“He saw me in the corner. I knew what he was thinking. I read his eyes. Me next. Kill me, too. I saw him raising the gun and aiming it right at me, but I was frozen. I couldn’t move. Something must have shifted inside him, watching me. He kept bending his elbow up until the gun was under his chin. Then he gave a little whimper. I remember that so clearly, this whimper, like a dog when his master dies. And then he fired.”

Karly was bawling. Not making a sound, but crying so hard she could barely breathe. Not me. Back then, I was cried out.

“I should have been able to stop it,” I said.

She threw her arms around my neck and told me what people had been telling me for years. “You were a kid. You were just a boy. What could you have done?”

Yes, what could I have done?

I’d asked myself that question every day since I was thirteen. I’d never been able to find an answer, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I had. No matter how much you wish or pray, there are no second chances. All you can do is make peace with your mistakes. Unfortunately, there’s no manual to tell you how to do that.

Now, years later, I felt as if I were living in a kind of infinite loop. They’d all died because of me. My mother. Roscoe. And Karly.

Every time. Every single time it was the same.

I should have been able to stop it.

Edgar and I met every Thursday at lunch in front of Edward Hopper’s classic Nighthawks. My grandfather and I didn’t agree on much, but we agreed that this was our favorite painting in the Art Institute.

For years, when I stared at Hopper’s three customers in the late-night diner, I would see myself as the lonely man with his back to the artist, the one whose face you couldn’t see. That was me, alone in Chicago. Then, after I met Karly, I began to see myself as the other man, seated next to the redhead in the slinky red dress. I liked being that man. I liked his cigarette and his hat and his suit, and most of all, I liked the woman with him.