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  67. 3:46 a.m.

He is wearing flannel pajamas and red slippers. His glasses have slid down to the tip of his nose.

“Hey, Pops,” I say, then nod at the living room. “Looks like it’s coming together nicely in there.”

“Yeah,” he says, giving one of the pancakes on the skillet a flip. “It’s going to look great when it’s all said and done.”

“What time did Ingrid leave?”

“Around 8:30. She and her parents were here for about three hours helping set up.” He pauses, then adds, “Her mother seems to be doing pretty well.”

Ingrid’s mother had a stroke last July. She was in a coma for a number of days, and when she did come around, she’d lost all ability to speak. She’d been going to speech therapy for the past eight months and had made a lot of progress.

I met Ingrid’s parents for the first time three days earlier, when they flew into town from Atlanta.

Over some of Isabel’s amazing enchiladas, Ingrid’s mother had said, “It’s been f-f-forty years since I was up this l-l-late.”

That got a good laugh out of all of us.

Her father asked a couple questions regarding my odd circumstances — as a retired investment broker he was especially interested in how I’d managed to amass a small fortune trading stocks online — but for the most part, they left my one-hour day alone.

I knew Ingrid had briefed them on my situation and history, though I wasn’t certain if this included The Choice.

It had come eight months earlier.

I could undergo electroshock therapy on my brain and wake up normal, stay awake as many hours as I wanted in a day. But with an asterisk. My memory would be wiped clean. Not too different than what happened to Ingrid’s mother, but when I woke up, I wouldn’t have the ability to speak, or walk, or remember a single thing from my past. Every memory I had — my father teaching me math, my father setting up a 3:00 a.m. prom for me, the day I found Lassie, the day I rushed Lassie to the ER because he got beat up by a raccoon, the first time I met Ingrid, the day I asked Ingrid to marry me — would be gone. It would be as if I were a newborn baby.

Or, I could stay the same.

Live the rest of my days with Henry Bins.

A one-hour existence.

If I lived to be eighty, it was the difference between being awake 15,000 hours or 250,000 hours.

I chose the 15,000.

And I didn’t regret it for a single moment.

I didn’t have time.