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  “I have no idea what kind of man you are, Mr. Moran. I’m not saying you were to blame for the accident. It’s simply my job to get the facts.”

  I leaned across the table. The blanket slipped down my bare shoulders and I shrugged it back. My voice rose, but with the static of a radio station that’s going out of range. “You want the facts? The fact is, my wife is dead. I loved her. I did everything I could to save her, and I failed. If life handed out second chances, I’d be back in the water right now trying to get to her. Is that clear enough for you, Sheriff?”

  Her face softened just a little. “It is. I’m sorry, Mr. Moran.”

  “I’d really like to be alone,” I said. “This is all too much. I don’t even know where I am.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Sheriff Sinclair closed the folder in front of her. She rolled the pencil back and forth on the table, then slid it inside a pocket. She stood up and went to the door, but as she opened it, she turned around and studied me again.

  I knew what was coming.

  “One more question, Mr. Moran. According to my deputies, you were mostly incoherent when they found you.”

  “Is that a surprise?”

  “No. Of course not. But they said you kept talking about seeing a man on the bank of the river near the scene of the accident. You kept asking why he didn’t help you. Why he didn’t try to rescue your wife.”

  My throat went dry. This was the part no one would understand.

  “I don’t remember saying that,” I replied.

  “Did you see someone near the river?” the sheriff asked.

  I closed my eyes and inhaled sharply. I felt my lungs screaming for air again, my chest ready to burst as my face breached the surface. I gulped in a breath, and as I prepared to dive back down, I saw him.

  A man.

  A man stood barely ten feet away on the riverbank at the edge of the rapids. When the lightning flashed, I saw him clearly. There was no mistaking what I saw, and it didn’t matter that what I was seeing was impossible. All I could do was shout to him. Beg. Plead.

  That man was my lifeline. I needed him. He could save Karly.

  Help me! My wife is drowning! Help me find her!

  “No,” I told the sheriff, keeping my voice steady. “No, it was night. It was raining. I didn’t see anything.”

  A strange little wrinkle of concern crossed her forehead. She didn’t believe me, that was obvious, but she couldn’t understand why I would lie about something like that. Instead, she gave me another polite smile and left the room and closed the door behind her. It was quiet now. I was alone with the chipped cream-colored paint on the walls and the stench of the river in my head.

  Yes, I was lying, but I couldn’t tell her the reason.

  I couldn’t tell her about the man I’d seen, because I had no way to explain it to myself. You’ll think I was imagining things, and I probably was. I was panicked and oxygen deprived, and it was night, and it was raining.

  On the other hand, I know what I saw.

  I was the man on the riverbank.

  It was me.

  CHAPTER 2

  After the accident, I couldn’t go home. It was too soon. Karly and I lived near River Park in a two-story Chicago apartment house, where I’d grown up with my grandfather. Edgar lived upstairs, and our place was on the first floor. When I walked in, the rooms would smell of Karly’s perfume. Photographs of us would be hung on the walls and in frames adorning the fireplace mantel. Her clothes would be in the closet, her shampoo in the bathroom. I’d see her handwriting on little poems she’d scrawled and left for me on the fridge. In the apartment, my wife of three years would still be alive, and I couldn’t face the fact that she was dead.

  One of the police deputies drove me as far as Bloomington-Normal, and I took a train from there into the city. I walked to the hotel where I worked, which was on Michigan Avenue across from Grant Park. I booked a room and got out of the lobby before the staff could fawn over me with their sympathy. I spent the next two days and nights in a kind of hibernation. The phone rang; I ignored the calls. People knocked on the door; I didn’t answer. I ordered room service and had them leave the trays outside, and then I put them back in the hallway later, having eaten almost nothing at all.

  Did I drink?

  Yes, I drank a lot.

