The coffee was instant again. That was the first thing Tom noticed when he woke up, before his eyes were even open—the smell of it, cheap and metallic, the way it sat in his stomach like warm water with colour. He made it the same way every morning: two scoops, hot water from the kettle that had a dent in the side, stir it with the chipped blue spoon. He carried the mug to the kitchen window and looked out at the parking lot of the apartment complex, where a pickup truck was idling and a man in a grease-stained jacket was smoking a cigarette in the cold.

Then the dream came, the way it always did, right at the edge of waking, like a radio station you can almost catch but never quite hold.

In the dream, he was in a kitchen that was not his kitchen. The counter was granite, not Formica. The coffee was real—fresh beans ground in a machine that hummed—and his wife, the woman from the dream, was standing at the stove with her back to him, singing something he could not hear. She had dark hair and she wore a yellow dress and she turned and smiled at him and he knew, with a certainty that went beyond logic, that this was a life he had almost lived. A different life. A life where he had made different choices.

He stood in his own kitchen, holding his chipped blue spoon, and for three seconds he was somewhere else. Then the truck in the parking lot honked, and he was back, and the coffee tasted like water with colour.

He was thirty-eight years old and he worked for Mid-West Logistics, a company that moved pallets of consumer goods from warehouses in Indiana to stores in Ohio, and his job was to make sure the drivers had the right routes and the right papers and didn't take breaks that were too long. He had been doing this job for twelve years. He had been married to Linda for four years. They had been divorced for three. His daughter, Megan, was fourteen and lived with her mother, and they talked on the phone every Saturday night, and she always asked him the same question: Dad, are you okay? And he always said the same thing: Yeah, bug. I'm fine.

Friday night, he and Frank went to O'Malley's. Frank had been his coworker for twenty years, which in the world of Mid-West Logistics means they had survived three reorganizations, two layoffs, and one incident involving a forklift and a pallet of frozen chicken that neither of them talked about anymore.

You ever think about it? Frank asked, swirling his beer and watching the condensation run down the side of the glass. If you could do it all over again.

Tom thought about the dream. He thought about the granite counter and the yellow dress and the coffee that didn't taste like metal.

Yeah, he said. I do.

What would you do different?

Tom looked at Frank, at the lines around his eyes, at the beer belly that had taken twenty years to arrive, at the hands that had lifted pallets and steering wheels and a daughter who was now too old to sit on his lap.

I don't know, he said. Probably less beer.

Frank laughed, and Tom laughed with him, and they drank their beers and talked about nothing, which is what men like them talk about, because nothing is easier than something and easier is all most days offer.

Tuesday afternoon, Tom went to see Dr. Patel. The clinic was in a strip mall next to a nail salon and a Chinese restaurant that smelled like garlic and ginger and something that made Tom's stomach growl in a way that had nothing to do with lunch.

Dr. Patel was young—too young to be a doctor, in Tom's opinion, though he never said that out loud. She had dark hair pulled back in a bun and a voice that was calm and steady and didn't try to fix things that didn't need fixing.

How's the sleep? she asked, looking at her notes.

Bad, Tom said. Same as before.

And the dreams?

He told her about the kitchen. The granite counter. The woman in the yellow dress. The coffee that was real. He told her about the three seconds when he was somewhere else and then he was back, standing in his own kitchen with his chipped blue spoon, and the coffee tasted like water with colour.

Dr. Patel made a note and then looked up at him. Tom, what you're describing is very common. It's called counterfactual thinking. Your brain is creating alternative scenarios—what if I had married someone else? What if I had taken that other job? What if I had invested in that stock instead of paying off the car? It's not a dream about another life. It's your mind processing regret.

Regret, Tom said.

Unmet needs. Unspoken wishes. The brain doesn't distinguish between things that happened and things that almost happened. They feel the same. So you dream about them. It's normal. It's healthy, even. It means your mind is working the way it should.

Tom nodded. He nodded because Dr. Patel was a doctor and he was a patient and that's what patients do. But he wasn't sure he believed her. Because sometimes, in the space between waking and dreaming, when the radio station came through clear for those three seconds, it felt more real than the parking lot and the chipped blue spoon and the coffee that tasted like water with colour.

Saturday night, Megan called. She was in the kitchen at her mother's house, and Tom could hear the television in the background, some cartoon with loud music and brighter colours than anything in Tom's life.

Dad, she said, I drew something at school.

Yeah? What did you draw?

A man. Standing at a crossroads. One road goes to the city. One road goes to the country.

Tom felt something move in his chest, something he hadn't felt in a long time. Not regret. Not hope. Something in between.

That sounds nice, bug. What did you name it?

I didn't name it. But the teacher asked what it meant, and I said it means my dad.

Tom sat in his Ford F-150 in the parking lot of Mid-West Logistics and held the phone in his hand and looked at the sky, which was the colour of dirty dishwater and smelled like rain that might not come.

He thought about the two roads. The city and the country. The dream and the waking. The granite counter and the Formica. The real coffee and the instant.

Maybe Dr. Patel was right. Maybe it was just regret. Maybe it was just his brain processing the life he hadn't lived.

Or maybe, just maybe, the man in the dream was real too, and he was sitting in a kitchen somewhere, drinking real coffee, and the woman in the yellow dress was singing, and he was thinking about the other life—the life where he had a daughter who drew pictures of him and a pickup truck with a dent in the side and a chipped blue spoon that he used every morning.

Both lives, Tom thought. Both of them are real.

He hung up the phone, started the truck, and drove home.