Normally that shared isolation—people marooned from each other—bugs the hell out of him. But today it doesn’t. Today his walk is a stroll with a little extra lift to it.

They’re going to start training him in a couple of days.

The cute barista—Roseanne—returned from the back room with a smile on her face. Followed by the manager, Chris.

They asked for his cell phone number. He admitted he didn’t have a cell phone.

“We don’t require a lot to work here,” said Chris with a tight smile. “But you do need to have a phone so we can reach you.”

Zack resists rejoining the world. Caving in to its demands and conventions.

GreenGirl is temporary. They know it. He knows it. Maybe they’re intrigued by having a local celebrity on staff.

He’s been on hold. Hanging on to his previous life. Paradoxically but powerfully, the crazy events of the phone swap, of the twenty-four-hour nightmare that followed, the murder attempt he survived—all of it has kept him in his previous existence, kept it suspended over and around him, trapping him in that identity. Trapping his image in the newspapers, on social media, trapping him as if in a looping video.

This is a step. Maybe more symbolic than actual. On the way to something. Putting not just an episode behind him but a stage of life too.

He heads purposefully down the street. Not sure where he’s going exactly but sure now it’s somewhere. He feels a sense of momentum. He feels himself shrugging off, finally shedding, his previous life.

Soon, soon, to leave it behind.

He will remember this walk. This feeling. This little moment when everything seems to be shifting. This sense of lightness and liberation.

But he will remember it for entirely different reasons than he thinks.

He will remember it wistfully, longingly, and grimly. As a vivid, tangible, tactile memory—of what never truly was.

26.

26.

“State of New York versus Joey Richter. Borough of Manhattan, Courtroom 104B. Judge Burton Sherman presiding. All rise.”

An obedient shuffle of two hundred boots and shoes—court stenographers, attorneys, jurors, print and television journalists from a wide range of news organizations, well-known and obscure, victims’ families, and a smattering of court rats clever and quick enough to secure a seat.

Joey is sitting at the middle of the defense table. By this time, there are three lawyers on his team, the original one assigned to him by the state, Simms—hunched over, hollowed out, a scarecrow in an undertaker’s suit—and two more flanking him, who have materialized, as if out of nowhere, in the past few weeks.