I retrieve a piece from the Pando puzzle that’s sitting on the table near me. Pando is Latin for “I spread.” He told me that. Hilbert. I have to break it apart and I use it to push, using all the force I can muster, into the window. The glass bends like a taut sheet, and the piece I’m holding ends up poking right through. It doesn’t shatter like glass should but creates a tiny hole.

I feel like the room is spinning. I don’t understand. The floor isn’t steady under my feet.

I put my eye directly up to the opening and look through it. Instead of the forest, it’s another hallway, similar to the hallway outside my room. The difference is obvious, but I can’t decipher it. And then I realize. It’s the carpet. I know this carpet.

It’s the carpet I had in my old apartment.

The hole is too small to see much else, but I can make out some lights and other equipment. I see a violin. A French dictionary. Stacks of blue graph paper and a pencil. Several blank canvases. My eye and cheek are pressed right against the hole when I feel the sensation of being grabbed from behind. Something has me, is holding on to me. I feel a surge of pure panic before everything goes blank.

I’m startled awake by a light touch on my shoulder.

I blink, try to focus. There’s nothing to see. I hear a voice.

“Penny,” Jack whispers, stepping closer to my bed.

I open my eyes wider. He looks at me affectionately. He’s tense, skittish.

“What happened?” I ask. “I’m scared.”

“You had another nightmare. You were screaming.”

I focus on my breathing. In and out, in and out.

“Why am I still here? I don’t think I should be.”

“Penny…”

“Are you keeping me… alive? All of us?”

“Oh, Penny.”

Again, he touches my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m not a good person.”

“You are,” I say. “I think you are.”

“I wish I’d been better. I made a lot of mistakes.”

“You’ve been kind to me,” I say.

“I came here because I had nothing and needed to work. She told me, ‘What’s more important to life than living?’ I thought she was smart and caring.”

His face is ruddy and gaunt.

“Please tell me! Right now! What’s inside this house? What’s outside?” I ask. “The doors are locked.”

“Of course they are.”

“But…”

“You should be able to go outside. It’s not right that you can’t,” he says.

He turns toward the door, as if he’s heard something.

“Jack…”

He puts a finger to his lips.

“What’s your biggest regret?” I ask.

“I haven’t lived my full life yet, so I can’t say. It depends how long I have.”

“I remember a lady outside my apartment building once said: ‘You’re going to hell when you die.’ She yelled it at me. ‘You’re going to hell!’ That seemed so scary in that moment, when I was a young woman, to hear someone say when you die. To think about your own death, dying, how close it is for everyone. But now I know that’s not the horrifying part.”