The truck kept going, its driver undoubtedly aware that something had struck his trailer but probably blaming it on a clump of wet snow that had shaken loose from the overpass and landed on him. There was another truck rolling down the lane but Jack didn’t wait for the second impact. He walked to Ed’s car and removed the cinderblock from the trunk. He threw it into a field as he walked the mile farther down the road to his own car. There would be no connection to his mother’s death, no connection to him.

It was over.

He went home and put himself to bed, secure in the belief that starting tomorrow he could pick up his life again where he had left off.

He was wrong.

He slept into the afternoon of the following day. When he awoke, the enormity of what he had done descended on him with the weight of the earth itself. He had killed. More than that: He had executed another man.

He was tempted to cop an insanity plea, say it hadn’t been him up there on the overpass but a monster wearing his skin. Someone else had been in control.

It wouldn’t wash. It hadn’t been someone else. It had been him. Jack. No one else. And he hadn’t been in a fog or a fugue or consumed by a red haze of rage. He remembered every detail, every word, every move with crystal clarity.

No guilt. No remorse. That was the truly frightening part: The realization that if he could go back and relive those moments he wouldn’t change a thing.

He knew that afternoon as he sat hunched on the edge of the bed that his life would never be the same. The young man in the mirror today was not the same one he had seen there yesterday. Everything looked subtly different. The angles and curves of his surroundings hadn’t changed; faces and architecture and geography all stayed the same topographically. But someone had shifted the lighting. There were shadows where there had been light before.

Jack went back to Rutgers, but college no longer seemed to make any sense. He could sit and laugh and drink with his friends but he no longer felt a part of them. He was one step removed. He could still see and hear them, but could no longer touch them, as if a glass wall had risen between him and everyone he thought he knew.

He searched for a way to make some sense of it all. He went through the existentialist canon, devouring Camus and Sartre and Kierkegaard. Camus seemed to know the questions Jack was asking, but he gave no answers.

Jack flunked most of his second semester courses. He drifted away from his friends. When summer came he took all his savings and moved to New York, where the fix-it work continued with a gradually escalating level of danger and violence. He learned how to pick locks and pick the right gun and ammo for any given situation, how to break into a house and break an arm. He had been there ever since.