## Introduction Welcome to My Life, Revised by Dominic Rand. If you could change one decision from your past, where would you start? Maybe you already know. You've gone over it enough times. You can remember what you were thinking, why it seemed reasonable, and how much you wish you'd chosen differently. It's easy to imagine that somewhere on the other side of that decision, there's a life you would rather be living. This is a fictional story about someone who gets to find out. Derek Wayne Ryan is thirty. He spends his workweek waiting for the weekend, then gets to Sunday night wondering where it went. There are people he likes and things he wants to do. Somehow, when the time comes, he's usually too tired. He tells himself that a better job and a little more money would help. Other people seem to be getting somewhere. He keeps having to start another Monday. Then a journal arrives in the mail with his name stamped on the cover. The letter inside says he can use it to change a choice he made in the past. It has to be his decision, something he could reasonably have done at the time. The change takes effect while he sleeps on Sunday night. When he wakes up, he's living with the result. His memories, though, stay the same. Someone remembers spending time with him. He remembers staying home. There's evidence that he was there, and he has no idea what it was like. It's a small change. But once he believes it worked, he starts thinking about everything else he could fix. He has plenty of ideas. And a journal full of unused pages. ## Chapter 1 At 4:57 on Friday, I changed "as previously discussed" to "as discussed" in an email I had been writing for most of the afternoon. The first one sounded hostile. The second one probably did too, but at some point a person had to be allowed to refer to a conversation that had already happened. I had attached the quote with Nolan's approval on it. His name was right there. Earlier in the chain he'd asked which model would work in the space they had. I had sent the dimensions for the two models. Aries had ordered the heat-exchanger package we quoted. It was in production, and now Nolan was saying they wouldn't be able to get around it for cleaning or service once it was installed. Apparently this was something I was supposed to have anticipated from my desk in a different city. The phone rang. I watched the little screen until it stopped. I could call him Monday. There was no version of that conversation that would be finished by five, and if he wanted to get engineering involved they would probably be gone already. I saved the draft and checked the time again. "Are you doing anything tomorrow?" Victoria was standing beside my desk with her bag on her shoulder. She had changed out of her work shoes. In one hand she held a metal water bottle covered in national-park stickers, and in the other a glass container with two pieces of mango still in it. She ate fruit at work all the time, real fruit that she had washed and cut herself. I had eaten vending-machine crackers for lunch. "Why?" "We're going for a hike. You should come." "Who's we?" "Me and a couple friends. You met them at my place." I probably had. Victoria invited people over with enough regularity that there were people I had met two or three times and still thought of as people I didn't know. She was good about introducing them again without mentioning that she had done it before. "How far?" "About five miles." "That's a lot of miles." "Total." "Still five." She smiled. "We'll take our time. I can pick you up." For a second I pictured it. Coffee in a cup holder, the windows down before it got hot, a view that wasn't the back of the office park or the stucco wall outside my apartment. Victoria mentioned a breakfast place they liked to stop at afterward. I could picture the first cold drink and that good, used-up feeling from being outside. I used to like going out to places like that. As kids, my friend and I would spend entire afternoons around the wetlands behind our neighborhood. We never called it a hike. "What time?" "Six-thirty?" I laughed. She waited. "You mean leaving at six-thirty." "It gets hot." "It's Saturday, though." She tucked the container into her bag. "You can sleep in Sunday." I had nothing to do Sunday either, which somehow made the suggestion worse. I didn't want to start giving away pieces of the weekend before it had even begun. There were things I needed to get done. Laundry, for one. The apartment needed attention. I might see if my friend wanted to play something online. Mostly I wanted to wake up without being immediately required somewhere, and I thought that was a pretty reasonable thing for a thirty-year-old man with a full-time job to want. "I'm going to sit this one out," I said. "Okay." She said it easily enough that I started explaining. "It's been a long week. I kind of need a day." "I get it. Text me if you change your mind." "Yeah, maybe." She tapped the edge of my desk and left. I watched her stop to talk to someone on the way out. They were laughing about something before she reached the door. I liked Victoria. She was one of the reasons working there was tolerable. There were