Chapter 54
I always believed in fate. I just didn’t know what mine was until that text message arrived. Ilena admitting to a cover-up.
The release of that video would ruin everything.
That was never the plan.
That was never my plan.
Little did I know he had a plan of his own. Ethan’s plan could not be allowed to succeed. Not when it was at odds with all
I had done. All I had risked. And endured: humoring him, pretending he was the one in charge even though I was the one who’d
done it all to raise our company to the level it deserved.
They deserved.
They would see, they would know, they would thank me.
That night, a month before the outing, they took each other’s hand and walked away as one. United by a secret they could never
tell. I did that. I saved them from losing each other. I was supposed to save us all.
The reveal of the computer glitch was supposed to have come from me—a feat to be perceived as astonishing yet simple in practice
as I’d created it. I’d only used Ethan and his position within his company to mask the error’s existence until I said otherwise.
The valuation, the attention, the success. Me, me, me. I’d intended to explain it all. And they would understand that I was the one who had manufactured the error and taken us
to the brink of greatness, the wealth of users, the wealth those users would shower upon us, and they would embrace me as
they did you.
That was the plan. To play out on my timeline.
Not his. Ethan got greedy. He sought to blackmail his way to a windfall.
First Grayson, then, when that failed, Ilena.
The text message Ethan sent me from the bar with the incriminating recording of Ilena could not come to light.
It was quicksand. I was drowning. Y’all were drowning.
He had to be stopped. And quickly. What none of us knew was that fate had already stepped in to help.
Fate made the printer jam on the document that had to be signed in the morning. Fate made me stay at AIM until it was too
dark to comfortably cycle home. Fate made me walk past the stop just as the bus arrived. Fate made me choose to stand in front
rather than sit in back. Fate made me see it all coming. Clearly. In an instant. The way out.
They were on opposite sides of the street.
Ethan was in the middle.
My hand found the bus’s emergency stop.
My voice cried, distracting the driver.
The shrieking brakes, the wrenching halt, the thundering shouts, the heaving pain, so much in the moment, so much to come.
But they had taught me: one a means to an end; the other right and wrong. This was right. This was the only way it should
end. In Ethan’s death.
After we went public, they would see. They would know. They would thank me. They would love me. That was my plan.
That the game annihilated.
One second I was crossing the lawn of the gastropub in my white linen dress to round y’all up, and the next I was lying in
white linen pants in a lumpy futon in the living room of the studio I apparently shared with a Tufts grad student. Except
I lived alone.
The smell of meat smoking on an open fire from the barbecue restaurant down the street wafted through the open windows, a
constant I’ve come to find comforting, but that first day, I ran to the bathroom, gagging. That was when I saw my hair. Red.
I never wanted to be anything but the blonde I was.
Time travel was my first guess, yet aside from the hair and toned calves, which I would come to discover are the result of an apparent affinity for heels, I looked the same age. As did all of you.
Panic is not something I do. Methodical, that’s in my DNA. That first morning, my phone had sounded with a reminder to set
up the AIM conference room for a meeting with Grayson Fields. No such meeting had been scheduled in what I would come to realize
was our universe. I knew little of what was happening then. My mind remained on what I knew of our world and what I had to
protect: all of you.
Y’all were easy to find. This phone tracks all things Mallory: her laptop, her phone, herself. She must have trackers on all
the things she might lose. I didn’t even change, just hurried to Grayson’s penthouse, and there you all were at the door with
that dog that’s so cute it demands to be kidnapped. Then I heard: “Watching the dog while Mr. Fields goes on an unexpected trip.” A lie from Mallory’s lips. At odds with the meeting surely in everyone’s calendar. Y’all were heading to AIM, but I didn’t
know if y’all were y’all. I stayed out of sight and hurried to AIM to find out.
I was dumping that bougie tea in sachets when you ran past. I waved, but you continued on as if you didn’t even know me. I
was alone here the same way I had been in our universe. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.
That was when I knew why I was here. To right all the wrongs. The wrongs y’all have done to me.
When I tracked down Ethan, I suggested a painted rock might be just the trick to connect with you, the success of which he relayed to me on the balcony at Ilena’s dinner party.
