Chapter Five
The man behind the counter blinks at me, a perplexed but familiar smile lifting one corner of his mouth. “Yeah. That’s me.
Do we know each other?”
I feel lightheaded, fog eating away at the edge of my vision. It takes a few tries to find my voice. “No, I . . . I’m staying
in Dina’s extra cottage. She told me to get coffee here. She said her nephew worked here. So I figured that had to be you.”
I’m babbling, and only half of it’s true, but Nathan—this Nathan—seems to buy it. “Right,” he says, nodding slowly. “She doesn’t
rent that place out very often.”
“Yeah, I’ve . . . gathered that.” I can’t stop staring at him. At all the ways he looks the same as the guy I saw yesterday,
and all the ways he looks different.
He slowly raises his eyebrows. “Can I get you anything?”
“Yeah. Yes.” I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to ground myself, trying to remember what you’re supposed to do when you feel like you’re about to pass out.
Jackson told me once, when we were flying back from a conference he was invited to in Seattle.
It was windy coming down into Logan airport, the worst landing I’ve ever been through, and the plane bounced around so much I was sure I was going to throw up or pass out; it was just a question of which would happen first.
Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. He’d put his hand on my back, repeating it over and over. In through your nose, out through your mouth, slow and steady . . .
“I’ll have an Americano.” I open my eyes and fish out my wallet, trembling fingers finding my credit card.
“Small? Large?”
I glance up into Nathan’s blue gaze. “Uh . . . small is fine. Thanks.”
He nods and turns away to the espresso machine. I watch him from the corners of my eyes.
He’s real. He’s very definitely real. He just spent the last several minutes making lattes and mochas and Americanos for everyone
in line ahead of me, which means other people can definitely see him.
But if this is the real Nathan—this man in his early thirties, with a slightly faded dolphin tattoo, with shorter hair, with
hints of lines at the corners of his eyes—then that can mean only one thing: The Nathan I saw in the cottage yesterday wasn’t real. He wasn’t the single normal person in that house, the way I assumed he was, because I had no reason to think anything different.
I didn’t know him. He was just there fixing a hole in the wall.
But unless there are two versions of Dina’s nephew walking around, a twentysomething one and a thirtysomething one, then the
Nathan I saw yesterday has to be . . .
Well, whatever Professor MacAndrew, my dad, and Jackson are. A hallucination. An apparition. A ghost. My brain playing tricks
for who knows what reason.
“One Americano.” Nathan—the actual Nathan—slides a paper cup across the counter toward me.
“Thanks.” I hand over my credit card, and when he takes it, my eyes catch again on the dolphin tattoo on his forearm. Something
scratches at the back of my brain.
Why on earth would I hallucinate someone I’ve never met before?
I had no idea who Nathan was before yesterday, so how could my brain show me a hallucination of someone I didn’t even know?
And not just that, but a hallucination of a younger version of someone I didn’t know?
There’s no way that should be possible. Unless it’s not my brain at all.
Nathan scans my credit card and hands it back. “Receipt?”
“No, thanks.” I pick up the cup of coffee, glance at him once more, and then turn around, heading for the exit. I feel like
I have cotton in my ears. Like someone else is operating my limbs. Like I’m watching myself in a movie.
This is impossible. I know this is impossible, but the more I think about it, the more it makes a weird kind of sense. If
I’m seeing people nobody else can see, including someone I’d never met before yesterday, someone related to the owner of the
cottage, and I’m only seeing these people in the cottage . . .
Then the cottage must be responsible. And not in a toxins-leaking-from-the-walls way. The cottage must be showing me things. The cottage would certainly know who Nathan is. How it could conjure up my dad or Professor MacAndrew or Jackson,
I don’t know, but maybe it read my mind or something.
I pause on the sidewalk, taking a long, slow sip of coffee. The hot bitterness is grounding and mundane on my tongue. A completely
normal Americano.
I rub my eyes and glance back through the window of Cuppa Cove. It’s hard to see past the reflections in the glass from the
sunny street around me, but I catch a glimpse of Nathan taking orders from another small knot of people at the counter.
Why is he in the cottage?
Why are any of them in the cottage?
If it’s true—if I’m not losing my mind, because there’s no way my brain could show me some younger version of Nathan inside the house—and somehow, impossibly, something else is going on, then I need to get back. I need to find out what those people in the house are doing there.
