“Would you like to have breakfast, Jack?” she says.

“I’m having it right now,” I answer.

*   *   *

I gave up wondering where I came from. Nothing else can ever matter when the center of the universe is the blood-splattered floor of a kitchen. I wanted this to be Jack’s world—a forever that can’t be measured in heartbeats, seconds, the meshing of a cog’s gears, the equatorial rotation of some planetary object—gazing, my eyes locked on Nickie’s, across the table from me sipping ice water with a thin slice of lemon that I could smell, that surrendered small bits of itself against the cold crystal of her glass while she brushed a strand of black hair across one eye with a single finger I’d tasted in a moment that floated like that lemon slice inside some other trapped forever.

She was so beautiful and perfect that I couldn’t swallow.

I want this to be the whole world.

What are you doing here, Jack?

You have things to put away. Time to tidy up. Time to fix it.

What’s in your pocket?

What’s that in your pocket, Jack?

I closed my eyes tightly. Maybe everything would be gone when I opened them.

“What are you thinking about?”

I hadn’t touched the food on my plate.

“You know what I noticed? I think you turned just a little bit red when you said that, Nickie. I want to go back to bed with you, that’s what I’m thinking.”

She laughed softly. “You are going to wear yourself out, Jack.”

Her foot brushed mine beneath the table.

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”

“Eat your breakfast.”

“Are you scolding me?”

She turned even redder.

I tried anything to keep myself from thinking.

This is not Nickie.

I had some vague memory of getting on the train, how we’d locked ourselves inside our sleeper as soon as we departed, tearing at our clothing, tangling ourselves on the floor, then, with Nickie seated on the edge of the table, her naked back pressed against the cool window, and, finally, straining, crawling up into our bed.

She ate a strawberry.

I rearranged the triangles of toast on my plate.

I remembered being in the Under; I could still almost hear Quinn screaming when the light came over us and washed me away. I felt cheated by the transient flash of Conner on the beach where we surfed, and I wanted so desperately to be able to hold on to the people I loved, to find an anchor somewhere. And I knew I’d left Ben and Griffin alone back there, but this was Marbury, too, and I wanted this to be my world now.

I wanted it so bad that I refused to remember anything else.

There was no Glenbrook, or not-Glenbrook, the thousand other not-worlds; I pushed those things away. I wouldn’t let myself remember them. No Freddie Horvath. I was here in this forever where Jack was never tied down and drugged, brutalized. Raped by a fucking murderer. Ben and Griffin aren’t dead. They don’t exist. No fucking plastic barrel of bones, no goddamned fucking cop. There is no Conner, no Henry Hewitt.

No hanging boy in the trees.

And no boy with the glasses.

Just this.

My Marbury.

Welcome home, Jack.

One thing: Check in your pocket, kid.

I’m not going to say I didn’t know what I was doing. That would be a lie. And there’s no reason for me to try to make myself sound good or pure or selfless.

This was it.

This could be forever.

Fuck everything else.

Right?

“Please?” I sounded like a little boy begging for another helping of ice cream. Nickie knew it. She smiled again, blushed.

“I want you to eat your breakfast, Jack.”

I put some egg on the corner of my toast and bit it.

“There.”

“Good boy,” she said.

“Where are we going?”

Nickie had this amused expression, like she thought I was teasing, playing a game.

She was only partially right.

I looked out the window. Flat. Endless fields of something green that was planted in perfect rows, tall enough to reach the windows on the train. It looked like corn, but it wasn’t.

Marbury: (noun) Third planet in order from the sun. No natural satellites. This planet, as the only in the Solar System which is inhabited by humans.

“We have four hours to Grove, I think,” she said.

I grinned, calculating. “That’s a lot of time.”

“I have a feeling the woman in the compartment beside ours has been listening to us through the wall. She’s likely complaining to the steward right now about our noise.”

Nickie smiled and nodded slightly.

I turned around. Our neighbor was sitting alone, two tables away from us. An old woman with an unhappy expression on her face, staring at me while one of the white-suited dining car servants poured a quaking stream of black coffee into her cup.

Clack clack, clack clack.

We were the only passengers in the car.

I nodded a good morning and turned back.

“It was probably a bit too … um, stimulating for her,” I said.

I held Nickie’s hand across the tabletop. The server loomed over us, offering coffee from a silver-handled decanter that was swaddled in a perfectly folded, spotless white napkin.

Somehow, I knew I’d seen them all before.

He poured.

Steam rose.

The train rocked and shuddered.

Clack clack, clack clack.

This was Marbury.

Nickie sipped her coffee. “Perhaps she’s spying on us. For your mother.”

My mother. Amy. In another world, Amy left me on the floor of a kitchen where I’d been born. In another world, my mother abandoned me.

This is not the world, Jack.

Amy had seen us to the train. Back to school for Jack, with Nickie as chaperone. School was the only safe place for boys during wartime, and Amy was just looking out for her baby.

It hadn’t gotten too bad yet.

This is the world.

Right?

Clack clack, clack clack.

I took another bite. When I swallowed, I thought it might fill me up, give Jack all the missing pieces, shut all the open doors, make this be forever.

A conductor, his uniform perfect, dark blue, unwrinkled, walked through the dining car. He smiled warmly at us and said hello. I stared at the glint of light reflected from the oval brass name badge he wore.

This is real.

I know that man.

I have seen him place after place after fucking place.

Quit it, Jack.

When he passed us, the door at the far end of the car opened. A family—a man in a freshly pressed striped shirt, a woman, and three small children—spilled in to take the only large table in the diner. The two little girls giggled and teased at their brother.

What’s that in your pocket, Jack?

I swallowed. “I’m not hungry, Nickie.”

She squeezed my fingers. Nickie turned my hand in hers and traced the crooked line of the pink scar that stretched across the center of my right palm. It tickled. She liked doing that to me. And Nickie said, “Shall we take a walk?”

*   *   *

It wasn’t much of a walk.

The sleeper was two doors up from the dining car.

And we both smiled, an untold joke between us, when we heard the door to the next compartment slide shut. I was lying on top of her. It was hot, and we’d scattered the sheets of the bed down onto the floor and cracked the window open, so I could feel the cooling rush of wind streaming over my naked skin.

I started to say something, but Nickie could tell I was only going to screw with our interested neighbor, so she pressed her fingers onto my lips and whispered, “Behave yourself.”

I nipped at her hand. “Behave? I didn’t hear you saying ‘behave yourself’ when we were undressing each other.”

Nickie pulled my face down onto hers. She slid her tongue past my lips.