Chapter 17 #3
“Ajay, of course,” she said. “Sorry, I drank a lot last night. Ajay, you are great. But trust me when I say, I am not the girl for you. I’ll see you around, okay?” She smiled at him as though it might soften the blow and then walked into the bathroom, closing and locking the door behind her.
Ajay pulled the sheet higher up his chest and gazed out beyond the balcony.
He sighed, then bit his lip, unsure of himself.
His feelings of having been used and discarded were palpable; they filled up the room, rolling off him and over Casey in waves as she stood helplessly watching the confidence leach out of him.
She was suddenly seething with her other self; why would anyone pass up the chance to be with someone like Ajay?
“And this is without the meme existing?” Casey asked.
“Correct.”
“I don’t get it. Why am I like this?”
“Only you can answer that.”
Another thought occurred to her, one that gave her a sick feeling in her stomach, and she looked up at Margo. “I need to see my brother.”
“Of course,” said Margo kindly. “It’s your glimpse.”
A second later Casey felt grass beneath her shoes and a bitter cold soaking through her uniform.
She opened her eyes to nighttime, and the light spilling out from the French windows in the distance showed that she was in the garden, next to her cabin.
Only it wasn’t her cabin, of course, and when she pressed her face to the cold glass of her front door, she could make out the silhouettes of garden tools and a lawnmower, and three bikes hung from a rack on the ceiling.
The rasp and fizz of a bottle being opened made her turn back toward the house.
Nate took a deep pull on his bottle of beer.
He was sat on a garden chair on the patio, a blanket pulled around his shoulders like a cape.
Casey—still not convinced that she couldn’t be seen or heard—crept up toward the house.
He placed the bottle down on the patio and unlocked his phone.
He was instantly bathed in cold blue light that illuminated a much thinner face than she was used to, with deep, dark circles around his eyes that looked like they’d bedded in for the long haul.
Her heart ached in her chest as she moved toward him, but Margo held her back.
“You know that he can’t hear or see you. All you can do is observe.”
“Why does he look like that? What happened to him?” He barely resembled the brother she knew; this Nate was hollowed out, a haunted expression worn into his handsome face.
Margo shrugged. “In this reality, he didn’t do so well after Grace passed and his path altered accordingly. He found it difficult to concentrate on work and his business suffered. One loan to ease the financial burden became another and then another to help pay back the loans he couldn’t afford.”
“Do I know about this?”
“No. He’s ashamed. And he takes his role as big brother very seriously; he wouldn’t burden you with his problems.”
“He shouldn’t be dealing with all of this alone, it’s not fair.”
“Oh, sweetie, who ever told you that life was fair?”
A stifled sob from Nate made Casey turn back to her brother.
She walked behind him and peered over his shoulder to see what he was looking at on his phone.
Pictures of Grace with the children; a picnic rug spread out on the lawn with Grace sat crossed-legged on one corner, she’s laughing at Conner’s attempts to blow bubbles while baby Ellory in a frilly sun hat snoozes in her arms. “I’m sorry, Gracie,” he said to his wife.
He closed the picture and opened an email.
She recognized the estate agent’s logo at the top of the missive and read it through at the same time Nate did.
Someone had made an offer on the house, and the agent wanted to know whether he would accept it.
For a few moments, he simply stared at the words in the email, as though trying to see behind them to the workings of the phone beneath. Casey felt like she’d been winded.
“Children are very resilient,” said Margo in a voice that was meant to comfort but didn’t. “They’ll be fine.”
Casey ignored her. “Don’t do it!” she pleaded into her brother’s deaf ears. “Don’t sell the house! You love it here, the kids love it here. There must be another way.” She looked to Margo. “Can’t you intervene, just this once? Let me reason with him.”
But Margo only shook her head sadly. “You can’t affect the outcome from here. That’s a job for the Casey who lives in this timeline.”
“But she obviously doesn’t know what’s going on here. How can she change the outcome if she doesn’t have the facts?”
“Perhaps in this life the facts wouldn’t change anything.”
A movement caught her eye, and Casey looked back to see Nate scroll down and tap the Reply To icon.
She took a sharp intake of breath and watched—powerlessly—as he typed out his reply, with tentative, shaking fingers, giving the agent permission to accept the offer.
He sighed a sigh that carried his exhaustion and bleak acceptance out into the darkness, then he mopped roughly at the tears in his eyes with the edge of the blanket and hit Send.