West understood. He didn’t expect me to trust any of it. He knew that I’d been shown a different forever.

“It’s just the way things have to be done here. It’s the only way of restoring the broken

tomorrow we can go to the park. Sit on grass. Maybe go to the zoo?”

“Or the jazz festival?”

The man at the counter grinned. “Of course.”

West stood as Paul got up to pay the bill. “Do it like I told you, son.” As Paul approached the counter, he heard snippets of conversation: but we just, so you see, I don’t know maybe we can, but if Hesse had meant to, and that’s why in the first book, music’s just, cookies are delish, and at the counter: “This is where the fish lives.”

The owner smiled up at him: one dimple. The smile faltered, returned, a blink, a vague sense of

The man at the counter turned. One white streak in his salt-and-cinnamon hair. Eyes narrow, a blink, a sense of

“Keep the change.” Paul left a handful of silver dollars on the counter and began to walk away.

“Wait.” The owner reached out her hand: silver band on her ring finger, pattern. “Do I—”

Man: “You’re—”

West watched.

Paul cleared his throat, regarded the man. Stepped in, pulled him close, whispered. “Erase.”

Pause. Play.

The man gone, Paul sat down in his place at the counter, hands shaking. The owner, maybe seventy, maybe fifty, let her hand fall. Her ring was gone.

He stumbled over words, eventually succeeded in voicing. “I hope—I know you can’t understand.”

Eyes watered. Dimple retreated. “You’re—”

His hand hovered over hers.

“A bench outside a dorm. A box of cigars. A white t-shirt, paint-spattered hands, holes in the knees of my jeans, plastic-tipped cigars. Snow. It was cold. That’s all you’ll remember. Nothing more.”

“Paul? Paul Hughes? How—”

“It never happened. We never happened. I died on a beach before we met again. No ghetto apartment, no cigarettes in bed, no pears, no ice cream. No broken hearts, no broken tomorrows. You lived and loved. Without me.”