I breathed deeply, trying to make myself relax in the darkness. I managed to doze off and on. Finally I saw a faint light through the cave opening. Cautiously I pulled myself toward the mouth. The clouds had broken, and a hazy reddish moon peeked through. No, wait. What was that? Another light, lower in the sky and about half the size. A second moon?

Impossible!

I opened and shut my eyes, squinted, craned my aching neck. Each time I looked there were still two moons against a startling deep purple sky. I examined every back corner in the warehouse of my mind, searching for explanations, refusing to let myself believe the obvious. I couldn’t be in another world. Could I?

I rubbed my eyelids, then blinked again at the moons. This attack on my sanity seemed more cruel than being pursued by the beasts. Seeing was believing, right? I’d always trusted my senses. But now, how could I? Had I lost my mind?

I retreated from the absurdity and hunkered into the cold, clammy lap of the cave, my back to the opening. Reason was failing me. For the moment, I gave up on it, quit trying to figure it out, hoping it would all make sense if I came back to it later.

Into the mental vacuum fell a tangled, tumbling mass of vivid memories. First came the morning I woke up to discover Marci and the kids gone. It was as unthinkable as waking up now to find myself in a world with two moons.

I relived the shock and anger I had felt as I, in my mind, read and reread her note. And the helplessness, which I hated most of all.

Two years later now, I could understand a little more why they left. My long hours, endless trips away, climbing the company ladder. Enduring—often enjoying, I admit—all that went with it. I did it for Marci, I always said, and when Amy and Brian came along I did it for them.

But wouldn’t I have done exactly the same if none of them had been there?

And now they aren’t.

Maybe it was something about the air in this cave; I sifted through the ruins of my existence like a man whose life was passing in front of him on the long fall to death.

I saw myself sitting in that corner office, on top of the world, so I thought. I was all the swagger you could stuff into a three-piece suit. A legend in my own mind. I could bark out orders to a hundred people under me. But I could do nothing to make my wife and children stay, nothing to make them come back.

I’d reached the pinnacle of my career. Why had it looked so much better from below? My soul felt empty. Or do we even have souls? I wondered.