Recursion

by Blake Crouch

As the food arrives, Barry imagines Meghan sitting at the table with them. The rough edges of adolescence sanded down. Her entire life ahead of her.

But it is a cold November afternoon, the gun-gray clouds threatening the season’s first snow, and Barry has the coach car on the Long Island Railroad almost entirely to himself.

She takes a sip of the coffee she brought along—her talisman against the previous night of sleepless misery.

Helena closes the journal and goes to the window, sweeping aside the curtain. Anemic light creeps in.

There’s a ragged shoreline a hundred yards away, and mist hovers over the blue-gray water, obscuring the spruce trees in the distance, which stand along the shore like a line of haunted calligraphy.