About This Edition

This book was written in 2025, one chapter at a time, in answer to a single repeated question: what happens next. There was no outline and no plan. The story that emerged is preserved here exactly as it was told.

Because the book was written in sections over many months, the record is imperfect. Two chapters and one scene were lost along the way, and the places where the record breaks are marked with brief notes rather than smoothed over. Two chapters near the end arrived without punctuation, as line-broken text, and they are kept in that form, since the shape of the telling belongs to the teller.

Everything else — the appendices, the original file headings, the record of every correction — waits at the back of the book for readers who want it. The story needs none of it. Turn the page and begin.