I scuttle through the empty West Beach parking lot and onto the beach itself. My joints and muscles ache and my chest is knotted. Maybe Mercy took another chunk out of me earlier after all. To my right, about fifty yards away, a silhouetted pack of teens electron in the opposite direction. Are they finished with their night or just starting it? The strengthening ocean breeze carries snippets of chatter and laughter (carefree, commiserate, cruel; I always wonder). They couldn’t possibly be laughing at me but sometimes it’s too easy to travel backward in time. What if they are the children of my former classmates? I briefly imagine myself as the kind of ugly monster that had been locked away for a generation, and now I descend upon them, fangs bared and scything, reaping arms outstretched to extract revenge for the sins of their parents. That is, of course, not fair to them, but it’s their lot, their doom. For a moment (still a price, a fee, in time), I come closer until I am right behind them, on their heels that kick up sand and leave joyous, divoted prints for anyone to follow until the ocean will wipe them away as it will one day wipe away the Farms. There are four in their group. I hear their rabbit heartbeats and I smell their intoxicated and intoxicating breaths and they taste of salty, silly, beautiful hope and the vinegar tang of fear.

I pull away and fall to my hands and knees on the sand. I will not choose them, so I blot them from my mind. I wait for my own hitching breaths to recalibrate, to order themselves, then I stand. I could walk straight into the water and see how far I could swim. Maybe I’d make it to the wonderfully named Big Misery Island. It looks closer than it is. Instead, I scurry left, to where the sandy beach ends at an outcropping of seaweed-slimed rock. The wind is behind my back, urging me forward. I am fortunate the tide is out. If I keep to the rocks, I won’t have to go in the water. The climb is treacherous and gothic in the indifferent moonlight until I step down onto sand again.

Why I am here? (It has taken me hundreds of pages to explain why I am here.) Despite my clunky reveal Mercy didn’t put a stop to me and she didn’t and wouldn’t tell me why she chose me. Now I need and want to know if I can control it and if I can choose.

Weak sauce. You can’t lay this one on me. You planned on going to Eddie’s all along.

And, yeah, I choose Eddie. I will use him to learn what I can and can’t do. I will use him to find out, finally, who I am. I will use him until there’s nothing left and there’s no coming back. I know it’s wrong, even if he is a shit person by most people’s metrics. But also, he’s a shit person, so why shouldn’t I? I’ll answer: because to choose is to destroy (Mercy can never admit that to herself). I already know who I am, and I’m not that. Or I don’t want to be that.