Of course she did. She couldn’t see my face. I was a stranger attacking her husband. She grabbed my shoulders to pull me off, and when I hung on, she kicked and scratched and got on the ground and clamped her teeth around my forearm. I couldn’t take it. Finally, I let go, and she dragged me backward into the grass.

We were still in the dark. She couldn’t see my face.

“Karly, stop!” I screamed.

But all her primal instincts had taken over. She hammered my body with her fists. Her knee sank into the bloody mess of my abdomen, causing waves of agony that left me struggling to breathe. I put up my arms to fend her off and shouted again.

“Karly, it’s me!”

My familiar voice, my words, slowly seeped into her mind. She began to perceive that something impossible was happening here, but it was already too late.

Rising above her like a ghost under the park light, I saw my doppelgänger. He was on his feet again, the knife in his hand. Blood from his fractured skull ran in ribbons down his face. He jumped toward my wife. With a surge of adrenaline, I shoved Karly away, but Dylan kept coming. He landed on top of me, and we rolled together, battling for control of the knife. My strength was waning, but so was his. Both of us were dizzy, drained, desperate. The park became a whirling gyroscope inside our heads, and I could feel our minds coming together. I saw his face and my face through my own eyes. As we rolled, as our bodies intertwined, we were becoming one person. We’d always been one person, trapped inside endless worlds.

There was only one way to stop him. I had to sacrifice myself. I let go of the knife and took hold of his throat again, choking him. With his hands free, he thrust the knife into my back, and pulled it out, and thrust it in again. I held on through every lightning bolt of agony. I ignored the pain and weakness and blood and kept my fingers wrapped around his windpipe. Below me, his face turned purple. His eyes bulged. His tongue swelled from his mouth. He stabbed me over and over, but the shock waves rippling through my back belonged to someone else, not me. My mind shunted them aside. I had no wounds, no feeling, no body at all. I was nothing but two hands locked around a killer’s neck.

He reared back to stab me one more time.

This time, the blow never came. His arm stiffened in midair. The knife slid away from his fingers and dropped to the grass. His stare grew fixed, the whites of his eyes ruby red with exploded blood vessels. His body went limp.

It was done.

Dylan Moran was dead.