Jonathan Stride watched the knife fall to the floor.

It was a simple thing, the knife falling. His hand laid it on the counter wrong; it slipped off, blade pointed down. But in the past month, nothing had been simple for Stride. His eyes followed the downward path of the knife and just like that, he was falling, too.

He was no longer in the cabin where he had gone to recover from his injuries. He was over Superior Bay, hurtling through one hundred and twenty feet of air to the hard water below. He felt the speeding rush of his body as it became a missile; he endured the helplessness and fear of those three long seconds; he suffered the excruciating pain of impact, his bones breaking, the water choking off his oxygen, the lights around him extinguishing to blackness and cold. Everything he had tried to forget, he remembered.

Stride's eyes sprang open. He stood in the cabin's small kitchen with his palms flat on the granite counter. He felt on his neck for his pulse; his heart was racing. He wondered how long he had been gone this time. The knife stood straight up, its point jabbed into the wooden floor, but it wasn't vibrating like a tuning fork. He had been standing there frozen, caught up in the flashback, for a minute or more.

He grabbed the back of a chair to keep his knees from buckling.