When I learned Kai had a crush, I reminded him that you don’t drink caffeine and told him to buy you another rosé at the bar, because who doesn’t love a love triangle?
Poor jilted James, that’s who. The fury in his eyes when he took my musings over those old-fashioneds Mallory loves to mean his dear Felix had been trapped? My, oh, my.
Not that everything went to plan. When I realized at least one of those hideous state charms on my key chain was missing,
I searched everywhere before trying the Latham home. The doorbell camera I learned about later was unfortunate. Still, I was
intent on creating chaos. And I did. Scheduling the Shandy Shane visit for the same time as the police interview and making sure Heidi Hoffman was there played out even more brilliantly
than I’d imagined. Ironically, that was where it all fell apart.
I was the one who nudged the door open and encouraged Harley to interrupt. Seeing how frightened y’all were crushed me worse
than a stampede of wild horses. I had to do something to help fix what I’d done.
This wasn’t me. It wasn’t who I wanted us to be. Why I had done all I had in our universe. Y’all were here. And so was I. This was our chance to come together. I knew exactly where to start. The river. The event I suggested you
re-create in our universe.
That day, none of you came to work. I took a chance, and there you were, huddled around that sandbox. I had no idea what you’d
intended. I just knew I needed to be there too. To come clean. To have us come together, finally, as one. Fast as small-town
gossip, I ran alongside the river, weaving through all those people running home from work, my ponytail bouncing like I was
on a trampoline. But then you walked away.
And now they are gone.
But we, we, are here. And we will be the best of friends.
Two hands encase Aubrey’s, the warmth at odds with the piercing cold sparking gooseflesh along her skin. She looks to the
table in front of them. She’s reassured by the knot of jet-black hair and the person to which it’s attached.
Aubrey extracts her hand, sliding it past the half-finished old-fashioned across the table and the untouched one in front of herself.
She manages a half smile despite the nausea blooming in her stomach at what she’d just heard.
Ethan, her Ethan, had been killed—just not by Aubrey.
“The plan, your plan, did it extend beyond, to anything else? Anyone else?”
“Mr. Fields?”
She smiles so genuinely with such affection that Aubrey almost feels sorry for her. For how lonely she must have been. Aubrey
thinks of the night of the outing in the world that had once been theirs, the night she came to them with drinks and a desire
to please, the night Aubrey had invited her to stay. She hadn’t. Yet she must not have strayed far. She must have been spatially
close enough to move between worlds when they bumped. But not quite close enough to return when Mallory and Ilena did.
It was the David Copperfield that sparked Aubrey’s suspicion. When Aubrey had tried to explain the reference to Kai, she discovered
that the man doesn’t exist here—at least not as a magician that everyone knows. But this woman was here. And she knew David
Copperfield too. She’d said it when Harley interrupted the police interview.
“Y’all know that Mallory sometimes asks me to restock her emergency snack bag,” she says, having slipped back into using their
first names. “I like to surprise her. Change it up.”
This Mallory has no memory of anything after the outing. She admits an attraction to Grayson but swears they never slept together.
If she went home with him after the party, that was the first time. She had no reason to keep her emergency snack bag free
of nut crackers. An accident, that’s what her lawyer is insisting.
Could this help? If Mallory didn’t pack her own snack bag, she could be cleared entirely, not even that involuntary manslaughter they’re floating would have a chance.
Mallory would no longer have to worry about being in jail when the newly separated Ilena gives birth to her daughter.
Mallory could accept an invitation to The Shandy Shane Show for something other than as part of a scandal.
She did go on, they all did, to explain the postponement of the direct listing
as a result of the tragic loss of Grayson Fields.
Aubrey gently tugs Harley closer. “Grayson, then. The crackers being made of nut . . .”
“An unfortunate twist of fate.”
Relief bubbles up inside Aubrey’s chest before her mind takes it one step further. Because this woman admitted that she woke
up here, same as them, with no idea that she was in a different universe. With a different Grayson. A Grayson who didn’t actually
know the secret that she had already killed to keep. Was she leaving anything out?
“Not planned?” Aubrey says carefully.
“Not by this version of me,” she says. “Perhaps the other Noreen . . . well, I guess we may never know.”
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