I hung up the phone. I paced in the bedroom, overrun by panic. Where were they? Maybe Karly had skipped the date, but my ego told me that wasn’t true. She wouldn’t have stood me up, not after the conversation we’d had today. But if it wasn’t Karly, then it was him. He’d changed the place where we were supposed to meet. He’d assumed I would get free and alert the campus police, so he’d reached out to her to pick a new location away from the university.

Where did they go?

They were out among millions of people on a Chicago Saturday night. They could be anywhere.

I tried the office number I’d found on Karly’s faculty profile. It went straight to a generic voice mail message. I tapped out a short e-mail to her university account: You’re in danger. Get away from Dylan now. But I had no idea whether it would reach her.

Where?

Where would they meet?

Then I remembered a fragment of our conversation. We’d talked about wishing for a do-over in life for our worst mistakes, a chance to go back and change whatever we’d done wrong.

Wasn’t that what tonight was for Dylan and Karly?

A do-over for a disastrous blind date?

If Dylan asked the Karly of this world where she wanted to go, I was willing to bet she’d go back to the beginning. She’d suggest we try our first date over again and see if we could get it right this time.

“We went to a club, didn’t we? I don’t even remember which one.”

“The Spybar.”

The entrance to the basement dance club called the Spybar was down an alley off Franklin in the artsy River North neighborhood. By the time I got there, a line of twenty-something club hoppers stretched around the corner from the black-draped entrance. I stood under the rusted steel beams of the L tracks, and one of the trains thundered like a roller coaster over my head.

From across the street, I studied the people in line. Dylan and Karly weren’t there. That meant they were already inside. Or it meant I was completely wrong and they weren’t here at all. I needed to get into the club and find out. I had no time to wait, so I found two Hispanic girls in skintight outfits near the front of the line. I gave them each fifty dollars and paid their covers, and five minutes later, I was down the stairs and inside the club.

The synthesizer beat of techno music wailed like a siren. I felt it deep in my chest, making it hard to breathe. The house was packed, bodies crammed shoulder to shoulder, arms and hips writhing as people danced. I moved slowly through clouds of fog. Strobe lights blinked, twisting around the floor in cones of white, red, yellow, and green.