Zack knows the standard of proof is much lower in a civil action. He can already detect the slightly different phrasings and framings of the attorneys. He knows that wrongful death is usually about restitution but Joey barely has a dime. So what’s the point here? Just the satisfaction of hearing a guilty verdict? Or has the family been told that Joey has money stashed away? Or is this suit about something else entirely? Like Zack’s suspicion that it’s been somehow helped along by Karloff.

It occurs to Zack once again, looking at Joey, how Joey truly had nothing, nowhere to turn, no one to turn to, when he texted Zack Yellin.

And now, on the stand, Zack understands—Emily leaving him, Steve tossing him out, his GreenGirl jobs all lost after bedding down in a supply closet. He understands Joey’s feeling of nowhere to turn, nowhere to go.

But it is Joey’s reaching out and Zack’s responding that has led to this moment. Which has put a potential explosion in Zack’s pocket.

Zack tells the story to a packed courtroom again—the switched phones, the assassin’s phone filled with photos, being lured to a rendezvous he figured he might not survive, being chased on the city streets, the assassination attempt on the street corner.

He wonders: Is this all he’ll ever be known for? This story? This bizarre event? Will his life be stopped, held forever, in this tale?

“And you expect us to believe you two switched phones like that? And you came up with the other phone’s code?” The same question that Darwin Cope had asked, but this time asked sympathetically by the prosecution, inviting Zack to explain, to help the judge accept the strangeness of the universe.

Because this is a civil trial, argued before a judge without a jury. This elderly judge with the strange name—Josepho Litvinov—with his strange, vague, unidentifiable accent, whose origins Zack imagines only he knows.

“That’s what happened. I wish it didn’t,” Zack says to the courtroom. “I wish none of this was happening,” he says, looking at Joey.

And certainly no one in the courtroom would believe that he and the defendant have switched phones again, and as a result he has a remote trigger in his pocket.

He feels time ticking, the bomb ticking, in a way, at a pace he doesn’t understand, but he also has the strong sense of time looping somehow because he is giving the same testimony, looking at the same defendant.

Suddenly time compresses acutely, rears up disruptively.

Zack sees Karloff enter the back of the courtroom. He barely recognizes him from a single arrest-record photo on one of the police databases, but it’s him. Hair white now. Decades older. But same jutting cheeks, same small, piercing eyes.

Is it the first courtroom the criminal mastermind Karloff has been in since he was a child in Bulgaria?