“Standing next to the chair—and I’d forgotten all about it until just this very moment—was a little wooden table. There was a glass on the table, like a champagne flute. It was filled with this shining liquid. It was the colour of amethyst.

“I almost made it to the top when I suddenly froze. I can’t remember exactly what it was sitting there, waiting for me, but I was overcome with…awfulness. I tried to turn around, to get back to the bottom of the hill, but there was a magnetic pull that was forcing me closer to that chair.

“I tried to resist. I pressed my fingernails into the asphalt until they broke off. I even tried to bite down into the ground. Somehow it worked. I’d managed to stop moving forward.

“So, the thing in the chair came to me.

“The chair came grinding down the sloping road. The sound was hideous, the shrill scraping sound of wood being dragged along the ground. I remember seeing the chair legs splintering and breaking apart. The closer it got, the worse it became. The upholstery was not patterned but stained with all these foul blotches. And I bet if you try really hard you can guess what the upholstery was made from.

“And then the chair was right there.” Joyce held her hand before her face to emphasize her point.

“The thing in the chair stood up and lifted me off the ground by my eyelids. I started to scream, and then the nightmare ended.”

Morgan felt she should speak. She did not speak. “When I woke up,” Joyce added, “my babies were gone, and I was in a little townhouse with a different lot in life. The stranger who insisted he was my husband got tired of my hysteria pretty quickly. It took him less than a day before he had me hospitalized. I was stuck inside there for weeks. But I got out of that situation too, eventually. Anyway, something good came out of it. I kept the name Joyce. I used to love James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead.’ I really think I did…such a long time ago.”

“I sent an email,” Morgan finally confessed. “I found an online service that claimed they could track down lost relatives. It was that day we argued last week, remember? I was angry at you, and hurt, so I emailed them to ask for information. But I’ll write them back and cancel, okay? I’ll tell them to forget it.”

“Don’t bother.”

“No, really.” She reached for her phone, which sat charging in the kitchen wall socket. “I’ll do it right now.”

“It won’t change a thing.”

Morgan withdrew her hand.

“What happens now?”

Joyce said nothing for a time, then: “What happens is that everything shifts.”

“How can you be sure?” Morgan retorted. “Nothing’s happened to us yet.”