That was a good question.
That was a very good question, and I knew what I wanted to say. I wanted to rise above the anger I carried—for the world, for her, but mostly for myself. Karly needed me to forgive her, and that was what I needed to do, too. Instead, I failed both of us. It was another of my mistakes, another bad choice. I should have kissed her right then, but all I did was walk past her and get in the car. That was how we drove out into the rain that night, with a bitter silence lingering between us.
You see, there are moments in your life you are desperate to take back as soon as they happen, but the clock ticks, and they’re gone. You make your choice, and an instant later, nothing is the same.
By the time I was ready to tell her how I felt, we were already in the water.
I couldn’t stay at the accident scene any longer. I walked down the side street toward the green fields of Horner Park, which I knew from my childhood. As I did, I learned that my life was still governed by Chance with a capital C, because in the next block, across from the park’s basketball courts, I noticed a two-story house with a familiar red-and-black sign mounted in the yard. The house was for sale, and the listing agent was another woman at Chance Properties whom I’d met once or twice.
However, I didn’t care about that.
Instead, I focused on the white pickup truck parked at the curb. The truck had a painted logo on the door for Ryan Construction.
Scotty Ryan.
He was inside the house.
I heard a roaring in my head, a thump-thump-thump as my heartbeat took off. I hadn’t had a drink all day, so there was no excuse for making a foolish mistake. No good could come from seeing him.
It didn’t matter. I couldn’t stop myself. I walked down the sidewalk and stood in front of the white picket fence. The house was neatly put together, freshly painted, with flowers growing in the window boxes. The front door was open, and I could hear the whine of a power saw inside. My common sense sent me a very clear message to walk away, which my heart ignored. I let myself inside the fence and headed for the steps. I hesitated only briefly at the house’s screen door before I ripped it open.
The interior had the sweet smell of cut wood. Plastic sheeting lined the living room floor. The noise of the saw deafened me, but then it cut off, leaving a stark silence. Scotty Ryan stood behind the saw, holding up a long length of oak trim to examine the cut. As he did, he saw me.
His whole body stiffened. When he recovered, he took off his noise-canceling headphones and his safety goggles and canvas gloves. He was dressed in jeans and work boots, with a loose Black Hawks jersey over his long torso. Sawdust made a film on his arms.
“Hello, Dylan,” he said.
“Scotty.”
We faced each other across the room. The standoff between us was like two tough dogs growling in an alley.
Scotty Ryan was forty years old, so nearly a decade older than me. He was half a foot taller, too, with a lanky, almost rubbery frame. He had wavy reddish-blond hair, and his face was sunburned pink from time spent in the sun. When he talked, he had an aw-shucks drawl in his voice, and his words always came out slowly, like honey from a jar. His casual good humor made him a difficult man to dislike, but believe me, I’d found a way.
“I’m really sorry,” Scotty said, which covered a lot of ground. “You can’t imagine how sorry I am.”
“You should be.”
My verbal blow rolled off him without causing any damage. He brushed his hand through his thick hair, and I could see the glow of sweat on his face. “I can’t believe she’s gone. I’m crushed. I’m sure you must be, too.”
“Wow. You think?”
Scotty shrugged his wide shoulders. “Hey, it’s hard to tell with you, Dylan. Karly always said you kept things locked up tight. You never showed her anything. That drove her crazy. No offense.”
Because adding “no offense” made everything better, coming from the man who’d slept with my wife.
“I have a question, Scotty.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“How long were you in love with Karly? How long were you hiding that little secret?”
Scotty rubbed his jutting chin and took his time to answer, the way he always did. “Maybe we shouldn’t do this now, Dylan.”
“How. Long?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Probably from the day I met her. I’ve known her a lot longer than you. I think she was only eighteen back then, but I never thought of her as young. She was so smart, confident, full of herself. I knew she was way out of my league, but yeah, I guess I had a crush on her from day one. Not that I ever intended to do anything about it.”
“Or you were just biding your time. Waiting until she was vulnerable.”
“That’s not how it went down. I swear. That’s not what happened.”
“Then what did happen?”
I took a couple of steps toward him. The plastic sheeting crinkled under my feet. He watched me warily, like a fighter in the ring.
“Look, what else do you want to know? I’m sure Karly already filled you in. When she called me, she said she was going to tell you everything.”
“You talked to her? Are you kidding me? When?”
“The day after,” Scotty admitted. “She was upset, blaming herself, said she couldn’t believe she’d made such a stupid mistake. She was going to tell you the truth, and she wanted me to know. For what it’s worth, I told her to keep it to herself and not risk her marriage over this. Believe me, I knew she had no intention of leaving you for me. That’s not what it was about. Whatever that night meant to me, it was just a drunken error in judgment to her. You should know what that’s like. You’ve made enough of those yourself, am I right?”
I didn’t take the bait.
“The details, Scotty. How did it happen?”
Scotty shook his head. “I don’t know what to tell you, Dylan. Karly and I have been friends for a long time, and yeah, it’s always been more than that for me. If she knew how I felt, she was classy enough not to let on and embarrass me. But the last few months, she started telling me things. Personal things. Confiding in me about her problems. She needed to talk to someone, because you weren’t listening.”
