She stuck to side streets, riding slowly, with care. The trip took a little under an hour, and Diane was feeling a pulsing pain in her calf by the time she pulled up to the front of the pawnshop. There was a black sedan with tinted windows at the end of the lot—the windows cracked down enough for her to see two sunglassed agents of a vague yet menacing government agency. One of them raised her camera and tried to take a photo of Diane, but the camera flashed, only reflecting the car window back at the lens. The agent swore. Diane waved a cursory hello at them and walked into the store.

Jackie slouched over the counter. She had her eyes closed and was breathing slowly and was inattentive to the living world around her and was deep in a complexity of vivid, nonsequential mental imagery, but she was not asleep.

Diane put her hand on the glass counter.

“Jackie?”

No response.

“Jackie.” Diane slapped the counter.

Jackie’s eyes opened and focused on the counter. She knew that Diane was there but was too overwhelmed by the new information she had learned to care. It was an issue she was having with the world in general that day.

“Jackie, I need your help.”

Diane reached into her bag and pulled out a plastic bag marked “nope!”, and took out a piece of paper with “KING CITY” all over it in Josh’s handwriting. She placed it on the counter.

Jackie winced. She batted the paper off the counter.

“Jackie I need you to—”

“Why did you bring that here?”

Diane didn’t know what to say. There were a lot of reasons, but it sounded like Jackie didn’t think any of them would be good reasons.

“This is not an arts and crafts project, Diane. I am living with this. This is real.” Jackie shook her cast, and they could both hear the rustle of paper inside. “I only just got out of the hospital.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“You don’t dress like a person and suddenly you’re twins. You don’t get the same haircut and suddenly you’re best friends. I’m not going to King City, okay? I can barely move. My mind doesn’t seem to connect the way it used to. I don’t have a car. I can’t do my job. If no one would remind me of that goddamn paper I could sit here forever and never think of it or anything else again.”

She shook her head.

“I’m sorry. I know this is hard for you. I know this is so painful. You’re a mother and you’re trying very hard. But I can barely hold it together to just sit here. I can’t help you. I can’t even help myself.”