There has to be a reason I’m seeing them. I just need to figure out what it is.
Professor MacAndrew looks up as soon as I open the dining room door, peering at me once again over her reading glasses. She’s
still paging through a book—Giovanni’s Room, I notice. Which I’m pretty sure I saw on one of the shelves of the dining hutch when I first arrived, and is not the kind
of book I would generally picture Professor MacAndrew paging through. The only books I remember from her office were all narrowly
focused academic tomes on the involvement of the US in World War I and biographies of Woodrow Wilson.
“Hello, Harlowe,” Professor MacAndrew says. “Thank you for coming by.”
I take a deep breath and repeat to myself (for the thousandth time since I left Cuppa Cove) that I’m rolling with this. “Hello,
Professor MacAndrew. Long time no see. What are you doing here?”
She blinks. “Excuse me?”
“Why are you here? Is there a reason you’re occupying the beach cottage I’m renting instead of your office in the BU history
department?”
Her delicate eyebrows pull together. “What on earth are you talking about? We’re in my office.”
My composure slips. “No, we’re not.”
“Let’s not waste time.” She closes the book and lays it down on the table. “I asked you to come by so we could talk about your thesis and your future.”
The hair on the back of my neck stands up. This is familiar. This is very familiar.
Your thesis and your future. She said those exact words to me two years ago. Right before she crushed most of my dreams, crumpling them up like useless
notes for an old test she no longer needed to think about.
I swallow. “I don’t need to talk about my thesis, Professor MacAndrew,” I say. “I finished it.”
“Yes, I know you did.” Now she folds her hands on top of the book. Her nails have a vaguely shiny luster to them. I always
had a suspicion Professor MacAndrew used clear nail polish, and I always wondered why she didn’t go for a color. “I finished
reading it. And I appreciate the work you’ve put in. But I think I owe you a conversation about your future in academia.”
I don’t want to hear any more. “This already happened,” I say. “We already had this conversation. Right before my thesis defense.
You called me into your office. Remember?”
Professor MacAndrew purses her lips—that look she got when she clearly thought something I said was worthless but she’d decided
it was too mean to actually point it out. “Yes, Harlowe, I remember. I emailed you about this meeting yesterday.”
“No, not yesterday,” I say. “Two years ago.”
The pursed lips are now accompanied by another frown. “We’re getting sidetracked. The important thing here is that I’m going
to recommend to the committee that we accept your thesis. You’ll get through your defense, and you’ll get your degree. But
as to your future—”
“I don’t need to talk about my future,” I say, as firmly as I can manage.
Which isn’t all that firmly, because this is starting to feel like a very, very bad dream.
“We’re not in your office and I’m not about to defend my thesis.
I don’t even have my thesis anymore. I threw it out.
I work in IT. I don’t care about any of this. ”
“I know you have an IT job on the side,” Professor MacAndrew says with a sniff. “But it’s not the best look to tell your thesis advisor that you don’t care about your work.”
“It’s not a job on the side,” I say in frustration. “It’s my actual, full-time job. My actual career. It’s . . .” I pause,
my thoughts catching on her words. “Hang on. Are you talking about the IT job I had at the student center?”
“What else would I be talking about?”
I lean forward, studying Professor MacAndrew more closely. She looks exactly the same as I remember. I’m pretty sure I remember
this exact sweater set. And these glasses. I’m not sure if it’s what she was wearing on that particular day, two years ago,
when she called me into her office, but it might have been.
“What year do you think this is?” I ask.
She raises an eyebrow. “Really? I’m trying to have a conversation about your career. About something you’ve spent years working
toward. I don’t think now is the time for jokes.”
I haven’t seen Professor MacAndrew since I finished my PhD. As soon as I got my degree, I was plenty happy to never set foot
on the BU campus again, so I have no idea what Professor MacAndrew looks like now—if she’s grown out her hair or stopped dyeing
it. If she’s gotten new glasses. If she’s switched from sweater sets to blazers. Or if she actually looks exactly the same.
But the Professor MacAndrew in front of me is the same, because as far as she’s concerned, it’s actually two years ago. She really seems to think she’s in her office,
and we’re about to have one of the worst conversations of my life.
I rub my temples. “Can you leave?”
Professor MacAndrew’s eyebrows jump. “What?”
“I don’t want to talk about my future. So could you just—I don’t know—leave and come back later? Or maybe just leave?”