“And there you were, with a shoulder for her to cry on.”
“You think Karly was the only one turning to someone else? She said you told your assistant Tai more than you ever told her.”
I felt slapped. “There was nothing between me and Tai. There never was. Karly knew that.”
“Did she?”
“Don’t try to put any of this on me.”
Scotty rolled his eyes and stared at the ceiling. “I’m not. Seriously, man, I’m not. I’m just telling you the way it was. You were running so fast in your life that you never saw that Karly wanted to slow things down. She was ready to quit, Dylan. To tell her mother that she wanted out of the real estate business. She was always more like her dad than her mom—you know that. A book type. A poet. Karly was ready to have kids. She wanted all of that more than anything, but she didn’t think you’d ever go for it. It was eating her up inside.”
“I never said anything like that to her.”
“I don’t care what you said. I’m telling you what she heard. That night? Her and me? She’d landed a buyer on that place in Schaumburg for Vernon Hotels, and the renovations were all done. I opened champagne for us, and yeah, we had too much. But if that’s all it was, nothing would have happened. Except the more she drank, the more Karly started talking about wanting a different life and not knowing how to tell you. She didn’t blame you for it, if that’s what you’re thinking. She was just upset, and she started crying. I hugged her. I wanted to comfort her, and one thing led to another. Neither one of us planned it, and Karly hated herself for letting it happen. You can believe this or not, but I’m sorry it happened, too.”
I didn’t need a drink now to be losing control.
“You killed her,” I snapped. “It’s your fault she’s gone.
We were out there in the middle of nowhere because of you.”
Scotty’s casual demeanor hardened into anger. Our nerves were both fraying. “Hey, you can blame me for the affair. I’ll take that. But I’m not the reason she died. If you want someone to blame for that, look in the mirror.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I mean, what happened in that river, Dylan? Explain it to me. Tell me the truth. Why are you here and she’s not?”
“I tried to save her. That’s what happened.”
Scotty opened his mouth and then clamped it shut. His sunburned cheeks flushed even redder, like steam building up in his face.
“Do you have something to say?” I asked.
“No.”
“Don’t hold back, Scotty. Say it.”
He pushed into my space, his scarlet face inches from mine. His voice became a snarl. “Fine. You want me to say it? I will. You should have died out there. If it was me in that car, I would never have come out of that river without her. Either we both lived, or we both died. But there’s no way I would have let her die alone.”
My left hand flew. I didn’t even feel it happening. I never did when I lost control. My arm swung like a rocket left to right, and my fist collided with Scotty’s mouth. The impact was like hitting a wall. Blood sprayed from his lips and nose, and I felt the shudder knifing through my forearm. I wondered if I’d broken my fingers. His head snapped sideways, and he staggered back, spitting out a tooth like a kernel of popcorn.
I tensed, waiting for him to charge me. He was big enough and strong enough to give me a beatdown if he wanted. A part of me hoped he would. I wanted to feel the pain of his fists until I was unconscious on the floor. I deserved punishment. I’d failed, and it felt as if I was doomed to relive that failure over and over. Whenever I closed my eyes, I was in the water, swimming through nothingness, searching for the car where Karly was trapped. I had to find her. I had to save her. I dove and swam and searched, but each fragile second dragged her farther away from me. Her voice stopped calling my name. Her cries vanished. All that was left was a terrible silence in my head, a silence of guilt and death. She was gone. My wife was gone.
I hit Scotty because I knew he was right.
I’d let Karly die alone.
When it was obvious that Scotty wasn’t going to fight back, I left the house, nursing my bruised and bloody hand. I was consumed by a mix of adrenaline and despair. At the sidewalk, I met an elderly woman walking her Westie. She studied my face with suspicious eyes and noted the blood on my fingers.
“Is everything all right?” she asked me.
“Fine.”
“I heard loud voices. An argument.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Should I call the police?”
“Everything’s fine, ma’am,” I told her, continuing into the street.
“This is a nice neighborhood!” she called after me, with the reproach of a schoolteacher. “We don’t like that kind of thing around here! People shouldn’t fight!”
I didn’t answer her. I crossed through the traffic to Horner Park and then into the wet, open grass of the park’s baseball field. I used to come here as a kid. Roscoe and I would toss a football around and tackle each other in the mud. We’d talk about playing quarterback for the Bears, and believe me, they’ve had worse.
The drizzle had turned into showers, and the rain soaked me as I stood there. No one else was around. I winced, feeling the sharp burn in my hand. My fingers felt stiff as I tried to move them.
The sheriff called me a violent man.
You’re not.
But my history said otherwise.
Ahead of me, I saw a lineup of trees where the park ended at the narrow ribbon of the Chicago River. A fence discouraged kids from hiking down the riverbank and falling into the water. Not that it worked. As teenagers, Roscoe and I had explored the banks on both sides of the river, playing spies, throwing rocks, hunting rats. Today, in the rain, I walked all the way up to the fence and took hold of it with both hands and closed my eyes. I leaned my forehead against the mesh.
