Why did it happen? Was he a Defender? Was it ultimately about the Carls? No. Those are all the wrong questions. It’s so tempting, even now, to try to blame all of the politicians and pundits who were rising in power by feeding on people’s fear and confusion.

We can blame those people, but the only thing a mass murder “means” is that we’ve made it too easy to kill. None of us are going to talk about it anymore in this book, because if we did, that man will get to keep having his power on us, and I’m sick of it.

Moving on.

ANDY

I couldn’t stop feeling bad about telling Miranda she had to apply at Altus. My gut was all, Absolutely not! She should stay in Berkeley where it was normal and safe. Enough of my friends had done weird, risky things. If the book hadn’t told me to tell her to do it, I absolutely would not have. It was one thing putting my money on the line with this thing, but this was Miranda’s future. But The Book of Good Times was in charge now. Or maybe I just wanted it to be.

And now, since I had completed the book’s two requests, I could turn the page.

You waited! Excellent work! I knew you would. I mean, I literally knew it. Otherwise, how could I have known when I printed the book? You probably shouldn’t worry too much about all of this right now. So, you have another million dollars. It seems like you can trust me, right?

As previously noted, this wasn’t true. I was doing everything I could to not trust the book. I knew it was powerful, but I did not know what it wanted.

So now, I’d like you to move 100 percent of your portfolio into Posthiker, a distributed shipping company. They’ve only been publicly traded for about a year, and people are not optimistic about how their business has gone. But they’re about to have a very good quarter. Search for Posthiker on Twitter and you’ll see people talking about it. It’s functioning, it’s earning people money, and it’s saving others money. The stock is going to jump 32 percent in the exuberance immediately afterward. Yes, I realize that I’m asking you to go against your instincts here, but you’re going to need a lot of money. I know you think you already have a lot of money, but you’re going to need much more. After Posthiker, you’ll want to move everything into Alphabet, which will give you a further 6 percent bump after their earnings come in, and then after that into Emerson, which has been doing extremely good business in air conditioners in China.

The book continued this way for more than a page, instructing me exactly how to move my money over the next two weeks. There was some action to take almost every day. It was hard not to enjoy this plan. Not knowing what to do with my money had been stressful, but now I knew exactly what to do. It was a good feeling to know that I might soon be very, very rich. At the same time, it was terrifying to know that I was going to need it for something.

After this, you will be, by my best guess, at $125 million. You’re going to wonder what all of this money is for, but do your best not to worry about it. You might ask, “Why don’t I just go to Vegas and you can tell me how to bet in roulette, or which lottery numbers to pick, or which sports team to bet on?” Well, it turns out, those things are actually random. Nothing is as easy to guess as the success of companies. All of the data are already out there. The information is known by people and stored in computers, and the reactions of those buying the stocks are easy to predict in large part because many of those entities are deeply simplistic computer programs. The question you’re asking yourself now is, Is this illegal? Yes, it is super illegal. You are trading stocks based on tips from someone with insider information. I am stealing that information and giving it, in a distilled form, to you. So yes, this is illegal. But it is not, as far as I can tell, wrong to do it in this case. You do many things that are illegal, but I will not ask you to do anything that is wrong.

Here’s the thing about having $125 million: If your portfolio increases by 1 percent in any given day, your net worth will increase by $1.25 million. You will make and lose more money in a single day than many people do in their whole lives. And you will make more than you lose.

You will make more money by investing your money than you ever could working. Which is fine, because I don’t think you’re doing what you’re doing to make money. Except for the times when you are. I’d suggest stopping that. Though don’t lose that business card.

I thought about this and realized the book probably meant the card the guy had given me in Cannes.

In the next three weeks, you need to think more than you act, and listen more than you talk. There are big things happening, and you are uniquely positioned to see them. Call Bex, introduce her to Jason. Hang out. See where it goes!

As I read, I could tell it was coming to an end, and without a single word about April.

Give yourself time to think. Don’t fill it all up with podcasts and TV shows. Talk it out, think it out, be present. And maybe call Maya—she’s thinking a lot these days too. Actually, you should reach out to all the old friends. Just ask how they’re doing. You’ve got a few weeks before this story starts up again. You can move to the next page two weeks from today. But remember, tell no one about me. It will ruin the Good Times.

The urge to turn to the next page was overwhelming. Where was April? What was going on?

I turned the page.

Andy, I told you not to turn the page. April will be OK. But sometimes you have to wait.

I threw the book across the room, and it slammed into the wall, knocking a couple plastic cups off my shelf.

“You OK in there?” Jason said, half laughing.

“I’m fine, just trying to kill a roach.”

I went over to grab the book and stuffed it between my bed and the box spring. Jason didn’t ever come in my room, so I wasn’t hiding it from him as much as I was hiding it from myself.

And thus, in secret, I had to live all by myself in a world in which April was alive and books could predict the future. It took gargantuan strength for me not to tell Robin about it. It wasn’t just that I wanted to tell anyone, though I did; it’s more that it seemed so cruel to let him just suffer while I had this new hope. But then again maybe it was cruel to tell him when it could still all be a lie.

It was one thing to let a supernatural garbage book give you hope that your dead friend was alive; it was another thing entirely to force that ambiguity on someone else.

I tried to take the book’s advice, to give myself space to think, but I was nervous and skittish and addicted to content.

Jason definitely noticed something was up.

“Dude, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but you have been weird since you met Subway Girl.”

“Don’t call her Subway Girl,” I told him.

“That’s what I’ve always called her, though.”

“Yeah, but she’s going to come over tonight, and if you call her ‘Subway Girl’ in front of her, she is going to stab you, and then me. You can call her Becky or Rebecca or Bex.”

“OK,” he said before repeating, “Dude, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but you’ve been weird since you met Becky.”

“It’s not her, it’s …” I decided to do a half lie: “It’s money. Money is so freaking weird, man.”