What If It’s You?

Chapter Ten

After a few minutes in each other’s arms, Ollie pushed himself upright with a grunt.

“Are you coming?”

“Sorry…what?”

He smirked sideways at me as he tugged his boxer briefs back on.

“If I told you, it would ruin the surprise.” He rolled his eyes exaggeratedly, like an annoyed teenager. “But, just guessing here, you seem like you need a reset, and I happen to have the perfect option. By the way, if you want to go like that, I’m not going to stop you, but the police might.” He gestured at my recumbent nudity. With a sniff, I retrieved my underwear.

“You think you’re so clever, Oliver Hughes.”

“I do,” he said, nodding sagely. “So? Shall we?” He extended an arm, dark eyes twinkling with mischief. I should go to work. Yes, I’d called out for the morning—last week, actually, when I’d received my “annual physical” calendar reminder—but the appointment would need to be rescheduled, and my To Do list only ever seemed to grow, and I was still so new in my role, I didn’t want anyone to think I was phoning it in. But somehow I found myself taking his hand. Ollie had always had a way of making me want to cross fewer t ’s, of making me believe—however briefly—that there was another, freer Laurel hiding inside the business casual version most of the world saw.

After a brief stop at our favorite café for stuffed croissants— We’re venturing into realms unknown, Lo, we need to fortify ourselves— Ollie started leading me through the streets of Somerville, stopping every few minutes to check the map on his phone. We didn’t talk much, but silence with Ollie had never felt awkward, even on our earliest dates. There was an easy comfort there, one I was more sharply aware of after the last two days. Not that I wasn’t comfortable with Drew—I was, at least when I knew the parameters of what we were to each other…

“Osprey,” he said, pointing up at a large, shaggy nest balanced atop a telephone pole, a large bird with a fierce, hooked beak perched on the edge of the mess. It was a habit with him—pointing out wildlife I was otherwise unaware of—and all our road trips were punctuated with a string of animal names, deer, wild turkey, shit is that a falcon?

“Someday your kids are going to be so embarrassed by that.”

He looked at me for a long moment, expression unreadable, before he answered.

“Yeah, but then some much later day they’ll start doing it themselves. Just ask Shelly.”

“You’re saying this is biologically inevitable?”

“Who really knows where the line between nature and nurture is?”

We kept picking our way through the streets between Porter and Magoun squares, past a string of stately Victorians and blocky triple-deckers, the sun casting shivering silhouettes of the autumn leaves clinging stubbornly to the old-growth trees dotting the sidewalk. I took a bite of my pastry, eyes hooking on the intricate gingerbread woodwork on the house we were passing. It had been too long since we’d done this, played hooky. I wondered if there was really a destination at all, or if Ollie was just trying to distract me. Which frankly didn’t make the gesture any less thoughtful. The state I’d been in when I walked in the door was…probably a little unnerving for him.

Finally, Ollie stopped at a street corner and pointed to the base of an empty shopfront, its windows butcher-papered, a faded pet shop sign clinging above the chainlocked door.

“You wanted to show me…an empty store?”

“Look down, Lo.”

I did, and then I saw it, a small window cut into the weatherworn stonework just to the right of the entrance. I moved closer, squatting near the two-foot-wide gap in what I’d assumed was the building’s foundation, a slightly filmy piece of fiberglass paneling offering a glimpse inside.

“What is this?” I blinked at the scene in miniature unfolding behind the hazy opening.

“I think it’s the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.”

“You’re totally right,” I murmured, scanning the wavery gilt mirrors in forced perspective at the left, the brilliant parquet flooring lining the enclosure, the series of tiny, glittering chandeliers suspended from who knows where. A miniature statue, vaguely Greco-Roman, was tucked into a little clamshell recess, and what looked like gold foil had been worked into impossibly intricate moldings and frames, carving out the geometry of ceilings and walls. In the center of the scene was a single tiny figure in a Marie Antoinette dress and powdered wig. But it was…

“A mouse? It’s not…alive, is it? Or, you know…like poisoned?” It looked so real, its shiny eyes staring straight ahead, its miniature mouse hands folded over the front panel of its voluminous satin skirt.