Without Roscoe, without Karly, I didn’t think I’d ever felt more alone. They’d gone on to other worlds, and I was still here. However, when I opened my eyes again, I realized that I wasn’t alone anymore.
He was with me.
I can’t tell you how I knew. I didn’t hear footsteps on the trail. I didn’t see anyone watching me. The trees were close in around me, and the gray sky made it seem like night. A stranger could have been six feet away, and I wouldn’t have seen him. But someone was on the other side of the fence, hiding on the riverbank the way I used to do when I was a kid. Like he knew this was where I’d go. Like he’d been waiting for me to come here. I tried to be patient, to stand there like a statue in silence and see if he’d show himself.
He was back. I was back.
My doppelgänger.
I stared into the brush, watching for movement in the shadows. I could see the tree trunks like soldiers, and among them, I finally spotted a dark outline that looked out of place. A person. I hadn’t been this close to him before. Only a few feet separated us. I also realized, as I had in the museum, that this wasn’t just about me. He knew I was here, too. He was aware of me, just as I was aware of him. We were connected. And what I felt emanating from him was an aura of sheer sadistic rage. It was like I’d handed this shadow all my anger, all my bitterness, all my frustrations.
I looked around to be sure that no one else was nearby. Just him and me. My hallucination. My mental breakdown.
“I know you’re there,” I called to him in a low voice. Then I added for the hell of it: “Talk to me.”
I waited for an answer, but I didn’t expect to get one. Hallucinations didn’t talk back. Even so, by speaking to him, I felt as if I’d taken a leap into a rabbit hole, and I had no idea where it would lead me.
“Who are you?” I asked.
I still got no reply. The silence around me was punctuated by the patter of rain on the leaves.
Then, like a statue coming to life, a voice spoke from the darkness. My voice, as if I were on the radio, when you can’t believe that’s how you sound to everyone else.
“I’m you.”
I lurched back in disbelief. Did I really hear that? No, I couldn’t have heard that. Alicia had told me: he’s not real. This was my fevered imagination at work, all my memories playing tricks on me. My body twitched. I dug my fingertips into the top of my skull, as if I could squeeze out what my mind was telling me. My eyes blinked over and over. I rushed the fence and grabbed hold of it like a prisoner in a cell.
“What do you want?” I hissed.
Again the rain was the only sound for a long stretch of time. He dragged out my torture by saying nothing. I was starting to hope that I’d awaken and realize this had all been a nightmare. I’d be sane again. I’d be back in my bed, and Karly would be next to me, and all the preceding days would have been a dream. But as I stood there, soaking wet, chilled to the bone, the nightmare deepened.
It got blacker.
I shouted at him. “Why are you here? Tell me!”
This time, my shadow man answered. He whispered from the trees.
“To kill.”
CHAPTER 6
I ran.
I ran without looking back at the river. I sprinted through the park’s wet green fields, dodged through random side streets like a man being chased, and finally boarded the first bus that passed my way. I didn’t care where it was going. It took me away, which was what I wanted. Eventually I got off and transferred, and then transferred again. A long time later, I made it back to the hotel. I hurried through the lobby without talking to anyone and twitched impatiently, waiting for the elevator. When the doors opened, I tensed, not sure what I would see inside. The same was true when I got to the floor where I was staying.
I expected to see him. Me.
Finally, back in my room, I locked the dead bolt. I even thoug
ht about dragging a chair to the door to make sure it wouldn’t open. With my heart pounding, I paced back and forth between the walls, unable to stop, unable to calm down. When the phone rang, I jumped. I let it go, and eventually the ringing stopped, but only seconds later, it rang again. This time, I picked up the receiver without announcing myself. I waited nervously to hear who was on the other end, and I exhaled in relief when I heard Tai’s voice.
“Hey,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. Fine.”
“I tried you several times and didn’t get an answer. I was worried. I asked the desk people to keep an eye out for when you got back.”
“I was out,” I told her, without going into detail.
“Do you need anything?”
“No. Thanks.”
Tai was quiet for a while, breathing softly into the phone. “Well, I’m almost done for the day. I’ll be heading home soon. The team has everything under control for the Eve Brier event. Our Lady of Infinite Worlds. She’s speaking in the ballroom tonight.”
“I remember.”
“You sure you’re okay? You sound tense.”
I was more than tense. My life was breaking down like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but I couldn’t tell her why. I couldn’t even explain it to myself.
“I’m fine, Tai. You’ve had a long day. Go home.”
“Okay.”
But she didn’t hang up.
“Do you want some company?” she went on after a brief pause. “There’s nothing but Lean Cuisine and Prime Video waiting in my apartment. I still have that thank-you bottle of pinot the Walkers gave us. I could bring it up, and we could talk. Or not talk. If you want to just sit there and drink and look at the lake, we could do that, too.”
“Not tonight.”
“Look, I know you may feel like it’s better to be alone, but that’s not always the best thing. Sometimes it helps to have a friend there with you. Someone warm, someone who cares.”
As if her meaning wasn’t clear enough, she made it even clearer.
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