I headed to the stairs, but before I got there, I heard the front door open below me. Seconds later, footsteps crinkled on the plastic sheeting in the living room. I tried to decide what to do. Announce myself, or slip downstairs and get away. I put a foot on the top step, but when I shifted my weight, a loose nail squealed, sounding loud in the quiet house. Immediately, I heard more footsteps heading my way.

The foyer below me was in shadow. A man emerged from the downstairs hallway, and I couldn’t identify him at first, but when he got to the bottom of the stairs, he turned around. Seeing who it was shocked me into silence.

Standing at the base of the stairs was a dead man.

Scotty Ryan.

He didn’t look at all surprised to see me, and his face broke into an easy smile. “Hey, buddy, you got my message? What do you think of the place?”

“Scotty,” I managed to choke out from my chest. I thought about saying something stupid: You’re alive. But I held my tongue even as my mind whirled.

“Come on down, I’ll get you a beer,” he said.

Whistling some kind of country song, Scotty disappeared toward the kitchen. I steadied myself and continued downstairs. I went back into the living room and examined it all over again. There comes a time in most dreams when you realize you’re dreaming, but that wasn’t how this felt. I almost said the word out loud to see what would happen.

Infinite.

But I didn’t. I needed to see what came next.

Scotty returned with two bottles of Goose Island in his hand. He gave me one and clinked the neck of his bottle against mine. “Cheers. Good to see you, man. So where were you last night? I kept texting you from the bar. Hell of a game, huh? Ten to one. Suck it, Phillies.”

I looked into Scotty’s eyes to see why he was pretending that we were friends. Pretending that nothing had happened between us. Pretending he hadn’t slept with my wife. I glanced at my hand and saw the raw bruises and scrapes on my knuckles where I’d swung my fist into his face. Then I realized: His face had no damage at all. His lips should be cut and swollen. He’d lost a tooth. I was sure I’d broken his nose. But there was no evidence of a fight.

Scotty swigged his beer and gestured around the house. “Can’t believe it’s all mine. Never thought I’d be able to afford a place in the city. I mean, it needs work, but it’s nice to be able to remodel my own house for a change.”

“It’s great,” I said, because I had no idea what to say.

“Isn’t it? Total fluke that I found it. I was redoing a kitchen down the street, and I noticed the FOR SALE sign over here. Went in and looked around, and I thought, perfect. Love the location, love the park. With the money my uncle left me, I had enough for the down payment. So now we’re neighbors, sort of. What is it, half an hour’s walk to your place?”

“Yeah.”

Scotty’s face scrunched with puzzlement, as if he was noticing my condition for the first time. “Everything okay? You seem kind of out of it today.”

“I’m fine.”

“Why’d you miss the game last night?”

“I was pretty tired.”

Scotty drank his beer and eyed me thoughtfully. “That all it is?”

“What else would it be?”

“I don’t know, there’s something different about you today. I can’t put my finger on it. You’re not acting like yourself. You and I have been friends a long time, Dylan. If something’s going on, you can tell me about it.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” I replied.

But I wanted to say: No, we haven’t been friends for a long time. I barely knew Scotty Ryan. We’d met a handful of times when I was visiting Karly at one of her listings and Scotty was doing construction work for her. He and she went back for years, but he and I didn’t. I didn’t watch Cubs games with him at the bar. I didn’t even particularly like him. In fact, at the moment, I had every reason to hate him.

There’s something different about you today.

I thought about Edgar telling me that I’d spent my whole life with my emotions shut off, when in reality, the opposite was true.

I thought about the old woman with her dog on the street, who didn’t remember me, even after telling the police that I’d killed a man.

Most of all, I thought about Scotty and the fact that he was supposed to be dead. But he wasn’t. There had been no knife plunged into his heart. There hadn’t even been a fight between us. I hadn’t changed, but everything else had. I’d been slow to realize it, but the world around me was different. I wasn’t in the Chicago I’d left behind. I was somewhere new.

I’d gone through the door at the Art Institute into the life of an entirely different Dylan Moran. A man the police were looking for. A man who had been missing for two days.

Where was he?

“What did you want to talk to me about?” I asked Scotty, remembering his message.

He put down his beer bottle in midswallow. “Oh, yeah. I finished up the drawings for the remodel on your bathroom. You’re going to love it. Travertine tiles, body sprays in the shower, recessed lighting. All I need are some decisions on the cabinetry, and I’ll be ready to get started.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“I pulled pages from the catalog to give you an idea of your options. Doors, knobs, roll-out trays, that kind of thing. I can do all the drawers with a soft close, too.”

“Sure.”

“Take it home and talk to the missus, and then let me know what you guys want to do.”

I almost stopped breathing. “My wife.”

“Right. I can start next week if you want. My job in Oak Park finished early.”

I heard it in my head again: My wife.

“Dylan?” Scotty said, his voice sounding far away.

My wife, my wife, my wife . . .

“Jesus, buddy, you’re white as a sheet,” he went on.

“Scotty, I have to go.”

“Sure. Okay. Let me gather up the plans and catalog, and you can take everything with you.”

I pushed the bottle of beer into his hand and backed away. “No, I have to go now,” I said again. “Right now.”

“Dylan? Hey, what’s up?”

But I was already out the door.

My head throbbed. I felt a tightness in my chest, and my breath came in sharp, ragged bursts. I kept repeating a mantra to myself that this was real, that this wasn’t a dream, but I didn’t dare allow myself to believe it. I didn’t even want to blink, because I was afraid that closing my eyes would take me back to my old life.

I wanted it to be true.

I wanted that more than anything else I’d ever prayed for in my life.

I started walking, but the pace of walking felt glacial. I pushed past people who were going too slowly, ignoring their comments when I bumped into them. Soon I was running. I sprinted north past the park and then into the quiet, leafy streets of Ravenswood Manor. I ran full out all the way until Lawrence Avenue, where I finally had to stop and bend over, gasping for air. When I could breathe again, I crossed the river.

I was only a few blocks from home. This time, I didn’t run. I measured out each step, because I wasn’t sure what I would find when I got to my door. I didn’t want to face the reality of being wrong.

My wife.

I walked through a neighborhood I’d known my entire life. Nothing looked different. The buildings were all the same. I could tell you the names of most of the people behind those doors, and I wondered if they’d led identical lives to what I remembered or whether they’d taken different paths in this world.

Ahead of me, I saw the green lawn of River Park, half a block from my apartment. Our apartment. Only one dark cloud passed quickly through my mind. I remembered the headline in the newspaper about a young blond woman on the trails there two nights ago, the last night of her life. Someone had put a knife in her heart and murdered her.

The Killer Dylan I was chasing was already here. My doppelg?nger in the leather jacket had struck again. He’d killed a woman who looked just like Karly.

I thought: Or was it me?

I didn’t remember this woman, but I remembered nothing from those missing days.

There was our building. I stopped, cupping my hands in front of my face, breathing hard. I walked up the sidewalk the way I had thousands of times, since I was a teenager. I wondered if I could simply use my key and let myself inside. Would the locks be the same? My phone still worked, so it seemed as if some of the little details followed me across worlds.

But I rang the doorbell anyway. I wanted her to come to the door.

I wanted to see her face.

Seconds passed. Interminable seconds. Then I saw a shadow on the other side of the glass.

The door opened, and there was my wife.

It wasn’t Karly. It was Tai.

CHAPTER 16

“Oh, thank God!” Tai exclaimed, throwing her arms around me. “Dylan, I was so worried. Where have you been?”