"Yeah," answered Jon. "I can't trust myself with this thing anymore. Here, you have it."
Karyn took the stone. "Who knows what else changed because your mother's a lawyer?"
Jon looked into the distance. "Yeah ... what if she freed someone who was unjustly imprisoned before?"
"Or she could've sent someone to prison," added Karyn. "Maybe she doesn't practice criminal law. I don't know what kind of lawyer she is. I never asked you."
"Maybe we should research this before doing anything, but then again ... Mikey ... sometimes he'd get on my nerves, and I used to wish he'd never been born, and now I wish ..." Jon glanced at his empty hands with relief. "I could've wished something by accident just now. Don't use the word 'wish' yet, okay?"
"Okay."
"It's like I'm being punished for the dumb things I said about Mikey in the past. I want him back. I want my world back. A world where my mom isn't a lawyer, where you remember Mikey ..."
Karyn couldn't bear seeing Jon suffer like this. She never realized Mikey meant so much to him. She squeezed the stone and said, "I wish Jon's mother hadn't become a lawyer." She thought she had zeroed in on the source of the problem - the one change in history that caused all the other changes. But she didn't realize that she had the Omission Stone. She didn't expect its bonus effect. She gasped.