  I know what you probably think of me. Dylan drinks. He gets into fights. He is a bad man. I can’t really disagree with you. It’s been that way since the death of my parents, but that’s not an excuse for how I’ve led my life. It simply is what it is. My vices cling to me like boat anchors. Karly told me once that I was always doing battle with another side of myself and that one day I would have to make the choice to cast him aside. But I’ve never known how to do that.

  Sometime during my second night in the hotel, I had a nightmare that I was still under the water. I was a blind man, with no compass to guide me, swimming deeper into an abyss of darkness. The heaviness weighed on my lungs, like a balloon about to be popped. Somewhere beyond my reach, I could hear Karly’s muffled voice calling to me, begging for rescue.

  Dylan, come find me! I’m still here!

  I awoke tangled in the blankets. I was bathed in sweat, gasping as I stared at the ceiling. My blood was still poisoned with alcohol, leaving me dizzy. The hotel room spun like a carousel. I got out of the ultraplush bed and went to the window. Grant Park stretched out below me, the glow of lights lining the street that led toward Buckingham Fountain. Behind the park, Lake Michigan loomed like the stormy backdrop of a painting. Normally, I loved this view, but now I saw nothing but my own reflection in the glass, going in and out of focus.

  Dylan Moran.

  I stared at that face and saw a stranger reflected back from the window. I couldn’t see inside the person who was staring at me. It was as if I had broken into pieces and left part of myself with that other man on the bank of the river. And yet, for all that, the reflection was still me. My face.

  My black hair is bushy and a little unkempt. My dark eyebrows are thick, arching like the hunched shoulders of a gargoyle. My face is full of sharp angles, a tight jawline, pointed chin, hard cheekbones, fierce little nose. Karly would joke that she had to be careful when she caressed my face because she might cut her fingers. I wear heavy stubble on my lip and chin, mostly because I can never seem to shave it completely away, so I stopped trying. It’s like a shadow that goes with me everywhere.

  I’m not tall. My driver’s license says I’m five ten, but my doctor knows I’m barely five nine. I stay in good shape, running, boxing, lifting weights, doing all the things that a short, skinny kid does to make himself look tougher. I want everyone to know you don’t mess with Dylan Moran, and you can see that in my eyes. They are ocean-blue eyes, intense and angry. I’ve spent too much of my life angry about something. It never seemed to matter what it was.

  It was funny. Not long after we got married, Karly was digging around in Edgar’s apartment, helping him straighten things up, and she found a photograph of me when I was about twelve years old. This was before everything happened with my parents. Before the high school years when Edgar and I argued over grades and girls and smoking and drugs. I didn’t look all that different back then, not physically. I still had the same messy haircut, and I was already about as tall as I was ever going to be. But Karly looked at that photograph and then over at me, and I could see what she was thinking.

  What happened to you, Dylan?

  Back then, I had a big smile and a wide-eyed innocence. I’d been a happy kid, but that young kid was long gone. He’d died in the bedroom with my parents. Staring at my reflection in the hotel window, with the park and the lake hovering behind my face, I said the same thing out loud.

  “What happened to you, Dylan?”

  Then I put a half-full bottle of vodka to my lips, drank what was left, shouted a profanity at the city about a dozen times, and threw the glass bottle against the wall. It broke into razor-like pieces that spraye
d across the bedsheets. I sighed with disappointment at myself. It always happened like this, again and again. I went and gathered up the shards, and then I sat down by the side of the bed and squeezed the glass fragments in my fists until blood oozed through my fingers.

  For the rest of the night, I stayed right there, until the blood dried and I finally fell asleep.

  The first wave of grief can’t go on forever. You may feel dead, but eventually you realize you’re still alive, and you have to figure out how to go on.

  On the morning of the fourth day, I picked out a suit from the closet in my hotel room. My assistant manager, Tai, had arranged for some of my work clothes to be sent here from my apartment. She was efficient that way. I took a shower, put on the suit, knotted a tie tightly against my neck, and left the room. I wasn’t really ready to go back out into the world, but I didn’t have a choice.

