She gave me a reassuring smile. “It’s not too late. As long as you’re breathing, there’s still time. I’ll see you again soon, Dylan. Things will start feeling better, you’ll see.”

“I hope so.”

I headed for the door, but as I reached to open it, I stopped. I glanced around at the office again, which was completely unfamiliar. Even so, I told myself that everything here was solid. Normal. Real. So was Eve Brier.

And yet.

“Dylan? Are you all right?”

“I don’t know. Something still feels off to me. I can’t put my finger on it.”

“It’s the aftereffects of the therapy. That will pass. Trust me, Dylan, you’re back now.”

I had no reason to disbelieve anything she’d told me, but I’m sure my face broadcast my doubts.

“You still don’t think this is your own world, do you?” Eve asked.

“I’m not sure. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I want this to be the real world.”

“Why is that?”

I hesitated, trying to understand it myself. I could still feel those last moments in River Park as I lay dying. “Something happened to me right before I came back.”

“When you had to kill your other self?”

“Yes.”

“Try not to think of the violence as real, because it wasn’t. You were right here in my office the whole time.”

“Yes, I know, that’s what you said. But it’s more complicated than that. I saw Karly in that world. She was there, too.”

Eve frowned. “Ah. That must have been very emotional.”

“It was.”

“Sometimes an experience like that is part of letting go,” she told me. “It’s how you deal with grief.”

“Maybe so, but I can’t stop thinking about what she said to me.”

“What did she say?”

I could hear Karly’s voice, as clearly as if she were standing over me again. Looking down at me and whispering her last words. It didn’t feel like goodbye. It didn’t feel like what she would say if we were about to be parted forever.

It felt like a message.

Something to carry with me wherever I was going.

“She told me to come find her. She said she was still here.”

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 34

I left Eve’s office and passed the Lucent sculpture in the lobby of Hancock Center. Its thousands of lights, reflected in the black pool of water, taunted me like an echo of what I’d been through. Each flickering light was another world, another life, among an endless number constantly multiplying in my mind. I’d visited some of those places, and now I was back in my own world.

Except, according to Eve, I’d never actually left. All this time, I’d been lying on her sofa on the twenty-ninth floor.