“Don’t worry, no mice were harmed in the making of this diorama,” Ollie assured me. “Apparently it’s a mix of faux fur and felted wool, which like…I love imagining what inspired the artist to think ‘But what if I made a to-scale, perfectly realistic mouse?’?” He jerked his head to the side. “Come on, I hear the ones around the side are even cooler.”

We made our way around the building, stooping to marvel at the tiny Tower of London cell, complete with arched arrow-slit windows and a pacing Thomas More in threadbare sixteenth-century garb; the miniature sun-bleached desertscape of Petra, a family of Hawaiian-shirted mice snapping photos at the base of the intricately carved structures in the cliffs; and, whimsically, a rolling green hillside with a round door in the center, propped open to reveal a tiny mouse-hobbit in sturdy traveling garb and a hooded cloak, dwarfed by Ratdalf the wizard, his pointed hat grazing the ceiling of the homey interior.

“How did you hear about these?” I said, bending closer to peer at the minuscule glittering ring on the rough wooden mantel of the hobbit living room.

“Jason’s girlfriend heard about them from some of her art school friends.” Ollie flashed an amused grimace. Jason’s predilection for dating way younger than he should had become an inside joke. “From what I’ve been able to find out online, no one knows who made them. Presumably someone with access to the store.”

“And a metric fuckton of time on their hands.” I shook my head slowly, half baffled and half in awe of whatever impulse had led to…this. “Cool or creepy?” It was…not even a game, really, just a shorthand Ollie and I used. So many of the people we met through the music and arts scenes he—and by extension I—ran in had hobbies that could easily go either way.

“Definitely cool. Is that even a question?”

“But like…think about the kind of person who would go to all this trouble. Sewing a tiny eighteenth-century dress, sculpting a tiny piece of bread and then painting realistic mold on it. That’s weird, right?”

“It could be good weird.”

“What if it’s all just a cover to lure out whoever lives in the apartment next door? Like, they create this entire whimsical hobby but it’s really just a front for straight-up stalking?” I waggled my eyebrows exaggeratedly.

“That’s dark, Lo.” Ollie’s brow furrowed with feigned concern. “But…I still say cool. Like…elaborate, yes. Borderline obsessive. But you’d have a hell of a how-we-met story to tell your grandkids.”

“It’s called a meet-cute. And forget how obviously meet-creepy that is, I love that you assume this works as a courtship ploy.” I bent closer, not wanting the moment to end. “Oh, what if they come alive at night? Like that kid’s book with the magic dollhouse that shows what happened. The doll…deaths?” I bit my lip, searching for the memory.

“ The Dollhouse Murders, holy shit!” Ollie’s eyes went huge. “That book messed me up . Lily had a dollhouse in the corner of our room that I would watch for like…hours before I’d finally pass out.”

“Maybe these mice actually contain the souls of murder victims and they’re doomed to act out their own tragic demises until someone solves the case and puts them to rest,” I said, tapping at the fogged fiberglass, staring intently at the mouse figurine inside as though it might suddenly come to life and prove me right.

“Maybe that’s your brilliant literary debut. Sounds like a million-copies-sold premise to me.” Ollie slid his arm around my waist as I stood, pulling me against him and kissing me lightly on the temple.

Shame flooded me—for years now I’d talked about how someday I’d leave the corporate grind and become a novelist, the dream job that I’d find a way to turn into a reality…eventually. But really…why bother to pretend anymore? Even in a world where I had the time and space to write, didn’t have the pressure of work and bills and all the what ifs that hand-to-mouth life came with looming over me, I hadn’t come up with anything brilliant. Or really anything at all.

Why hadn’t I been able to come up with anything? Everything was set up for me to succeed there…

I sniffed away Ollie’s idea, willing the toxic thoughts to follow.

“So I write The Dollhouse Murders 2: Mouse Murder ? Might come off as a little derivative.”

