On July 29, 2022, a man recognized the onset of a heart attack from his medical training: heartburn-like pain radiating to his neck and jaw and a sense of impending doom. Collapsed on his kitchen floor, coffee soaking his sleeve, he prepared to observe his own decline, but thoughts of Cora’s bruised face and his children overtook him. He acknowledged that the people he should have loved, he had only hurt.

As he lay dying, he cried out, realizing he had one life and could have lived it differently. He knew he would not find peace, but grasped at a single imagined moment where he might have diverted his and Cora’s paths. He pictured walking with Cora in Embankment Gardens; at the gate he released her hand and let her go, watching her disappear from view.

His cooling body seemed to vibrate with unrealized possibilities, and his thoughts expanded into vignettes of alternate lives shaped by small choices. He imagined a child and her mother choosing Irish step dancing instead of ballet, leading the girl away from that dream and later toward time in the garden with her father. He imagined a young GP drawn to a classic soft-top car; six months later, in heavy rain, its brake failure led to a fatal crash, with the young man’s father operating two floors above when time of death was called.

He envisioned a fourteen-year-old girl slowing her walk with a new boy, their lingering afternoons gently nudging away the trappings of girlhood. He pictured a ten-year-old boy who idolized his surgeon father until overhearing colleagues, which sent the boy, shamed, into a toilet stall and back out resolved to be nothing like his father. He then pictured a woman naming her newborn son Hugh at a registrar’s desk, the name arriving unbidden yet feeling right the moment it was spoken.

These fragments flowed as his last breath left him: alternative choices, re-routed futures, and the desire—too late—to undo the damage he had done. The epilogue closed with the woman’s naming of the child Hugh, completing the chain of imagined possibilities.