mornings when she would ask me a question and I would hear myself giving her an unpleasant answer, and then spend the next hour trying to think of a normal thing to say to her so that wasn't the last exchange we'd had. Bradley's office door was still open. He was on the phone, writing on a pad, nodding at something the person on the other end couldn't see. He had started at Meridian about a year after I did. Now he had an office and I had to ask him about discounts. There was a photograph of his wife and kids beside his monitor, angled so visitors could see it. I turned back to my screen before he caught me looking. I made quotes for food-processing equipment at Meridian Process Solutions. That was the job. A company needed something, I found the right page in the catalog, put a price beside it, and sent it to them. Sometimes the price changed and we all had to exchange several more emails about that. Bradley could make this sound like an important relationship between two businesses. I could make it take forty hours a week. I had thought that showing up for enough of those weeks would eventually result in more money, but the increases kept arriving in amounts that disappeared into things I was already paying for. A few minutes after five, I found my keys underneath a printed comparison sheet. I left the draft open, locked the computer, and went home. For maybe ten seconds in the parking lot I felt good. Then I reached my silver Nissan. The clear coat was peeling off the hood, one hubcap was missing, and the rear bumper sat slightly crooked. It ran fine. It had air conditioning. I had paid it off. Since turning thirty, though, I had started noticing it from farther away, before I reached the door, and wondering how much longer I was going to be driving it. I got in and waited for the air conditioner to stop blowing hot parking-lot air at my face. By the time the vents cooled down, I had opened a car-listing app and checked the price of a used Cadillac SUV I had been watching. The monthly payment was ridiculous. I closed the app and pulled out. The entrance to the 5 was less than a mile away. As soon as I reached the ramp, traffic stopped. A black SUV filled most of my windshield, clean enough that the sunset showed in the paint. I could only see the back of the driver's head, which was enough for me to decide he had a house, a garage, and a job where he was paid for knowing things instead of forwarding attachments. I made decent money, or at least enough that when I complained about money I felt obligated to add that. I had health insurance and an apartment in Southern California that I paid for myself. I could remember being in college and thinking about having my own place, buying whatever food I wanted, nobody asking where I was going. Now I opened the banking app and tried to understand how I had been paid so recently. Rent, insurance, groceries, takeout, subscriptions, things from Amazon that solved one narrow irritation and then became part of the apartment. I could explain every charge. I still couldn't explain where all of it went. At the grocery store I got a basket because I was only buying a few things. Then I had to carry the beer in my other hand. I stood in front of the chicken for a while, trying to remember whether the rice in my cupboard was the kind you could microwave or the kind that needed to be cooked. It seemed stupid to let that determine dinner. I could cook rice. But then I would have a pan to wash and a packet of chicken I would need to divide up, and I wasn't sure how long the rest would keep. I bought two frozen dinners instead. There was a deal if you got four, so I went back for another two. I passed the produce again on the way to the checkout. The salad kits looked useful until I remembered the wet bag of salad in my refrigerator. I bought bananas. They didn't require anything from me except remembering they existed. The total was more than I expected. I looked down at what I was buying, looking for something that accounted for it. Beer, coffee, dinners, a bag of chips I had put in while waiting, bananas. It wasn't as though I was buying anything extravagant. I paid and carried the bags out against my stomach. In the window beside the exit I caught the shape of myself from the side and pulled my shirt loose where it had caught on my belt. I had meant to buy shirts that fit better. Buying larger shirts felt like agreeing to something. At my apartment building, I parked under a tree that dropped sap on the windshield because the covered spaces cost extra. The mailbox key took the usual amount of convincing. There was a flat padded mailer folded against the back, along with an offer for a credit card and somebody else's dentist reminder. I pushed the reminder into the outgoing slot, tucked the mailer under my arm, and took the groceries upstairs in one trip. At the top I was breathing harder than I wanted to be after one flight. The mailer had my full name on it. Derek Wayne Ryan. Correct apartment, correct everything. No return address that I could find. I hadn't ordered anything, though I checked the shopping app while I was putting the groceries down. The last thing I had bought