“You’ll find a way to make it different, I have faith.” Ollie threw me a quick grin, then pulled out his phone, crouching to snap a photo of the hobbit diorama. “Shit, is it really ten?”

“Why, do you have somewhere to be?” I smirked. Ollie never taught lessons before noon, his ability to sleep in was almost teenaged. And to be fair, most of his students were…well, students, so he stacked lessons into the after-school hours, scheduling the handful of self-improving adults in the hour or two before.

“Is that so impossible to believe?”

“Of course not.” I frowned, confused by his obvious annoyance. We always joked about the way he languished in bed, his artist’s predilection for impossibly late nights and correspondingly nonexistent mornings. Though now that I thought about it, I couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t at least been awake to see me off to work. Most days he was already showered and sitting down at his computer by that point.

Was I the asshole? The possibility felt uncomfortably likely, though I wasn’t sure what, precisely, I was being the asshole about.

“Sorry, I just…When’s your first lesson?”

“Not for a few hours. I just have stuff to do in the studio. Some mixes I need to rework.” He shrugged, the smile he flashed almost casual.

“Is this for a new band?” Rising Waters, the Americana-influenced trio Ollie had been playing fiddle with for the last few years, hadn’t officially broken up, but once their singer had a kid, their practices had gone from weekly to monthly to occasionally. They hadn’t played out in at least six months now.

“No, nothing like that. Honestly, it’s nothing. At least not yet. But if it becomes something, I promise you’ll be the first to know.”

“Fine, if you want to be all mysterious about it.” I rolled my eyes, and Ollie laughed.

“Gotta keep things fresh somehow, right? Anyway, you probably need to get in to the office.”

“Oh, uhh…I already took the morning, maybe I’ll just work from home for a while.”

“Lucky me.” He pressed another kiss to my temple, then stepped away, tilting his head back the way we’d come. “Shall we?” I nodded, following him back home, our conversation easy, normal, but with a thread of… something beneath it. Something I had a sneaking suspicion was my fault. By the time we made it to the top of our street, we’d both fallen silent, and we stayed that way all the way into the apartment. Ollie was halfway across the kitchen before it occurred to me.

“Before you go…What did we do yesterday?”

He stopped short, then turned to me, brow lowered in confusion.

“What do you mean?”

“Just…nothing seemed weird to you yesterday, right? About me?”

“What would have been weird?” Ollie’s head tilted to the side slowly. He was staring at me like I was slowly transforming into Mouserie Antoinette.

“Nothing. I was just…” I licked my lips, casting around for an explanation. I was just living an entirely different life, hoping you could fill me in on anything I missed probably wouldn’t get the best reaction.

The fact that I’d actually been absent from this life, that somehow my body was walking through this world with my mind completely detached from it for an entire day, was mildly horrifying. But clearly it had happened, both in this world and in World D, and I needed to know what, if anything, I’d done while I was…not me.

“Woozy. I felt really woozy this morning. At the train? I couldn’t come up with anything that might explain it, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t forgetting something. I’ve been spread pretty thin at work lately, it can be hard to keep track of stuff.”

“Just lately?” Ollie gave a short, mirthless laugh. I frowned— he’d never come out and said that my work, and how much it demanded from me, bothered him…but had I been deliberately missing the signs? I’d somehow managed to ignore the fact that he’d been keeping normal hours for god knows how long now. “I can’t think of anything particular, it was just a regular Thursday night. Maybe you’re coming down with something?”

“Maybe…”

“Or you could be pregnant. That makes people faint, right?” Ollie flashed me a mischievous grin.

“You’d better take that back before you curse us both.” I chuckled and rolled my eyes. When I looked at him again, Ollie’s smile had faded.

“I don’t know. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, would it?”

I stared, throat suddenly too thick to form a response. I made fun of how dadly Ollie was on occasion, and yes, we’d talked about kids a couple times, but never seriously. He couldn’t think we were anywhere near that…could he? Even the thought of the ring was enough to make me break out in hives, but kids ? That was a kind of permanent that felt anaphylactic. If we were wrong about our ability to go the distance, saw forever in something finite, that would hurt, terribly. But the damage would be contained to us, two adults who made our own decisions. With a kid in the picture…the amount of pain you could cause was off the charts.

