Chapter 1: The Three Wishes
[West Village, Manhattan — March 14, 2011, 6:47 AM]
The headache hit before the light did.
Don Klein opened his eyes to a ceiling he didn't recognize — white plaster, hairline crack running east to west, a water stain shaped like nothing. The pain sat behind his temples like a spike driven through both sides at once, and when he tried to sit up, his hands pressed against sheets that were too soft, a mattress too firm, a body that weighed wrong.
He looked at his hands.
They weren't his.
These were younger hands. Longer fingers. No wedding ring indent on the left, no scar across the right knuckle from the time he'd punched through a car window after —
After.
Don went very still.
The last thing he remembered was headlights. High beams. The Jersey Turnpike at 11:40 PM, rain turning the asphalt into a mirror, and a delivery truck jackknifing across three lanes. He remembered his own hands — his hands, forty-three years old, liver spot starting on the left, callus on the right index finger from years of pen grip — yanking the wheel left. The guardrail coming fast. Then a sound like the whole world folding in half.
Then this.
He swung his legs off the bed and stood. The room tilted. A studio apartment — compact, clean enough, the kind of West Village walkup that cost too much for too little square footage. Books on a shelf. A desk with a lamp. On the nightstand: an iPhone — not his model, older, the 4 maybe — and next to it, a leather badge holder.
Don picked it up. The laminated card inside read:
WAKEFIELD & GOULD LLP Donald A. Klein — Associate
Below the badge, a framed diploma leaned against the wall. Columbia Law School. J.D., 2008.
His chest tightened. He walked to the bathroom and turned on the light.
The mirror showed a stranger.
Late twenties. Dark hair, shorter than he'd worn it in his previous — in his life. Sharper jawline. Same eye color, or close enough that the difference only registered as a wrongness he could feel but not name. The man in the glass looked like someone who slept well, ate clean, and hadn't spent fifteen years grinding his body down in corporate litigation.
Don gripped the sink. The porcelain was cold. Real cold. He could feel the grain of it against his palms, the chip on the left edge where someone had dropped something heavy. The towel hanging on the rack smelled like detergent. The fluorescent buzzed at 60 hertz.
This was not a dream. Dreams didn't have texture.
He turned off the bathroom light and went to the kitchen. The apartment was small enough that this took four steps. Coffee maker on the counter — drip, not pod. A bowl in the drying rack. And next to the sink, a legal brief bound in blue card stock.
Don picked it up.
The brief was standard fare — breach of contract, commercial lease dispute, the kind of thing a junior associate at a mid-size firm would draft on a Tuesday. He scanned the first page, looking for a date, a case number, anything —
And the words moved.
Not on the page. Behind his eyes. At the very edge of his vision, like heat shimmer rising off summer asphalt, letters rearranged themselves. Case names he hadn't read materialized out of nothing — Hadley v. Baxendale, 1854 — and a statute number floated in the periphery, too faint to read directly, gone when he tried to focus on it. A web of connections, gossamer-thin, linking the breach claim to a precedent chain he could almost trace.
The sensation lasted three seconds. Maybe four.
Then it collapsed. The shimmer dissolved. The brief was just a brief again — ink on paper, a junior associate's competent but unremarkable work.
Don set it down. Picked it up again. Nothing. He turned it over, pressed both palms flat against the cover page, stared at the text until his vision blurred.
Nothing.
He put the brief down and sat on the kitchen stool. His hands were shaking. Not from fear — from the headache, from the displacement, from the absolute and terrifying certainty that he had just experienced something that did not belong in any version of reality he understood.
Three things were clear. He was dead. He was alive. And something had changed the rules.
---
The taxi crawled through morning traffic on Seventh Avenue. Don sat in the back with the window cracked, letting March air — cold, exhaust-tinged, alive — hit his face. He'd gotten dressed in clothes that fit a body that wasn't his. Navy suit, white shirt, black shoes. The closet had seven variations of the same outfit. Whoever Don Klein had been before this morning, the man had the wardrobe imagination of a funeral director.
The radio was on. Some pop station the driver had left running. A song ended and another began — guitar riff, then vocals, a track Don had heard a hundred times before.
"Greenback Boogie."
His throat closed.
He knew that song. Everyone who'd watched the show knew that song. It was the opening theme — the one that played over shots of Manhattan skyline and tailored suits and glass-walled offices where people said things like "I don't play the odds, I play the man" before commercial break.
Don pulled out the phone. Thumbed past the lock screen. Calendar app: March 14, 2011.
March. 2011. Manhattan.
