Eve sighed at my denials. “You’re Dylan Moran. Events manager at the LaSalle Plaza Hotel. Your father killed your mother and then killed himself right in front of you. You moved in with your grandfather, Edgar, after their deaths. You still go to the Art Institute with him every week. Your favorite painting is Hopper’s Nighthawks. Edgar likes to say that if he hadn’t accidentally bumped into the museum director when he was a boy and saved him from getting killed on State Street, that painting would be hanging in a totally different place.”

My breath left my chest. I grabbed her shoulders and hissed in her face, “How do you know all that?”

“How do you think? You told me.”

I stared at her face in the starlight and tried to make sense of this woman. She was a doctor and a psychiatrist, but she was something more, too. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but she had an enigmatic quality about her, as if she could seduce people with her mind. I felt the spell she cast pulling me into her orbit. She was beautiful, sensual, unforgettable. A magician. I could picture being with her in her office. I could hear my own voice telling her secrets about myself.

But it had never happened.

“This therapy,” I went on. “What did I experience?”

“You told me you saw other Dylans from other worlds. You interacted with them. You went into their lives.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“You believed it.”

“What did I see?”

“If you want to know that, you should go back inside your head. Try it and see for yourself.”

“No thanks.”

“Are you sure? You told me after one session that you wished you could stay in the world you found. You were tempted to take over that other Dylan’s life.”

“None of that is real,” I said.

“How do you know? Frankly, I wasn’t sure before we began, but your experience made me a believer. The Many Worlds theory is true. We really do take every road that’s open to us. In some other world, you and I never met. We’re passing each other by the lake right now like strangers. In another world, we’re having sex. In another, you’re holding me under the water and drowning me.”

I flinched at the violent image. “Drowning you? Why on earth would you say something like that?”

“Because that’s why you came to me, Dylan,” Eve said. “You said you were having visions of killing people, and yet these people were still alive. But you could give me details, dates, descriptions, methods of how you’d murdered them. You wanted my help. You were afraid you were on the verge of becoming a serial killer.”

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 8

Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror—I mean, really looked at yourself—and wondered who you were?