As far as I could tell, having Eve inject me with her hallucinatory drugs had accomplished nothing, other than giving me a weird dream and a splitting headache. I didn’t know why I’d expected anything else. In the harsh light of day, the idea of jumping between worlds inside my head sounded like what it was. Impossible. And yet if I was wrong about my doppelgänger, I also couldn’t explain the murders of Scotty Ryan and four innocent women.

Meanwhile, Eve herself was nowhere to be found. She’d injected me and then left me alone, which made me wonder if she’d hoped that I would never awaken. I dug out my phone and dialed her number. I wanted to tell her I was still here, still in trouble. However, the call didn’t go through. I didn’t get her voice mail; instead, a recording told me that the number was out of service.

Eve had disconnected her phone.

Her message couldn’t be more obvious: she didn’t want me anywhere near her.

When I got to the end of Navy Pier, I stayed by the water, heading toward the downtown skyline. The trouble was, I didn’t know what to do when I got there. Wherever I went, the police would be looking for me. A part of me thought about turning myself in, but I had no idea what to tell them. I had no way to prove that I wasn’t what they thought I was.

A killer.

As I stared out at the water, debating my next move, my phone rang in my hand. When I checked, I saw Edgar’s name on the caller ID. I answered the phone hesitantly—Edgar almost never called me—but I heard my grandfather’s unmistakably raspy voice on the other end.

“Hey, where are you?” he demanded.

“Why, what do you need, Edgar?”

“I’m here at the Art Institute. Where are you?”

“Edgar, we just did that yesterday. We meet on Thursdays, remember?”

“It is Thursday.”

I sighed. It wasn’t uncommon for my grandfather to get his days mixed up. On the other hand, I was also suspicious that the police had arranged this call for me as a trap. “Stay put, I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I told him. Then I added, “Was anything happening at home when you left?”

“Like what?”

“Like police in the neighborhood.”

“Well, yeah, a cop said they were trying to find you.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them I didn’t know where you were.”

“Did you say you were going to meet me?”

“No. What you do is your business, not mine. You’ve made that pretty clear over the years.”

He wasn’t wrong about that.

“Okay, Edgar. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I hung up the phone.