Chapter Nine
He is kind and sweet and buys another drink and touches my hand and says all the right things. And yet still – still – I look at him and I see the nemesis I have railed against for so long. What the actual fuck is wrong with me?
Tyler fucking Adams, whispers the voice in my head.
Tyler fucking Adams. It doesn’t quite feel right, doesn’t fit the guy in front of me who is … well … nice.
He orders us chips and curry sauce. Tells me a story about a holiday to Slapton Sands in Devon a few years ago where he discovered this delicious combination.
I tell him about how that is where Rachel took my dad for their first trip and then he came home and asked me and Cesca if perhaps we’d be okay if Rachel became a more permanent feature in our lives.
They got married a year later and we had a party in the same place.
Cesca and I were bridesmaids and the day was perfect.
Tyler fucking Adams.
He comes back from the bar and this time he sits next to me on the bench, the warmth of his thigh pressing against mine.
He tells me stories about his family. About his friends from university.
He studiously does not mention a girlfriend, even though I start to listen out for one, for a name repeated a few times, someone who makes his breath catch in his throat.
There is no one. Or least he doesn’t seem to mention anyone obviously special.
Not that I care of course.
We talk and talk and I find myself telling him everything about the last week, all the tiny details that made me realize I wasn’t in my world but skipping through others.
Tyler Adams.
It’s four p.m. and there’s no longer any space between us, our thighs still pressed together as he listens intently. He believes me. He wants to help me.
Tyler Adams.
He leans in to me, the heat of him, the feel of his breath on my neck.
I pull away, look up into his face.
He smiles. A sad smile that doesn’t meet his eyes.
‘I like this version of you, Bethany Raven,’ he says quietly.
I like this version of him. But I don’t say it. I can’t say it.
Maybe he was always like this, the traitorous voice whispers inside my head. Maybe you judged him too harshly.
Tyler Adams.
My resolve breaks and I lean my body towards him. His gaze holds mine. My heart skips.
Fucking Tyler Adams.
He walks me to my flat just after five. There is no plan, no real idea how we can possibly get me back to my own world. ‘I just need some time to think about it,’ he says gently at the door to my flat. ‘It’s too big a problem, too big a question to answer right away.’
‘But do you think …’ I don’t finish the question. I don’t know if I want him to answer. What if he says it’s impossible?
‘Nothing is impossible. The fact that this version of you is here in this world … if that is possible, then anything is.’ He shrugs. But not in a way that dismisses the size of the issue. The gravity of the situation is etched into his features, into the way he holds himself. ‘We’ll find a way.’
And do you know what? I actually believe him.
Fucking Tyler Adams might just be the only person who can save me.
I get changed into one of this Bethany’s softest pairs of pyjamas and settle under a blanket on the sofa.
I always feel better under a blanket. Even in the middle of summer.
There’s something about the weight of a blanket over me, pulling me down to earth just enough to feel like I won’t float off at any moment.
Last Christmas Cesca bought me a surprise present.
‘It’s not exactly useful right now,’ she’d said before doing a drumroll on the arm of the sofa.
‘But in the summer you can think back to Christmas Cesca and realize you were a bit of an ungrateful bitch at the time because I absolutely promise you are going to love this.’ She had placed the perfectly wrapped gift into my hands, her smile filling her whole face.
It was a summer blanket. One specially designed to keep you cool. In May, when we had the first heatwave of the year, I pulled it from the box at the bottom of my wardrobe. Ten minutes later I was in heaven. I called her immediately.
‘See, I told you it was perfect,’ she’d said.
But this Cesca didn’t buy me a summer blanket. So I burrow under a winter one anyway, ignoring the heat. Comfort is more important right now.
I wish Cesca was here.
It’s almost midnight when I remember the notebook, now hidden under a bowl of melted ice cream and a rather larger number of supermarket own brand chocolate wrappers than I’d really like to admit.
The notebook is the first thing I checked in every other universe, but I still haven’t even looked here.
I slip it out from under the vestiges of my shame and settle back against the cushion before I crack it open.
It’s the first time I’ve seen this Bethany’s handwriting and it’s subtly different to mine.
Surely that would be a constant? Something that transcended time and place?
I understand each universe is the result of a different set of scenarios playing out in my life – I mean that is literally the basis of multiverse theory and we all know it even just from popular culture.
Yes, I am supposedly going to write a book about what they get wrong, but even so, Spider-Man has done wonders for the general population’s understanding of theoretical physics.
And it’s helped to take my job from ‘seriously you do what now?’ to ‘oh, that’s kind of cool’ and I’m hugely grateful for that.
This Bethany’s handwriting is far neater than my own, more precise, with the letters a uniform height and a tiny ‘O’ instead of a dot for Is and a slanting line for crossing Ts.
I remember one of the guys in the office started dating this woman last year who ran a calligraphy party company – it was billed as the perfect activity for hen parties and baby showers.
I turned down the offer of an afternoon team-building session because it sounded duller than a very dull thing – and I’m a scientist so generally have a high boredom threshold.
But I wonder if this Bethany took her up on the offer and then spent far too much time practising.
I guess it must have kept her off that damn shopping app for a few moments though.
I study her writing a bit more closely. It’s almost uncanny to look at, so similar but also so different. I shudder despite the warmth and wrap the blanket more tightly around myself as if to stop a cold wind blowing in.
As anticipated, because this does at least seem to be a constant, there is no sign of the theorem that came to me that night after the whole falling over in front of Tyler incident.
I groan at the mere memory. Although, it didn’t happen here, did it?
Or did it? I lean my head back. It’s all so complicated.
So thoroughly impossible to track and know and how can I keep all of these different Bethanys inside me at the same time?
Is it ‘Bethanys’? Or ‘Bethanies’? You’d say ‘puppies’ not ‘puppys’.
But then again, I’m sure it’s the Kennedys.
I do a quick google but that just makes me more confused.
Well, I guess there isn’t really a technical right answer for how you pluralize yourself anyway.
I’m going to go with Bethanys. It feels less wrong somehow.
I feel like my head is about to explode.
But – just like I have always done in these types of situations when life threatens to overwhelm me and I can feel panic rising in my chest and I think I might spontaneously combust right here in my seat – I take a deep breath.
And I flip to a fresh page in the notebook and I write out the theorem.
Finding a soothing rhythm in the numbers, the calculations.
Trusting that maths and order and logic will help me.
They really are a constant. I think that’s part of the attraction, why I decided on physics and not on something else like medicine or veterinary practice.
They have too many unexpected outcomes, too many times when you do everything right and yet still the patient is lost. With physics, input is equal to output and there is no deviation.
No unexpected items in the bagging area and all of that.
Well, except that I now seem to be jumping through different universes, increasingly diverging universes as well, with no ability to stop myself, or get home.
Perhaps I should have been a vet.