He was almost surrendering himself to that fate when George stood up and said, “I need to say something.” They all stopped to listen. “You know, most of the people I counted as my best friends until a month or so back, they died in that crash, and they were good people. But this last week, you guys have shown me what real friendship is, and that’s you more than anyone, Tom. I don’t care what stories get out, I’ll tell the truth to anyone who’ll listen. I’m proud to count you as a friend.”

“Me too,” said Kate, immediately, and a chorus of voices joined in.

Tom smiled and nodded, but couldn’t speak, suddenly overwhelmed after everything he’d been through, and he was relieved when George came over and almost crushed him in a bear hug. And he thought again of what Kate had said to him alone out there in the jungle—this is who we are now. Maybe that was true, he thought, with a feeling of unfamiliar warmth, and a hope for the future—this is who we are now.

This is who I am now.

EPILOGUE

It’s called the butterfly effect, and it’s the part of chaos theory that everyone loves. The idea is that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. Not directly, of course. It’s not like the wings disturb some air and that disturbance disturbs more air and so on until it grows into a hurricane—that would just be stupid.

What it really means is that everything is incredibly complex, with millions of tiny factors built into almost every occurrence, and if you remove just one of them (the beat of the butterfly’s wings), then it might happen differently, or even not at all.

So, a few years back, some jerk named Pedro Herrera started dating the daughter of his boss at the law firm where he worked. When the relationship turned sour because Pedro was being a jerk, things started going wrong for him, and he got fired soon after. At first, he accepted grudgingly that it had been his own mistakes that had done him in, but as time went on and his life spiraled downward, he convinced himself that his ex-girlfriend had persuaded her father to fire him for no reason.

He became obsessed with revenge—not against her father, because he was a powerful man—but against his ex. He wouldn’t do anything major—he wasn’t a psycho or anything—but he’d make her suffer for the wrong she’d done him. Pedro was the butterfly, and his bizarre decision to seek revenge was the beat of his wings.