was a charging cable. That had already arrived. I was using it. My apartment had two bedrooms, a long living room, a dining area, and more space than I used. I called the second bedroom my office. It held a desk I rarely sat at, adjustable dumbbells with a light film of dust on them, and three boxes from my last move. Most nights I moved between the kitchen, the couch, the bathroom, and my bed. The rest of the place stayed dark. I put the frozen food away, left the mailer on the counter, and took the last cold beer from the refrigerator. The first swallow was perfect. It loosened something behind my eyes and made the whole trip home feel farther away. I put one of the new beers in to get cold and a pasta tray in the microwave. By then I had my phone out. It supplied a dog refusing to leave a bathtub, a man restoring a rusted knife, and several people I had never met having the same argument about work. The microwave beeped twice before I got up. I ate on the couch with the television on. The food was salty and hot and good for the first few bites. A panel of people on television argued about whether the country was collapsing, and my shoulders started to settle. At least everybody agreed something was wrong. When my phone died, I sat with the empty tray balanced on my stomach for a while. I could have gotten the charger from the bedroom. Instead I kept looking at the mailer on the counter. Eventually I got up, mostly because I wanted another beer. I tore the mailer open over the sink. A dark brown leather journal slid out into my hand. My name was pressed into the cover in small gold letters. I rubbed my thumb over it. You could feel the edges of the letters. The cover bent a little when I held it, and the paper was heavy and cream-colored. Somebody had spent money on this. I thought of my mother. She sometimes sent things because she had seen them and thought of one of us. I opened the cover looking for her handwriting. There was a folded sheet of paper inside. The writing on it was done by hand in dark blue ink. > Derek, > > You are no stranger to regret. I stopped there. "Okay," I said. The letter had gotten personal too fast. I looked at the front door, then back at the letter. I kept reading. > You know the decisions you replay. The work you left for later. The invitations you declined, then kept thinking about. The mornings you planned to use differently. > > You have wondered what would have happened if you had chosen the other way. > > This journal will let you find out. > > Choose a moment when the decision was yours and either path was possible. Write what you wish you had chosen. The change must make sense for who you were and what you knew then. You cannot send new information into the past or change a decision that belonged to someone else. > > There is a catch. > > Your present may change. Your memories will not. You will wake inside the result without remembering the life that produced it. > > Each page can be used once. Changes take effect Sunday night while you sleep. Tear out the page to undo a change. > > Be specific. > > Start with something small enough to prove it works. > > YFS I read the initials twice. They meant nothing to me. I flipped through the journal from the back. The binding was solid and every page was blank. The mailer held nothing else. If it was marketing, I couldn't tell what it was selling. The sentence about invitations was annoying, especially after Victoria, but it was broad enough to apply to half the people alive. Regret. Wasted time. Things you should have done. This was horoscope language dressed up in leather. I got the charging cable from the bedroom and plugged my phone in on the counter. When it came on, I took a photograph of the cover and sent it to my mother. "Did you send me this?" She answered while I was putting the empty dinner tray in the trash. "No, but that's lovely. Who's it from?" I said I didn't know. She sent back a heart and asked whether I was having a good Friday. I wrote "Yeah, just got home" and put the phone down. I slid the letter inside the cover and left the journal on the counter. I took the phone and charger back to the couch. I watched enough of the news to get angry, muted it, and let the pictures continue while the phone charged beside me. I carried my weed out to the small balcony and smoked while the air conditioner units hummed below me. I had not planned to smoke yet. I was bored, still irritated about Aries, and could already feel the beer flattening out, so there was no real reason to wait. The first few minutes were always good. The air felt cooler. The lights across the parking lot looked more interesting. The pressure to choose what came next went away. Back on the couch, I started a movie I had seen enough times that missing parts of it didn't matter. I remember the opening. I remember looking up during a scene near the middle and realizing I had been watching videos on my phone over the movie. The next thing I remember clearly was waking up in bed Saturday morning with my jeans on the floor and no memory of making the move from couch to bedroom. For a moment, before I checked the time, Saturday felt huge. No alarm. No