I was in the room with Seurat’s enormous pointillist masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, ten feet wide, nearly seven feet tall. I’d seen that work a thousand times, probably more. I could tell you the details from memory: the long pipe of the man in the muscle shirt, the monkey with the perfectly curved tail, the parasols all in different colors. It was one of the museum’s most famous works, and I couldn’t get anywhere close to it because of the crowd, so I stood at the back of the gallery, eyeing the painting over the heads of thirty or more people clustered in front of it. They made a kind of Grande Jatte themselves, different ages, races, heights, sizes, clothes, all frozen in wonder by the art.

Then my gaze drifted to one man with his back to me. What drew my attention was his jacket.

It was a leather motorcycle jacket, weathered and black, with parallel seams down the backs of the sleeves. The jacket was just like the one my father had been wearing that night when I was thirteen. That night when my life became Before and After. For years, I’d kept that jacket in a closet, unable to touch it but also unable to throw it away. After Karly moved in, she finally convinced me that the day had come to get rid of it. I burned it. It became ash. It no longer existed.

So it was a shock to see the man in front of the painting wearing a jacket of the exact same style.

Except, more than that, I realized that this was my father’s jacket.

When I looked closely, I could see the chocolate-brown bloodstains. They were soaked into the leather, a permanent reminder of the night that changed my life. Believe me, I’d memorized the pattern of the blood spray long ago, like the paintings I saw in the museum. I would never forget it.

The man in the coat glanced back, revealing his face. When he did, my knees buckled beneath me. I couldn’t stand; I had to grab for the wall to hold myself up. Our eyes met as dozens of people came and went between us. He looked at me; I looked at him. He reacted. He recognized me. I watched his steely blue-eyed gaze grab on to me like a predator spotting prey.

The encounter lasted only a second, and then he turned casually away and disappeared into the next gallery.

But I’d seen him. I’d seen myself.

My profile. My face. Just like at the river. That was Dylan Moran studying La Grande Jatte and wearing my father’s murder coat. The shock of it left me paralyzed, but he didn’t look surprised to see me at all. It was as if he’d been waiting for that moment, waiting for me to find him.