  I took the elevator to the lobby. The LaSalle Plaza was one of downtown’s grand old hotels, dating all the way back to the White City days of the Chicago World’s Fair. You could feel turn-of-the-century ghosts here, passing you with a brush of silk. The lobby glistened with marble floors, a chambered ceiling, and elaborately decorated archways of glass, brass, and stone.

  I’d worked at the LaSalle Plaza since I was a college student at Roosevelt University. I started as a bellman and worked my way up. The previous events manager, a man named Bob French, hired me as his assistant, and he stuck with me even when my behavior outside the office got me into trouble. Six years ago, Bob left to run the events program at the Fairmont in San Francisco. He invited me to go with him, but I couldn’t imagine a life outside Chicago. Bob did me the favor of telling the hotel managers that they shouldn’t hire anyone but me to fill his shoes, which was a big leap of faith given my age at the time and my tendency to leave the hotel and head straight to the Berghoff for drinks rather than going home. Ever since, I’d tried to prove they made the right call, which often meant fourteen-hour days and long weekend nights. Karly told me more than once that my work was my life. She didn’t say it as a compliment.

  My first stop wasn’t in my office but in the hotel ballroom. Karly and I were married here; it was the hot ticket for Chicago weddings. The two-story space was a kind of miniature Versailles, all done up in gold leaf, with chandelier sconces on the walls and cherubs flying above the rounded doorways and murals painted on the ceiling. I hovered in the back, watching the maintenance team set up chairs and a riser for an evening event. Normally, I could rattle off every ballroom event for weeks at a time, but the accident had erased certain details from my memory. I saw a large marketing poster on an easel near the door, and I walked across the stone floor to remind myself who had booked my ballroom for the night.

  The poster showed a photograph of an attractive woman in her forties. She had long brown hair that glinted with blond highlights and was swept over her head like a cresting ocean wave. She was white, but the faint almond shape of her eyes suggested Asian blood somewhere in her past. Her eyes were golden brown, staring intently at the camera, with lips creased into a dreamy smile that offered only a hint of teeth. She wore a black long-sleeve knit top, and she leaned forward with her arm on a desk. Her fingers were bent as if in midcaress. The whole effect of the picture was intimate and erotic, as if she were beckoning you to come closer.

  Above the photo was her name and the title of her talk:

  DR. EVE BRIER

  AUTHOR—PSYCHIATRIST—PHILOSOPHER

  “MANY WORLDS, MANY MINDS”

  I tried to remember who she was, but I came up empty. We hosted conferences and speakers here all the time, but I had no recollection of booking space for Eve Brier. Based on the photograph, I didn’t think I would have forgotten her. And yet there was something familiar about her, too. Her face stirred . . . what? What was it? It wasn’t really a memory, but I felt as if we’d met somewhere.

  “Hello, Dylan.”

  The voice came from behind me. I turned around and saw my assistant manager, Tai Ragasa. Her face was exquisitely sad. She came and put her arms around my neck and held me tightly. Her closeness made me uncomfortable, but I opted not to push her away. She hugged me for several beats longer than was appropriate, and then we broke apart. Tai wiped away a tear and reached out and took hold of both of my hands. I could feel the sharpness of her long fingernails.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she told me.

  “I know.”

  “It’s so horrible.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you sure you should be here?”

  “No, but I was going crazy on my own.”

  “Of course.”

  Tai led me to a row of chairs at the back of the ballroom. We sat down next to each other. The maintenance men worked around us, calling out to each other in voices that echoed in the high space, their cleaning equipment banging on the furniture. I tried to pull my hand away, but Tai wouldn’t let go.

  “What can I do?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Everyone in the hotel has your back. I mean, if you need anything, we’ll all be right there to help you.”

  “I know.”

  “You really don’t need to be here. I’m serious. I’ve got everything under control. We can manage.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Just focus on yourself,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  She kissed me softly on the cheek. Her clean, floral smell enveloped me. When she backed away, her ebony eyes held on to mine, and a few strands of her black hair clung to the buttons of my shirt.