Three months before a kid named Mike Ross would walk into a hotel conference room carrying a briefcase full of marijuana and walk out with a job at the most prestigious law firm in the city. Three months before Harvey Specter — senior partner, best closer on the Eastern Seaboard, the man whose face Don had watched on a screen for nine seasons — would break his firm's cardinal rule and hire a brilliant fraud.
Don leaned his head against the window glass. The cold seeped through.
He was in Suits. Not watching it. Not remembering it. Inside it, wearing another man's skin, carrying credentials from Columbia Law — not Harvard, never Harvard — and working at a firm that the show had never mentioned because it didn't matter enough to mention.
Wakefield & Gould. Mid-size. Mid-prestige. The kind of firm that handled real estate disputes and corporate compliance while Pearson Hardman reshaped Manhattan from forty floors up.
The cab stopped at a light. Don watched pedestrians cross — real people, not actors, not characters, people with weight and shadow and breath that fogged in the morning air. A woman with a stroller. A man eating a bagel while jaywalking. A bike messenger who cut between two cars and vanished down a side street.
Real. All of it real.
And I know what happens next, Don thought. I know every case, every betrayal, every secret. I know Mike's fraud. I know Hardman's return. I know Jessica's blindside and Louis's desperate loyalty and Donna's quiet dominion over everything she touches.
I know how this story ends.
The light turned green. The cab lurched forward.
---
[West Village — 7:15 PM]
The Thai food arrived in eighteen minutes. Don carried it to the fire escape and sat with his legs hanging over the iron grating, three stories above a street that smelled like rain and garbage and the particular energy of a city that never quite finished any of its conversations.
Pad thai. Green curry. Spring rolls that crackled when he bit through the wrapper.
He chewed slowly. The curry burned. Not metaphorically — the peppers were real and they were vicious and his new body apparently had a lower spice tolerance than his old one. His eyes watered. He ate more.
This was real food. Not the memory of food, not the idea of it. Real rice noodles that stuck between his teeth. Real lime juice that stung a cut on his lip he didn't remember getting. A real breeze that carried sound up from the street — a car horn, someone laughing, the distant clatter of a restaurant kitchen venting steam.
He finished the curry. Set the container aside. Looked at Manhattan's skyline going orange and purple in the last light.
Somewhere in Midtown, Pearson Hardman's offices were cleaning up from another day of legal warfare. Harvey Specter was probably at his desk or headed to a bar, Donna reading his mood from the sound of his footsteps. Jessica Pearson was running the firm with the cold precision of a woman who'd built an empire by being smarter than every man who'd tried to stop her.
And in some apartment in the city, Mike Ross was taking bar exams for other people, trying to keep his grandmother alive on money that came from the only skill he had.
Don pulled the Wakefield & Gould employee handbook from inside his jacket. He'd grabbed it from the apartment on his way back. Now he opened it and laid it flat on his knees.
The shimmer came back.
Faint. Unreliable. A flicker behind his eyes like a machine running on its last fumes — connections forming between sections of the handbook, cross-references to New York employment law materializing as ghosts at the edge of his vision. An organizational chart that the book didn't contain but that the shimmer seemed to extrapolate from context.
It lasted six seconds this time. Then it faded, leaving the headache sharper than before.
Don closed the handbook. Pressed his thumbs against his temples. The pain was specific — not the dull ache of a hangover or the diffuse pressure of stress. This sat right behind his eyes, in the space where the shimmer lived, and it throbbed with the rhythm of a system powering down after a surge it wasn't built to handle.
He put the handbook in his lap and looked at the skyline.
Three months, he thought. I have three months before the pilot. Before Harvey hires Mike and the story starts. Three months to learn this body, this life, this firm. Three months to figure out what the shimmer is and what it wants from me.
Three months to decide what I'm going to do with nine seasons of perfect information.
The fire escape groaned under his weight as he shifted. Below, a couple argued about parking. Above, someone's TV played the evening news through an open window.
Don stood. Folded the takeout containers into the bag. Went inside.
The W&G badge sat on the nightstand where he'd left it. He picked it up and clipped it to the jacket hanging on the back of the door. Tomorrow morning, 8 AM, the lobby of a law firm that history would forget. A desk he'd never sat at. Colleagues he'd never met. A legal career built on knowledge that came from nowhere any reasonable person would believe.
The Library — that's what he'd started calling the shimmer, because it searched like a library and surfaced information like one — flickered once more behind his eyes. A single word, half-formed, dissolving before he could read it.
Don turned off the light. Tomorrow, he'd feed it.
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