment near Wrigley Field. Susannah, however, was the force of nature behind Chance Properties, and her Wilmette estate was the ostentatious symbol of her success.

I had the cab let me off on Sheridan Road, and I walked the last hundred yards under the old-growth trees. I was white and wearing nice clothes, which probably protected me from someone calling the cops. The people in this neighborhood had itchy 911 fingers. When I got to the Chance house, the lights were off, which wasn’t surprising given the late hour. I didn’t want to talk to Susannah or Tom. Instead, I let myself into the fenced backyard and made my way through the gardens to Karly’s dollhouse.

You can call it a dollhouse, but at more than a thousand square feet, it was bigger than our Lincoln Square apartment. That tells you how far down in the world Karly came to live with me. When she turned twenty-two, she moved out of the main estate and into the dollhouse, which was all the independence that her mother would allow her. She was still living there when we met, so I’d spent a lot of time in this strange fairy-tale world. I’d had a key for years, and I knew the security code.

When I went inside, Karly may as well have been a ghost rattling chains at me, because her presence was so strong. Her school pictures were on the walls and her dance trophies and poetry books on the shelves. She hadn’t lived here in three years, but her mother still kept it like a shrine, decorated with furniture she’d picked out for Karly at age sixteen. Susannah probably hoped that her daughter would eventually come to her senses, dump me, and move back home where she belonged.

I sat down in a beat-up leather chair that overlooked the garden. The chair came from Karly’s father, and I think he gave it to Karly for the dollhouse rather than let his wife take it away to Goodwill. It was a man’s chair, ugly and incredibly comfortable, and it looked out of place amid pink wallpaper and sunflower quilts. I’d spent weeks in this chair after Roscoe was killed. With my arm and leg in casts, I was essentially immobile, and Karly did everything for me. We barely knew each other, but she was my caregiver. And soon after that, my lover.

The last time I’d been here was six months ago, in January. She’d called me from the office on a Tuesday morning and said she needed to get away, and could I meet her in the dollhouse? I said yes, but I got there late. I was always late. Work always came first. As I came in from outside, I brought cold wind and snow flurries with me. Karly had made a winter picnic for us, spreading out a blanket on the floor and opening wine and laying out a Mediterranean lunch of hummus, grape leaves, and pita.

She stood on the other side of the dollhouse, where a fire in the fireplace warmed her bare legs. The chill had pinked up her face. Her breasts swelled with each calm breath. She stared at me with a kind of forever seriousness, just the barest smile on her lips. I swear, she was like a painting that way, frozen in her beauty. A Manet. A Vermeer.

“What’s the occasion?” I asked.

“Nothing. I love you, that’s all.”

“I love you, too.”

It was hard to imagine a more perfect moment, but looking back, I knew that very day was when things had begun to fall apart for us. I could draw a line from our lunch in the dollhouse to her foolish affair with Scotty Ryan to the last speech she’d given me that weekend in the country.

If I’d been paying attention, I would have noticed that Karly was unusually quiet. She was off somewhere in her own world, and she never took time off in the middle of the day unless something was wrong. I should have looked behind her peaceful smile, but instead, I was blind. I poured wine, and we sat across from each other on the blanket, with the fire crackling beside us.

“Susannah talked to me,” Karly said, when we’d enjoyed our lunch quietly for a few minutes. She said it casually. No big deal.

“Oh?”

“She’s giving me the Vernon Hotel account.”

I put down my wine and realized this was a celebration. Except it didn’t feel like a celebration. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s like the biggest account in the firm.”

“Yeah. It is. She says I’m ready.”

“Well, of course you are.”

“Thank you.”

“This is huge,” I said, trying to fill this moment with excitement, because the excitement in her face was strangely missing.

“Yeah. Pretty huge. It’s way more money. That’s good, huh? But a lot more time. Long hours.”

“So neither one of us will ever be home,” I joked, but Karly didn’t laugh.

“Susannah thinks we should move. We should be up here in Highland Park or something. She says we need a place where we can entertain.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

The same flat monotone all the way through. So unlike her. So not Karly. Why didn’t I see it?

“Well, congratulations,” I said, leaning over to kiss her. “You’re a star. I mean it.”

Karly smiled at me, but her smile was hollow, like one of her dolls on the shelves. Then, just like that, she changed the subject.

“I bumped into a friend at Starbucks this morning,” she went on. “A girl I knew in college. Sarah. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned her.”

“I don’t think so.”

“She’s got four kids now. They were all with her. Her youngest is almost two. A Down syndrome girl. So, so sweet. While Sarah was chasing the others, her little girl sat in my lap. I fell in love.”

“Of course you did.”

Karly delicately brushed something from the corner of her eye, and then she closed her eyes altogether. “Anyway . . . ,” she murmured.

I thought she was just basking in the warmth of the fire and in the glow of her success. She’d worked hard for it. I had no idea, no idea at all, that she was watching two trails diverge in the woods and thinking that she was on the wrong one.

“I’m really proud of you,” I said.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

You were running so fast in your life that you never saw that Karly wanted to slow things down.

Scotty was right. Karly had told me how she was feeling that day in everything but words. I never heard her.

“I wondered who was out here,” Susannah Chance said from the doorway of the dollhouse. “I thought it might be you.”

Karly’s mother wore a satin robe tied at the waist over her nightgown, and I could have sworn she’d put on makeup to go check on an intruder. She came inside the cottage and went and made herself a cup of coffee at the Keurig machine on the counter. When that was done, she took the mug into her hands and sat down on the sofa across from me.

Physically, she looked the way Karly would have looked in another twenty-five years, although Susannah was still trying hard to look like Karly’s older sister. She’d groomed her only child to be a carbon copy of herself, with the same ambition, same charm, same need for success. Karly had spent her twenties following that blueprint under Susannah’s watchful eye.

“How are you, Dylan?” she asked.

“I’m lost.”

“Yes, of course. Tom and I are devastated. I wake up each day, and I can’t believe it.”