Orelia Mason’s Back to the Start hardback stared up at him as if saying You’re not even safe here, my friend. Oh, and Orelia sends her regards.

His face flushed red; a furnace had been lit deep in his core and his skin felt on fire. William recalled maintaining enough control to mutter, “I don’t see her much anymore. We’re both so busy.”

As they walked away, he overheard the woman’s comments about him “seeming odd. Peculiar.” And he wished he had that knife so he could show them his version of peculiar.

He swooped up his glass and threw the water down his throat. Even that was a fail as the liquid traveled down the wrong pipe and resulted in a coughing fit, which left him gasping for breath.

Nobody came to his rescue because no-one was within earshot. Or coughing shot.

A straggly haired teenage girl standing at the door chewing gum called out to him.

“You done then? I got to put away the table and chairs.”

He looked over to say, “Very done,” but she was already on her phone. Even Diane had disappeared, perhaps elsewhere in the store shelving books which actually sold copies. Unlike his books.

Pretty crummy. So disloyal, considering William had made a point of continuing to frequent Bountiful Books, despite his success. Sometimes he’d buy a book or two of a read he’d heard was good and sign any of his they had in stock. Though the last few times Diane asked that he not autograph the three he’d found on a bottom shelf.

“Publishers won’t accept them for return-and-refund if they’re marked,” she’d said.

Indeed! Once, not so long ago, his signature would have made them more valuable.

Now here he stood before ground zero, the place where his and Orelia Mason’s worlds had collided. He, the moon, left in a shattered chunk of unlivable rock, while she, a fresh new planet, spun off in a magnificent orbit.

Why his subconscious brought him here, he wasn’t sure. Maybe it was to give him strength to fight her and remind him his failure was not his doing. This might be a nudge from fate to say he couldn’t let her get away with what she’d done?

No, he told himself, with a tentative step toward the front door, uncertain if he could bring himself to enter. The memories still raw and fresh, despite being over two years old, stung him. Good must triumph over evil, repeated in his head. And even though nobody would believe him, he knew evil when it visited to take his life and slam his world to hell.

7

Alan West never thought of himself as a lucky man. After all, look where he'd ended up-doing time in this god-forsaken hole of a prison. Later though he would call his incarceration the best goddamn intervention in the freaking universe.

In the beginning though he was angry. Some blame for what happened that night in the apartment was his. But really, the moment of his demise-when he'd officially become a murderer-happened because his temper got away from him.