“Isn’t it? Total fluke that I found it. I was redoing a kitchen down the street, and I noticed the FOR SALE sign over here. Went in and looked around, and I thought, perfect. Love the location, love the park. With the money my uncle left me, I had enough for the down payment. So now we’re neighbors, sort of. What is it, half an hour’s walk to your place?”

“Yeah.”

Scotty’s face scrunched with puzzlement, as if he was noticing my condition for the first time. “Everything okay? You seem kind of out of it today.”

“I’m fine.”

“Why’d you miss the game last night?”

“I was pretty tired.”

Scotty drank his beer and eyed me thoughtfully. “That all it is?”

“What else would it be?”

“I don’t know, there’s something different about you today. I can’t put my finger on it. You’re not acting like yourself. You and I have been friends a long time, Dylan. If something’s going on, you can tell me about it.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” I replied.

But I wanted to say: No, we haven’t been friends for a long time. I barely knew Scotty Ryan. We’d met a handful of times when I was visiting Karly at one of her listings and Scotty was doing construction work for her. He and she went back for years, but he and I didn’t. I didn’t watch Cubs games with him at the bar. I didn’t even particularly like him. In fact, at the moment, I had every reason to hate him.

There’s something different about you today.

I thought about Edgar telling me that I’d spent my whole life with my emotions shut off, when in reality, the opposite was true.

I thought about the old woman with her dog on the street, who didn’t remember me, even after telling the police that I’d killed a man.

Most of all, I thought about Scotty and the fact that he was supposed to be dead. But he wasn’t. There had been no knife plunged into his heart. There hadn’t even been a fight between us. I hadn’t changed, but everything else had. I’d been slow to realize it, but the world around me was different. I wasn’t in the Chicago I’d left behind. I was somewhere new.

I’d gone through the door at the Art Institute into the life of an entirely different Dylan Moran. A man the police were looking for. A man who had been missing for two days.

Where was he?

“What did you want to talk to me about?” I asked Scotty, remembering his message.