work. Nobody waiting for me. Then I looked at the phone. It was a little after ten. Victoria would have been on the trail for hours. I rolled onto my other side and checked messages, although there hadn't been a notification. I stayed in bed until I needed the bathroom. In the kitchen I made coffee and moved the journal so I could set the mug down. Even if the letter was nonsense, it was a nice thing to have. I had been meaning to start writing things down. Plans, probably. Something more organized than the notes on my phone, where a measurement for a replacement shower curtain shared space with several ideas I couldn't understand anymore. My friend was online when I sat down at the computer. I sent him a message, and a few minutes later his voice came through the headset asking whether I had finally updated the game. I hadn't. We spent the download talking about how every game needed to download another game before you could play the first one. He laughed, and I felt better. I hadn't spoken out loud since getting up. We had known each other since before either of us could drive. At one point we had tried to make shields out of leftover plywood in his garage. His father had helped us cut them, and we'd spent much longer choosing what to paint on them than actually using them. I could still picture the garage floor, a blue extension cord running past my shoe. These days I wasn't entirely sure what his job involved. He'd explained it, but the explanation had been interrupted by somebody shooting at us, and I'd never returned to it. He knew I worked in sales. That seemed to cover it. We played for a couple of hours. I got caught trying to go around the same building twice, and he laughed so hard the microphone cut out. I was still smiling when we loaded the next round. Then he said he had to get going. Something in the background, a cupboard closing, someone asking him where something was. "Yeah, I should get some stuff done too," I said. "Good playing, man." "You too. We should do it more." "For sure." When the call ended, my apartment became quiet all at once. I left the headset on for a minute, listening to the game's menu music loop. On the screen was the character I had spent twenty dollars dressing differently. I didn't really want to play by myself. I started another round anyway, then quit before it finished because the people on my team were annoying. By then I was hungry. I heated another dinner, opened a beer, and put YouTube on the television. One video was about a man building cabinets in his garage. I watched him feed a board through a planer, watched a review of it, then looked up the price. I liked making things. But even a small project seemed to start with buying equipment, and I wasn't about to set up a woodshop in a rented apartment. I saved the video. I had a whole list of projects waiting for somewhere to do them. I smoked a little weed out on the balcony and thought about walking somewhere for coffee, though I'd already had coffee. I went inside before the neighbor came out. We had an arrangement where we nodded at each other, and I wanted to keep it there. The afternoon passed. I remember individual parts of it better than the order. I ate most of the chips. I found a movie and backed out of it after the opening credits because I wasn't in the mood for that kind of thing. I spent a while on a dating app, looking at women who all seemed to have been photographed on boats. My own pictures were old enough that I was starting to worry about them. Taking new ones meant arranging a situation where somebody could take a picture of me that looked as though I hadn't arranged it. I swiped until the app offered to charge me for continuing, then closed it. Around five I thought of the hike. They would have been home for hours. Victoria had probably showered and gone on to something else. I looked at our messages, but there was no reason to text her. Asking how it went might lead to discussing why I hadn't come. I put the phone on the couch and went to get another beer. In the kitchen, the journal was still beside the coffee maker. I could remember the last instruction well enough. Start with something small enough to prove it works. I moved the journal into the wide drawer under the counter. There were menus in there, a screwdriver, some batteries whose condition I didn't know. It fit if I pushed the menus toward the back. I left the letter inside the cover. I hadn't decided whether to keep it, but throwing away something with my name on it seemed wrong. Sunday was going to be the useful day. I said that to myself while I made coffee, then again when I noticed it was nearly noon. I did one load of laundry. By the time it was done, the sheets were bundled inside the fitted sheet and still damp, so I had to untangle them and run the dryer again. I washed the fork and mug I needed, and put the rest of the dishes in the sink to soak. I paid a bill on my phone. Those things counted. People talked about weekends as though you could go somewhere both days and your apartment would continue running by itself. Later my mother called. I watched the phone vibrate on the table and waited for it to stop. I was going