His one cigarette was done, so he took the time to light another. Every motion he made was unhurried. When he’d savored a few puffs, he leaned close to me, with curiosity in his voice.

“Let me ask you something. If you could go back to that day, what would you do? You know what I’m talking about. Dad took the gun and fired. Mom was dead. You’re sitting in the corner. What would you do differently?”

“I was a kid,” I said, trying to make myself believe it this time. “There’s nothing I could have done.”

“Not true. I did something.”

Oddly, I found that I had to know. “What did you do?”

“I killed him. I charged him, knocked him over, took the gun, and blew his head off. I got revenge for our mother.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why not? Because you were a coward, and I wasn’t? Because you wish you’d done the same thing as me?”

“I don’t wish that.”

“No? Then why do you keep getting into fights with men who abuse their partners? It’s because when the chips were down, you didn’t stand up for our mother. You did nothing, and it eats you alive.”

I felt myself breathing hard. I wanted to scream a denial, but he wasn’t wrong. Yes, I’d dreamed about doing what this other Dylan had done. This mirror of myself, this serial killer, knew me better than I knew myself. A little smirk of triumph crossed his face as I looked away.

“See?” he announced, easing back in the chair and sucking on his cigarette. “I’m the ultimate Dylan Moran. I do what all of you wish you could do, and I get away with everything. Killing my father? They let me off. I was just a traumatized kid. In high school, I kept beating kids up, but they didn’t do a thing to me. Oh, that poor boy, he had such a tough upbringing. They’d send me to detention, or send me to a counselor, and then I’d do it again. Sound familiar?”

I frowned. Yes, it did.

“So I just kept raising the stakes. I wanted to see how far I could go. But I already knew where I was headed. I knew the line I wanted to cross. It’s how I’m wired. Somewhere inside you, you’ve got the same code, whether you like it or not.” He shot me a look that said he was familiar with all my secrets. “Who was the first girl you slept with? Diana Geary, right?”

There was no point in lying. “Yes.”

“How’d you meet her?”