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J ohnny joins me in the in-between place , on a day that feels like .

The in-between is a valley of velvet grasses, flowering purple.

Honeybees cruise low near the blossoms, their wings vibrating in a pleasant hum.

Beside us, a wide river flows, so clear we can see straight to the sandy bottom.

The river is fed by a tumbling waterfall.

Rainbow mist shimmers over the froth, and at its base, a herd of wild horses, chestnut, palomino, and bay, gallop through the surrounding wood.

We spot them only in flashes, for the trees are thick and tangled and older than memory.

Between the steady percussion of hoofbeats, the rushing water, and the hum of honeybees, the in-between is filled with quiet music.

It is always spring here.

Warm, with a gentle breeze, and we have no natural predators.

This is the place Johnny imagines in the tranquil moments preceding sleep.

It is her vision of a perfect world, beauty spilled to its fullest. She glances at the powder blue clouds, the blushing sky, twin moons that smile down from their places above a far off, snow-crested mountain top—then looks at me.

We are two halves of a split whole.

I, the Johnny who watches.

She, the Johnny who lives.

“Who are you?” she asks, taking me in like her own reflection, warped through a carnival mirror.

“You look like me.”

And I say, “I’m the you who remembers.”

Slowly, her gaze passes over each of my features, our features.

“Remembers what?”

She draws closer, craning her head as if to make sure I have a profile, am not just some in-between dream.

“All the times we’ve lived this week before,” I say.

With all she’s seen, snowfall in summer, tsunamis through city streets, English bulldogs transformed to shape-shifting horrors, she doesn’t fight the logic.

This time, she doesn’t make an argument for physics or souls or the indivisibility of consciousness.

Johnny is tired. We are both so tired.

“It felt familiar,” Johnny says.

“Monday, at the café. I thought it was déjà vu.”

I tell her, “I was watching at the Speakeasy, when we saw her again.”

She asks, “Did you know what would happen?”

My stomach aches with guilt’s tender bruise, and I cannot look at her.

Cannot look at myself.

“Why didn’t you stop it?” she asks.

“Why didn’t you stop me?”

“I tried,” I say, the weight of my failures heavy on my chest. “I called. I texted—and the sign…” A breeze bends the flowers at my feet.

It wasn’t enough . She doesn’t have to say it.

The words, unspoken, hang humid between us.

“ This has happened before .” Johnny flushes with a shame that’s all too familiar.

“Yes.” I explain as best I can, that I was there, I was with her, watching when I could and always remembering and always trying to spare her.

Always. I tell her I know about Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and Friday because I’ve lived it and watched it, lived it and watched it so many times each conscious moment is inscribed in my memory, an indelible brand.

“It was you. The calls and texts. Everything else,” she says.

We remember the oven clock and the billboard and the shape of tuna.

“You could’ve stopped it sooner,” I say, sliding the guilt toward her, but wondering if there was something, anything else I could’ve done.

“It never works. You never answer, not until Friday.”

Johnny’s cheeks bulge with her clenching jaw.

“ You could’ve done more . You should’ve warned me.” She turns, taking a few steps away and leaving flattened grass and crushed petals behind her.

“ You always want to stay ,” I call across the distance between us.

It’s louder than I meant it to be, more accusing.

“How many times?” Johnny asks, eyes toward the double moons, her voice quivering.

The truth is, I lost count a long time ago, but I say something else that’s true.

“Enough.”

“Five?” she asks, then spins on her heel.

“Ten? Fifty?”

“Enough.”

Johnny stiffens, squaring her shoulders with mine.

“You should have done something!” she yells.

“I did!” A flock of parrots flee from the nearest thicket of trees, squawking as they fly.

Heat pricks at the corners of my eyes.

“You never listen! You never listen to me. All you can see is her. All you care about is Alice, no matter what she does to you. No matter who she turns you into. You don’t listen to me, you don’t listen to anyone.”

“What is happening here?” She chuckles with an aimless rage.

“Why is this happening?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

Johnny slumps down, cradling her knees.

Beside her, the river laps lazily onto the pebbled shore.

“Do we have to go back?”

For the first time this week, I feel a flicker of hope, the possibility of change, of a new ending.

“No,” I say, almost too quickly.

