He opened the book from the coffeehouse. The prose was terse and brilliant. He choked up at the descriptions of Paris at night. The restaurants, the bars, the music, the smoke. The lights of a real, living city. The sense of a wide world brimming with diverse and fascinating people. The freedom to explore it. Forty pages in, he closed the book. He couldn’t take it. Hemingway wasn’t distracting him. Wasn’t sweeping him away from the reality of Wayward Pines. Hemingway was rubbing his face in it. Pouring salt into a wound that would never heal.
