“No, it does help. I appreciate it. Eve says the procedure can be disorienting, and that’s probably what’s happening to me. Somehow I have to turn off that experience and turn this world on again.”

Alicia got up from her chair. She came around and sat on the front of the desk. “If these worlds were as vivid as you say, that will take time.”

“I know. I just don’t understand how I could lose three weeks of my life. If Eve’s right, I’ve been getting up, going to work, living my life this whole time, right up until I went to her office this morning. Now it’s like those past few weeks have been erased and replaced by the worlds she sent me to. How can that happen?”

“I can’t tell you that without knowing more about her therapy. But I think there’s more going on here than just Eve Brier.”

“What do you mean?”

“Trauma can affect memory, too, Dylan. You’ve been through a singularly traumatic event.”

“Karly.”

“That’s right.” Alicia put a hand on my shoulder. “Let me ask you something. Forget about today. Forget about the past few weeks. What’s the last thing you do remember?”

I closed my eyes and rewound the clock in my head until the seconds started ticking forward again.

“I remember being in the river,” I told her. “I was under the water. That was when everything stopped.”

Finally, I went home.

In the foyer of our apartment building, I could hear the buzz of Edgar’s game show on the television upstairs. I thought about going to see him, but he was probably asleep. Tomorrow was Thursday, and I’d see him at the Art Institute.

Inside my apartment, I saw the things I’d expect to find for a man who’d just lost his wife. Flower arrangements were beginning to wilt. Dozens of sympathy cards lay on the table, some opened, some still sealed. Laundry was piled in baskets, and dishes that needed to be done were stacked in the sink. This was the apartment of someone who’d been in a kind of Alaska for weeks, frozen in place, unable to move on. Seeing it all triggered fresh memories, too. The last three weeks didn’t come back, but everything that had happened before Karly and I left on our weekend trip was still here in the apartment, waiting for me.

We’d argued in the living room that night. She’d lost an earring as she tore at her hair in guilt over the affair. There, on the floor near the fireplace, I saw the glittering diamond stud where it had fallen.