A man leaned over me, blocking out part of the sky. “Up, up. Come on, let’s go.”

I pushed my stiff limbs until I was sitting up, fighting off a wave of dizziness. My muscles ached, as if I’d been motionless for hours. I winced as I massaged my neck, and I looked around with a terrible feeling of disappointment. Nothing around me had changed. I was still on the same bench at Navy Pier.

Even worse, the man standing in front of me was a Chicago police officer. He was medium height and stout, with wiry red hair and florid cheeks. “You got some ID, buddy?”

My mouth felt gritty. I tried to talk through the dryness. “Um, yeah. Yeah, sure.”

I dug around in my pockets and found my wallet, and rather than fumbling for my driver’s license, I simply handed him the whole thing. He opened it, and I tensed as he read my name. I didn’t know if the search for Dylan Moran had made its way to every street cop yet.

The police officer made no effort to pull his gun or his handcuffs. His mouth mushed into a frown as he tried to make sense of me. I probably had the hygiene of a vagrant, but my wallet contained the identification and credit cards of a downtown professional. “Dylan Moran? Is that you?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

“You okay, Mr. Moran? You don’t look like you’re having a good day.”

“You’re right. I’m not.”

“The thing is, parents don’t like to see homeless people sleeping on benches when their kids are around here. You made them nervous. A couple folks thought you were dead.”

I tried to smile. “I’m not dead.”

“You need help or anything? A doctor?”

“No, thanks. It’s just the aftereffects of a rowdy office party, I guess. I don’t remember a lot of it.”

“Well, next time you want to tie one on, party on the buddy system, okay? You get drunk, make sure somebody knows where you are. When you crash out on a bench down here, you’re likely to get rolled, know what I mean?”

“I do. Thank you, Officer. I’ll be heading home now.”

“Good plan. A shower might not be the worst thing, either.”

“Yeah.”

I got to my feet, wobbling as I did, and offered the cop a weak smile. I wasn’t really ready to move, and I didn’t know where to go, but I didn’t want to linger in case he got the idea of calling in my name and having it bounce back with a red flag. A few tourists on the pier looked at me curiously. Suspicious mothers tugged their children a little closer. I tightened my tie for whatever good it did, wiped some of the dirt off my sleeves and pants, and headed toward the city. When I checked my watch, I saw that it was already past noon. Several hours had passed since my early-morning rendezvous with Eve Brier.

As far as I could tell, having Eve inject me with her hallucinatory drugs had accomplished nothing, other than giving me a weird dream and a splitting headache. I didn’t know why I’d expected anything else. In the harsh light of day, the idea of jumping between worlds inside my head sounded like what it was. Impossible. And yet if I was wrong about my doppelg?nger, I also couldn’t explain the murders of Scotty Ryan and four innocent women.

Meanwhile, Eve herself was nowhere to be found. She’d injected me and then left me alone, which made me wonder if she’d hoped that I would never awaken. I dug out my phone and dialed her number. I wanted to tell her I was still here, still in trouble. However, the call didn’t go through. I didn’t get her voice mail; instead, a recording told me that the number was out of service.

Eve had disconnected her phone.

Her message couldn’t be more obvious: she didn’t want me anywhere near her.

When I got to the end of Navy Pier, I stayed by the water, heading toward the downtown skyline. The trouble was, I didn’t know what to do when I got there. Wherever I went, the police would be looking for me. A part of me thought about turning myself in, but I had no idea what to tell them. I had no way to prove that I wasn’t what they thought I was.

A killer.

As I stared out at the water, debating my next move, my phone rang in my hand. When I checked, I saw Edgar’s name on the caller ID. I answered the phone hesitantly—Edgar almost never called me—but I heard my grandfather’s unmistakably raspy voice on the other end.

“Hey, where are you?” he demanded.

“Why, what do you need, Edgar?”

“I’m here at the Art Institute. Where are you?”