“ We can move forward, leave the past where it is .”

In the field, standing alone against the current of grasses appears a door, formed in the image of the very same one that hangs in Alice’s apartment.

Red paint flakes around a brass knob, an empty coat hook hanging at the center.

“We never have to do it again, if we go through there.” The cosmos has a sense of humor.

It is the door out, the one Johnny almost uses on Tuesday and Friday, but never walks through.

Never.

Johnny looks at the door, rubs her lips against her teeth as if considering.

“Will Alice be there?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“I don’t think so.”

Johnny nods, gaze drifting away from the door.

Our path out. “Does she ever get better?” Johnny doesn’t meet my eyes when she asks, “In all the versions you’ve seen, are we ever happy?”

I come to Johnny’s side, placing my hand gently on her shoulder.

“No.”

Johnny squints and tenses, pushing back a wave of bitter disappointment.

“She never changes?”

“I don’t think she can,” I say.

“I don’t think she knows how to.”

Rays of light permeate the edges of the door, capturing Johnny’s attention.

“What’s out there?”

We both look into the warm glimmer shining at its edges.

“I don’t know that either,” I say.

“Something different.” The soft glow folds around red paint, turning it pink.

“Something else. Something we’ve never tried before.”

A honeybee lands briefly on her shoulder before buzzing up, up, up and away.

“Do you want to go through there?” Johnny asks.

“I—”

“Do you want to give up?”

Agonizing pain ricochets through my center.

I don’t. I don’t. I don’t.

But we must. “I do,” I say.

“We deserve a chance, just a shot at something better. She can’t love us, Johnny. You know. I know. We’ve done everything we can. I know we want it worse than anything. We want a life with Alice so bad we broke the universe. But it doesn’t want us. It always hurts. I don’t think it’s meant for us.”

Tears drop silently down Johnny’s cheeks, carving a trail through dried blood.

“I think we should go through there. But we have to agree. If I go through without you, Monday starts all over again.”

Johnny hugs herself tighter.

She stares at the door for a long time, eyes tracing its shape, up, down, and around, then resting on the knob.

“It’s gotta be better, Johnny.” It’s too close, the promise of something new.

It’s sticky. I dare to believe it might be real this time, it might be possible that I can fix her, heal the fissures in Johnny that make her a killer, that return her to Alice in loop after loop, stand in the gaps she thinks Alice can fill.

Imagine me , imagining Johnny in my arms, moving through that door together, our flesh stitching, two severed halves joining as one .

Imagine us. And we don’t return to the Speakeasy Café.

And we never feel the press of those crumbling apartment walls or watch Brynne die or waltz one-two-three, we never taste blood and we never again wonder if .

Maybe we rest. Maybe we recycle, are reborn into a different life or mingle with the essential, enigmatic thing that runs living and breathing through all.

If the Christians are right, maybe we burn.

But anything would be better than the slow agony of repeating, of watching, of circling the drain, making the same mistakes again and again, riding the vicious loop all the way to the bottom and always always always finding nothing when we get there.

Then all that inflated promise collapses in just five words.

Johnny says, “I want to try again.”

I extend my hand, as I’ve done countless times before.

Even with all I know and all I’ve seen, all we’ve been forced to bear, inside me is sick, tiny hope.

Maybe this time, it works.

She reaches to take my hand, but before she does, I ask, “Are you sure?”

“ I’m sure,” she says, grasping my palm.

“Just one more time.”

I pull Johnny up to her feet.

We look at the door then look at one another.

“It won’t change,” I say.

“You’ll have to watch. You’ll remember and I’ll forget and in a week we’ll end up back here, and it’ll be me you’re trying to convince.”

“Just one more time,” she says.

“One more try.”

We’ve said this before, a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand times , but the decision has cemented in the lines of her face.

Settles into faint creases formed over an unhappy lifetime.

As I walk to the door, I feel the press of her eyes at my back.

“It will hurt.” Hand on the knob, I say, “Come with me.”

Her arms fold.

“You always ask, and I always say no.”

When the knob turns, I’m swallowed by glimmering gold light.

Its warmth is a bittersweet promise, already broken .

Before it takes me entirely, I hear two words from the in-between, a place I can no longer see. “I’m sorry.”