“I can’t remember it all. I know I woke up and looked out the car window, and saw him setting up a camp under the trees. I got the door open and tried to walk away, back up the dirt road, but walking was… I couldn’t coordinate. And the driver spotted me, ran up and grabbed me by the collar and threw me out of the road, into the grass. I kept trying to get up and he kept hitting me. Then I was further off the road, where he was pitching camp, and he had something in his hand, and I was so scared. I felt something under me, in the grass. I picked it up and swung it at him. I didn’t know until it hit him that it was his camp hatchet.”

I stopped for breath, and Sunny didn’t say anything. Maybe she’d fallen asleep. Maybe I was reciting this for my own benefit, and in the morning I’d discover that I’d gotten it off my chest without ever spilling the secret. “The next thing I remember was trying to get his car, his huge damned Chrysler with its damned stick shift, turned around at the end of the dirt road without getting stuck in a ditch, and the headlights lighting up the long grass and nothing past it. I just knew it would be like in a horror movie, that he’d come lurching up out of that grass with his hatchet still stuck in him, and break the windshield and kill me.”

“Instead, you got the car turned around and came here,” she said behind me. I rolled over and stared at her. She was propped up on her elbows, gazing at the brightening window. “And as soon as you got here, it never happened. You came to the Borderlands, and your past was cut off like six inches of hair. It never happened at all.”

We lay there like that for what might have been a long time. Then she said, “Go to sleep,” and I curled up and obeyed orders.

I woke up several hours later with sun knocking on the blinds. I was alone in bed. I remembered whose bed it was pretty quickly, and I remembered at about the same moment that there wasn’t any Tick-Tick anymore.