I gaze down at my changed body, at the vague crease in my skin. It’s only half of what it was yesterday, and I think I know why. I wanted to stay there with Mina. I wanted to stay dead.

Maybe I’ve only got so many lives in me after all.

“Listen,” I say, wrenching my hand away, “I promise you don’t want to come with us.”

Daisy scoffs, her nose crinkled like a spoiled child. “Why do you get to make that choice for me?”

There’s that word again. Choice. It’s the one thing I’ve always wanted, and the one thing I’ve always been denied.

Bee cranks the engine, a warning shot for Daisy, but this only makes her edge closer, her face softening now.

“Please,” she says, those keen eyes watching me. Everything about her is so familiar. Daisy and I aren’t so different. She just wants people to see her, to really see her. I remember what that’s like.

I want to tell her I’m sorry, to tell her I wish things had turned out differently, but Bee shifts the Buick sharply into gear, and we surge down the street. Away from Daisy, away from everything.

The night settles like tar over us, and I don’t look back.

We’re at the edge of Golden Gate Park, the streets clogged with red taillights, kids in bell-bottoms spilling off the sidewalk in waves. There are so many people, cramming every available space, bodies nearly tumbling atop bodies. It seems like everyone in the world is here.

Bee does her best to ignore them. “You want to go north?” she asks, and I start to answer her when the breeze changes, and someone else is with us. Someone we know.

Bee. A thin voice, so small I barely hear it. It isn’t Rochester this time.

Bee and I see her at the same moment. Jane. She’s at the top of a sloping hill, that yellow ribbon in her hair, still wearing the same blue dress she borrowed from Bee. The Buick screeches suddenly, Bee jerking the wheel hard, as we skid to a stop at the mouth of the park. This is the farthest we can go in the car. Now it’s on foot down the dirt path or nothing at all.

I expect Bee to leap out and run to Jane, but she doesn’t. We’ve come all this way, yet now she’s frozen, her hands tightening on the wheel, regret leeching into her. That faraway look, the one I know so well, casts a shadow across her face as she remembers it, remembers everything. How they were together, then how they weren’t, and how many days there were in between. The past is always so much heavier than you ever expect it to be.