to call her back when I had something to say. She would ask what I had been doing, and I would say not much, and she would start offering ideas in a careful voice that made me sound worse off than I was. I sent her a message saying I'd call during the week. She said, "Okay, love you." I answered that one right away. Around four, the sun came through the blinds at an angle that reached the television and put my own reflection over the picture. I could see the unwashed bowl on the coffee table, an empty dinner tray on the floor, my shirt pulled up slightly over my stomach. I adjusted the blinds and fixed all of it at once. Later I considered going out for dinner, got as far as putting on a clean shirt, then looked at the delivery prices. The fee was irritating, but going out would involve parking and then sitting somewhere by myself. I ordered enough food to make the fee feel reasonable. While I waited, I folded two towels and laid the rest of the laundry across the bed. I could put it away before I went to sleep. By the time the food arrived, I had turned on the lamp. The room looked much the way it had Friday night, except there was laundry across the bed and I had to leave for work in the morning. There had been the game with my friend. That was good. I opened our conversation to ask whether he wanted to play again, but it was late enough that he was probably busy. I put something on the television and started eating. Eventually I put the leftovers in the refrigerator, moved the laundry from the bed to a chair, and went to brush my teeth. I had been thinking about going to bed early all evening. By the time I got into bed it was after eleven. I couldn't sleep. There was a short period when I almost could, but then I remembered the email to Aries and started composing a better version in my head. I had to keep correcting it because imaginary Nolan was arguing back. After a while I turned over, checked the time, and worked out how much sleep I could still get. I did that twice. The second time I put the phone beyond reach, which left me with nothing to do except think about how I had to get up and go back to work without having properly had the weekend. The neighbor below me started his car. He had modified the exhaust so that the entire building could participate in the ignition. It idled for several minutes, rattling the window above my bed. I waited for him to leave. When he finally did, I could hear the refrigerator running in the kitchen. Start with something small enough to prove it works. It had become an earworm. I kept picturing Monday, Victoria asking what I'd done, and me trying to make a couple of games and a lot of television sound like a weekend. I'd spent all Friday waiting for those two days. I wanted something to have happened in them. Fine. I would write in the thing. I went to the kitchen and opened the junk drawer. I could have smoked. I had considered it, but then I would want something to drink and probably check the television again. I took the journal to the table. There was a greasy patch from the takeout bag, and I wiped it with my sleeve before putting the journal down. I unfolded the letter and read it again. I thought of the Cadillac. That was as far as I got. I could picture three words, "Own a Cadillac," sitting there in my handwriting, and the idea of having paid for it remained exactly as difficult as before. Victoria had invited me hiking. That had happened two days ago, and I could still hear how casually she had asked. I had even considered going until she'd told me the time. Six-thirty was early, but I got up at six-thirty for work, and nobody had ever put that much effort into persuading me to come to work. She would drive. I already owned the shoes. If nothing happened, I would have wasted a few minutes. If it worked, I would have gone on one hike and spent a little less time watching things I could barely remember. I found a pen in the drawer. It didn't work. I scribbled on the edge of a menu until it did, then opened the journal to the first lined page. For a few seconds I worried about ruining it. The cover had my name on it and the first thing inside was going to be this. > When Victoria asks you on Friday afternoon if you want to go hiking on Saturday, say yes. Get up and be ready when she comes at six-thirty. You have the shoes and she is driving. You always think staying home will be better than it is. You can come back and sit around afterward. You'll probably complain on the way up, but you've liked going out with her before, and you'll be glad you went. I stopped. I wanted to add something that made it clear I knew how ridiculous this was, but there wasn't anyone to make it clear to. I read the paragraph once and capped the pen. I put the pen down and waited. The kitchen stayed exactly as it was. The oven clock changed from 11:52 to 11:53. According to the letter, I was supposed to be asleep for that part, which was convenient for whoever had written it. I folded the sheet, put it back inside, and returned the journal to the drawer. A takeout menu slid over the cover when I closed it. Back in bed I checked that the alarm was set for six-thirty. I plugged the