  “If you ever need to talk, I’m here,” she murmured. “I’m sure you’re not ready yet, but any time you want to—”

  “I’m not. I’m definitely not ready.”

  “Okay.”

  The speaker on her radio buzzed. I heard one of my staff reaching out to her with a catering question. In our jobs, we had to be in constant contact with vendors inside and outside the hotel. Successful events were about a million details, laid out in order, one by one. Tai gave me a look of apology as she answered the call, but I was glad to have some space.

  I’d hired Tai six years ago, right after I got promoted myself. Like me, she went to Roosevelt and was enrolled in their hospitality master’s program. As a boss, I chose people based on my gut, and my gut said she was smart and would be running the whole hotel someday. She was twenty-eight now, with a conservative Catholic family back in the Philippines. Tai had a deeply religious streak herself, but it was tough to stay conservative in a metropolis like Chicago. In the past few years, she’d discovered tequila and hip-hop music and tight dresses that emphasized her bony curves.

  She was a wisp of a thing, a five-foot-nothing dynamo in high heels. Her black hair was very long and straight and parted in the middle. Her dark eyes twinkled below wicked eyebrows, and her lips were always bright red. Her cheeks dimpled when she smiled, which was often.

  If I were posting about our relationship on Facebook, I would say it was complicated. I liked mentoring her. I liked that she flattered me by telling me how good I was at my job. I liked the snarky little jokes she whispered about couples getting married in the ballroom. To me, she was a younger sister, and as an older brother, I tended to confide my secrets to her. Most recently, I’d told her about Karly’s one-night affair, and like any good sister, Tai was quick to assure me that I was right and Karly was wrong.

  All of this seemed safe to me because I had no romantic interest in her. Karly didn’t see it that way. From the moment they met, she didn’t like Tai at all. Karly had a habit of making up words to suit what she wanted to say, and she invented one for Tai. Manipulatrix. In Karly’s dictionary, that was a dominant, controlling woman who got what she wanted by pretending to be submissive. To Karly, who was strong in her own right, that was the worst kind of sin.

  “So what can I do for you, Dylan?” Tai asked when she put away her radio. She took my chin with her long fingers and turned my face so I was
looking at her. “I want to help with anything you need.”

  “I don’t even know yet,” I replied, which was true. “Just hold down the fort here, okay?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I thought I could go back to work, but I don’t think I can. Not yet.”

  “No one would expect you to be ready so soon,” Tai said.

  I checked the time on my watch. “I need to go. I’ve got to meet Edgar at the Art Institute in an hour. It drives him crazy if I’m late.”

  “Does Edgar know? I mean, about Karly?”

  “I called to tell him, but I don’t know whether he really understood what I was saying. Plus, his short-term memory is shot.”

  “Sure.”

  I stood up from the chair. So did Tai, and she wrapped me up in another embrace that went on too long.

  “Are you staying in the hotel again tonight?” she asked.

  “Probably. I can’t go back to the apartment yet.”

  “I’ll call you before I head home.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

  She squeezed my shoulder, and I gave her an empty smile of thanks. I turned away, but then, as an afterthought, I remembered what I wanted to know.

  “By the way, who’s Eve Brier?”

  “What?”

  I gestured at the poster near the ballroom door. “She’s the speaker at the event tonight.”

  “Don’t you know her?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s strange,” Tai replied.

  “Why?”

  “She told me she picked the hotel on your recommendation.”

  “On my recommendation? She said she knew me?”

  “Definitely.”

  I took another look at the photograph of Dr. Eve Brier and felt the same sensation that her eyes were sending me an invitation. Come closer. Get to know me. Yes, she looked familiar, but I had no recollection of meeting her.

  “Maybe I ran into her somewhere and gave her my sales pitch,” I speculated, although I didn’t think that was true. “Who is she?”