Ollie sighed, then shrugged, glancing over his shoulder through the kitchen, clearly anxious to go.

“Are you still feeling off? I could drive you to the doctor.”

“No, I’m okay. Probably I was just…overcaffeinated,” I said, grimacing exaggeratedly, hoping to pierce the cloud cover that had passed over Ollie’s usually sunny face. But if he noticed, he didn’t respond.

“Then I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. I really should get to it, though.” With a last, wistful smile, his dark eyes unreadable, he turned and walked away.

I opened my laptop, but I could barely focus, my thoughts spiraling faster and faster, threatening to spin off into oblivion. Our morning excursion had distracted me from the ring sitting at the bottom of Ollie’s underwear drawer—which was still terrifying, but apparently it was just the tip of the iceberg. A memory of my mother at the airport breached my mind’s defenses, Dad standing stiffly behind me, hands on my shoulders as she said my name once, twice, voice thickening more with each repetition. And I just continued to resolutely stare at my toes, unable to look at the woman who couldn’t be my mother, not anymore, because she would never leave me.

I swallowed hard, stomach churning.

You could break any promise. I knew that better than most. Why couldn’t Ollie see that? How big a leap it was from “happy now” to “together forever” to a child ? Even the word made me want to scurry backward, away from the cliff’s edge, but somehow he was ready to just leap into oblivion…why? How?

He was being na?ve. Wasn’t thinking through the risks. I was the spreadsheeter between the two of us, clearly he’d never even considered the cost-benefit analysis of the proposition, probably hadn’t even realized he should be thinking about the risk—and it was a huge risk, children were the biggest gamble you could possibly take, you couldn’t count them in the cosmic tally the same way you counted lost job opportunities or the likelihood of turning a profit on real estate—at all.

Unless…was I the asshole here, too? I didn’t want it to be true, but hadn’t I been lusting after Drew just hours ago? Barely managed to resist the pull of his clean scent and his warmth and the feel of his frankly impressive erection pressing into my thigh?

Maybe the problem wasn’t that Ollie hadn’t accurately weighed the risks in general. Maybe it was that he was blinded to the fact that the real risk here, the one element that he should know better than to trust…was me.

By late morning, the apartment was sparkling; I’d scoured the sinks, the counters, even the tiled floors in my effort to dispel the anxiety track playing on loop in my head: What if you’re wrong…again?

When I’d inexplicably found myself back in this world—the world where I belonged —I’d been so massively relieved that the enormity of that emotion briefly blocked my doubts from view. But I kept replaying the conversation with Ollie about kids—the way he watched me, like he was looking for something and was disappointed to find it wasn’t there; his blithe lack of concern with pretty much the biggest, scariest choice anyone could make—and the more I went over it, the more ground in my worry became, a patch of grime that no amount of scrubbing could eradicate. When I was with Drew, I couldn’t stop thinking of Ollie, couldn’t help but wonder whether the dream life I’d built in that world had wisps of nightmare threaded through it. But now that I was back here, sparring not over whose turn it was to make dinner, but over whether we were ready for children, I was starting to wonder whether I’d been hung up on the wrong things.

Was it a me problem? Was I just wired for dissatisfaction? And even if it wasn’t…how could I possibly decide between lives that looked so fundamentally different, between partners who both had so much to offer…and both left me vaguely unsettled, unsure whether this habit or that difference of opinion was just one of the things you had to accept, proof that no relationship could ever be perfect, or whether this was the red flag I should heed, or else.

I’d been so eager to get back here, I somehow forgot why I’d left this world in the first place.

When I ran out of things to clean, I cracked open a new romance. As a reader, obviously—I had empirical evidence that it wasn’t worth the effort as a writer. When I made it to the second chapter for the third time and still couldn’t remember any of what I’d read on the preceding pages, I threw it aside and went to check on Ollie. Again.

This time he looked over, sensing me hovering in the doorway.