I have this other fantasy I write down sometimes, too. In it, it’s visiting hours. And someone walks into my cell and tells me I have a visitor even though I haven’t had one yet. And I get out there. And it’s Lux. And she’s happy. She’s so pretty and happy and all the things that drove her crazy about herself are different, and she found a good place to live, and how could she have helped but hear what happened to me, and she would’ve been here sooner, but . . . but . . .

I never figure out why. I rip up the paper and throw it away.

As I’m sitting here writing, one of the guards comes into the library.

“Hey, Jesse, you got a visitor,” she says.

And she laughs. And I laugh. There’s no one there. And there’s nothing else left to do.

Epilogue

EPILOGUE

ALE

The lighting in the gallery had a crisp, but not overbearing, quality. Alejandro paused before walking through the door and took one last look at his reflection in the glass door. He straightened his tie and brushed nonexistent lint off of his dark suit. These sorts of events always made him nervous, made him remember the small boy in raggedy clothes that he hadn’t been in many, many years. He wondered if anyone could still see that boy but him.

Reaching his hand in his pocket and touching the ancient cell phone he carried there, he walked through the glass door. The room was full of beautiful people, all dressed as well as him, all talking around glasses of champagne and laughing short, clipped, polite laughs. Against the white walls were familiar images, many of them reaching up to the vaulted ceiling, and a few that were small but bright. Some of the images were still on the brick that they had been painted on, but others had been removed and transferred into canvases. Alejandro had more than a nodding acquaintance with these works of art.

Across the room, he heard a laugh louder and more confident than the rest. He smiled and spotted her—a woman in her forties with long, sun-bleached hair, a trim body, and a black eye patch over one eye. The last bit was an affectation. A bionic had been fitted shortly after the explosion, after the shock had abated, after she had befriended Alejandro in the hospital, after she had convinced her father to take the homeless boy with no family into their home. But in the time between the explosion and the surgery, Evann had decided that the patch gave her a look of distinguishment and singularity, and had since never left her home without it. Wheeling around the gallery was her ancient dog, Pollock. His back legs has been lost at the same time Evann’s eye had, but his modifications were more functional: wheels that spun behind his still-working front paws.