And if Klara hadn’t urged Simon to go, would he still be alive? She was the one who believed in the prophecies; she was the one who managed his trajectory, nudging until it canted and turned left. And no matter how many times she recalled Simon’s words in the hospital—how he squeezed her hand, how he thanked her—she couldn’t help but feel that things would have been different if they’d gone to Boston or Chicago or Philadelphia, if she’d kept her goddamn beliefs to herself.