phone in and, irritatingly, fell asleep almost at once. The alarm went off at six-thirty. I reached for my phone, missed it, and knocked it onto the floor. When I leaned over the side of the bed to grab it, both calves tightened at the same time. I stopped halfway down, with my arm hanging off the mattress. My shoulders hurt too. I sat up and rolled one, then the other. I must have slept in some stupid position. I put my feet on the floor and stood. That was fine until I tried to straighten my knees. Then I had to hold the edge of the dresser. "Oh, come on." In the bathroom I sat on the toilet lid to get my socks off. There was a rubbed patch above my right heel. I pressed it, winced, and examined the sock as though something might be inside it. The shower helped my legs a little. I let the hot water run longer than I should have, leaning against the wall while I tried to remember doing anything that could explain this. Laundry. I had carried a basket. If carrying a basket was going to do this to me, things had become worse than I thought. I got dressed sitting on the bed. The first few steps afterward had the stiff, careful feeling of walking the day after doing something physical for the first time in months. I knew that feeling. I just hadn't done anything physical. I stopped beside the counter with my hand on the drawer handle. I could check the entry when I got home. I let go and started making coffee, then looked at the time and decided I would have it at work. There were only a few minutes to spare if I wanted to miss the worst of the school traffic. I went to the closet for my work shoes. An old backpack was in the way, and when I moved it I saw the hiking shoes behind it. They were dirty. There was dry dirt along the seam above the sole and packed into the treads. I picked one up. Some of the dirt fell onto my hand. A thin piece of grass was caught where the laces crossed. I remembered buying them after watching a video about local trails. The clerk had told me to break them in, so I had worn them around the apartment for an evening. I had never taken them outside. I turned the shoe over and pressed a thumbnail into the dirt. It came away in a small flake. A second alarm started sounding from the bedroom. I put the shoe down, went for my phone, then came back for my keys. I was late. On the drive I kept pressing my left foot against the floor to see whether the soreness was still there. It was. I remembered Saturday morning, coffee, the download, my friend laughing when I got caught behind the building again. I could remember the dull pressure from the headset after I'd worn it too long. Six-thirty on Saturday I had been asleep. I knew I had been asleep. I had spent enough of Friday looking forward to it. I parked in my usual space and went in through the back door. The front entrance passed Bradley's office, and Bradley had a talent for remembering work the moment he saw me. The back door gave me a few minutes to get coffee, open my email, and look employed before anybody asked a question. Victoria was in the break room filling her water bottle. I went to the coffee machine and got my mug out of the cupboard. There was dried coffee inside it from Friday. I rinsed it under the tap and shook out the water. "How are the legs?" she asked. I put the mug under the machine. "What?" "Mine are worse today. I should have stretched when we got back." The machine began to grind. I turned toward her. She was tightening the lid on her bottle, trying to get the little loop out from underneath it. "From the hike?" "Yeah." She looked up. "How are you feeling?" I watched her for some sign that this was a joke. She finally freed the loop and slipped it over her finger. The machine was still making coffee. I wanted it to stop so I could hear her properly, although I had heard every word. "I stayed home." She gave me a look. "You were there, Derek. I picked you up outside your building. You complained about the hill for the first hour." I put my hand against the counter. My fingers were still wet from rinsing the mug. "You picked me up?" "At six-thirty. You were downstairs already. You made a whole thing about me being two minutes late." That was something I would have said. It made me want to interrupt her. I didn't know what with. "I wasn't there," I said. She set her bottle down. "Are you okay?" I nodded because she was looking at me and I needed to do something. Behind me the coffee stopped running. I picked it up by the handle and held it too close to my shirt. "You said you were glad you came," she said. "When we got back to the car. I told you I'd remind you next time." I knew I had written that. I could picture the pen stopping at the end of the line. Victoria took out her phone. "Here." In the picture I was standing beside her on a dirt trail. There were two other people, a low wooden fence, a slope with dry grass behind us. My shirt had a dark patch down the middle of the chest. I had one hand lifted to keep the sun out of my eyes, and my mouth was open as though I'd been caught talking. I recognized the shirt. It was on the chair in my bedroom. I set my coffee on the counter and took the phone with both hands.