His ex-girlfriend was Gloria Olivares. She’d moved and changed her number, but he found her new address, learned her new number, and started a subtle but determined campaign of harassment, phoning in the middle of the night and saying nothing when she answered, letting the phone ring until her voicemail message sounded but leaving no messages, sending mail-order deliveries, often including cryptic notes that might or might not refer to private details of their relationship.

Except Pedro, being a jerk, had tracked down the wrong Gloria Olivares. This Gloria was a laboratory technician who was mystified by the cryptic notes and increasingly terrified by the campaign of harassment.

She started to suffer horrendous migraines brought on by the stress, and after taking too many days off work, she began to fear she might lose her job. So she started going to work even with the migraines, and after one particularly stressful night, she accidentally mixed up two lab results, a cancer-free biopsy and a malignant growth.

So if it hadn’t been for Pedro and his twisted but mistaken campaign, Gloria wouldn’t have messed up at work and a pilot named Javier Quevedo—who’d lost both parents to cancer, and whose wife had been killed the year before in a street robbery—wouldn’t have received test results telling him the terrible news that he had terminal cancer.

Even then, if Javier had insisted on a second opinion, he would have found out it was a mistake, and he wouldn’t have sunk into a dangerous depression of his own, and from the bottom of that depression, his mind would not have found its way to the catastrophic decision that he would make his plane disappear in the Amazon jungle and never be found. Life had treated him with nothing but cruelty, so he would play a cruel joke on life in turn, and that would be his legacy. The pilot of that Malaysian plane had done it, and so would he.

That was Javier’s plan, anyway, and he researched it thoroughly. Of course, if he’d researched a little more, particularly about the unique thermals in the valley system where he’d chosen to crash, he would have succeeded in taking the plane down whole, the mystery would have been complete, and nineteen people would not have survived.

And if nineteen people had not survived the crash, two of them—Alice Dysart and Tom Calloway—would never have spoken outside of their English class, would never have come to know each other as anything more than someone to debate with over Shakespeare. They would probably never have seen each other again after high school, and they definitely wouldn’t have remained part of a close-knit group of friends who’d traveled those jungle paths together.