“Edgar, we just did that yesterday. We meet on Thursdays, remember?”

“It is Thursday.”

I sighed. It wasn’t uncommon for my grandfather to get his days mixed up. On the other hand, I was also suspicious that the police had arranged this call for me as a trap. “Stay put, I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I told him. Then I added, “Was anything happening at home when you left?”

“Like what?”

“Like police in the neighborhood.”

“Well, yeah, a cop said they were trying to find you.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them I didn’t know where you were.”

“Did you say you were going to meet me?”

“No. What you do is your business, not mine. You’ve made that pretty clear over the years.”

He wasn’t wrong about that.

“Okay, Edgar. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I hung up the phone.

Meeting Edgar felt like an ordinary day in an ordinary life, but nothing about my world was ordinary anymore. I walked briskly toward the museum, along sidewalks I’d taken throughout my life. It would have been faster to take a cab, but I wanted to preserve my cash for when I really needed it.

When I was back in the heart of the city, I cut through Millennium Park, passing the Pritzker Pavilion, where the wide-open stretch of green grass was crowded with people eating picnic lunches. On the sidewalks, every bench was taken. I passed an old man who was reading a copy of the Chicago Tribune, and he’d left the front section on the bench next to him. My eyes went to the headlines automatically, and I spotted a notice on the very top of the page about the Cubs completing a three-game home sweep of the Phillies. That made me stop in surprise. Not just because the Cubs had swept anybody. No, if there’s one thing I keep a close eye on, it’s Cubs baseball, and I knew they weren’t supposed to be hosting Philadelphia until next week.

Then I glanced at the date on the paper and saw that it was next week.

It was Thursday, just as Edgar had said. I didn’t understand how that was possible. Somehow, I’d lost almost an entire week of my life after my encounter with Eve, and I remembered none of it.

I thought about her question: Have you been having blackouts, Dylan?

Up until that moment, I would have said no, but I’d sat next to Eve Brier on Navy Pier in the early hours of Friday morning. Now it was six days later, and I had no idea what had happened in between.

The old man on the bench looked up from the sports pages. “Help you?”

“I was wondering if you’d finished the front section of the paper.”

His eyes narrowed as he studied the state of my clothes, but then he shrugged. “Yeah, take it. I’d just throw it away.”

“Thank you.”

I took the front section with me and kept walking until I found an empty bench. I sat down and ripped through the pages, not even sure what I was looking for. Somehow, I wanted to believe that I’d made a mistake. Or maybe I hoped I would see a news article that would trigger my memories of the past several days. Instead, the stories confirmed that events in the world had gone on without me. Nearly a week had passed, and I hadn’t been here to see it.

With my headache getting worse, I closed the paper.

That was when I noticed an article in the lower left corner of the front page. The headline jumped out at me: Woman Stabbed to Death in River Park I didn’t have to read far to discover that the murder had taken place two days ago, barely a hundred yards from my apartment. The body had been found in the dense trees on the riverbank by a couple of teenagers who were exploring the trails, the way Roscoe and I used to do.

The victim’s name was Betsy Kern. Twenty-seven years old. She was an IT programmer who’d gone out for a nighttime run and never come back. The boys had stumbled upon her body the next day.

There was a picture of Betsy Kern accompanying the article. I didn’t know this woman, but I spotted the resemblance immediately.

She looked just like Karly.

I felt a strange nervousness walking into the Art Institute. Part of me expected to find a seething mass of Dylan Morans inside, the way I had in my drug-addled dream. Instead, all I found was the usual crowd of visitors. Even so, when I climbed the grand staircase to the second floor, I had a vision of jumping from the balcony that felt so vivid it seemed like more than a nightmare. I even noticed that I felt a sharp pain in my ankle, as if I’d sustained some kind of fall in real life.

Upstairs, Edgar was waiting in the gallery. He had his hands cupped behind his back, holding his cane, his pants hiked high on his waist, in the way that old men do.