“Give someone a book about John Lennon’s life and death to see if they could stop the assassination?”

“If I gave someone a book about John Lennon’s assassination,” Hayes said, “and they stopped it, then how would I give them a book about John Lennon’s assassination?”

“Different . . . timelines? Parallel universes?”

“In a parallel universe, you didn’t take the queen of spades. But in this reality you just ate thirteen points,” Hayes said, and dropped the queen on me. “Whoever you want to save, Mr. Davies, they can’t be saved. I’ve tried.”

“Then what’s the point?” I asked. “What’s the point of being able to reach back in time if you can’t do any good?”

“Who said you can’t do any good? Did I say that? I just said you can’t save them.”

“Save who?” I asked. I felt a little winded. I’d had a single swallow of bourbon, and it was in my stomach like a thimbleful of battery acid.

“Whoever they are,” he said, and met my gaze. One of his eyes was filmed lightly with cataract. “I tried. I thought I could smuggle a letter back to the past and save my best friend in the world, Alex Sommers. This was 1991, and Alex was in hospice. Alex caught himself a fatal case of what was going around among my people then, and he slunk off to die, shunned and forgotten, despised by his ultra-Christian family for being a faggot and feared by his friends who worried they might catch it off him if he started to cough. I thought I could stop it from ever happening.” His voice roughened, and he dropped his cards.

“That’s enough of this,” Gallagher said. He took Hayes’s hand and glared at me. “Who the fuck are you? Come in here and ruin our game of cards.”

Ralph Tanner spoke very softly. “Mr. Davies has also lost people. And only wants to do the right thing. But he’s dealing with something only Loren really understands.” It was the first I was sure Ralph knew about my parents. He had known right from the start, I suppose. Like I said, Kingsward is a big town, but not big enough for secrets.