Chapter 1

My father has had mid-stage dementia for three years. He forgot names, sometimes thought we were still living in the nineteen-seventies, but he never lost his daily sense of direction in our quiet suburban neighborhood. Every day at precisely four o'clock, he would walk exactly four hundred yards down to the old oak tree at the corner, turn around, and walk back.

Yesterday at four-thirty, he wasn't back.

I pulled on my jacket and jogged down the usual route. The October twilight pressed cold against the street. When I reached the oak tree, he was standing there. But he wasn't on the sidewalk. He was standing deep inside the overgrown thicket behind the tree, his hands buried in the pockets of his brown jacket, staring blankly at the air.

"Dad?" I called out, stepping into the brush. "Come on, let's go home."

He looked up. His eyes were crystal clear. No fog of confusion, no panic.

"I can't go any further, Tim," he said softly. "The wall is here."

I let out a nervous laugh. "What wall? It's just the bushes by the parking lot."

He raised his right hand and pressed his flat palm directly into the empty space between two hazel branches. His hand didn't move. His fingers flattened out as if resting against an invisible, icy pane of reinforced glass.

Before I could process what I was looking at, he reached out, grabbed my right hand, and shoved it forward against the boundary.

"Feel it," he whispered.

My hand thrust into the open air—and slammed into an invisible, razor-sharp obstruction. An unyielding force met my momentum.

CRACK.

Agony shot up my arm. The invisible edge sliced deep through the skin of my index finger and snapped my middle finger cleanly backward at a ninety-degree angle. Blood spattered from the gash straight onto thin air—and stayed there.

The blood didn't drop to the dirt. It ran in thin, scarlet rivers down an invisible glass wall that cut straight through the woods.

"The dementia wasn't in my brain," my father whispered, watching my blood trace the outline of the barrier. "My mind just kept remembering how the world was built before they shrank it."

Through the red streaks smeared on the invisible pane, I looked beyond the boundary.

On the other side of the bushes—where our street, our neighbors, and my house should have been—there was nothing. Just a boundless, featureless landscape of gray, untextured plastic beneath a sky with no stars and no light.

My father hadn't been confused. He was simply the only one who had been walking up to the edges of our tiny, artificial enclosure every single day.

I stood there in the brush, cradling my broken, bleeding hand against my chest while my father sat down on the dirt and folded his legs.

We didn't go back. I am still standing here by the oak tree. Because when I turned around to run for help, I saw the twilight behind me flickering—like an old monitor losing its signal. And the sidewalk I came from is slowly fading to black.