Chapter Thirty-Eight
The edges of something are coming into focus.
I close my eyes, the sun warming my face and the taste of coffee on my tongue.
And I let my mind go, chasing down the thought, coalescing it into some kind of order.
This is the key. The fact that I could have been skipping before, but the changes were too small, too inconsequential to even notice. Which means …
‘You’ve got something, haven’t you?’ Tyler says and stands up. He reaches out his hand and a jolt of electricity runs through me as he pulls me up to stand next to him. ‘We need to go to the library.’
‘I don’t think the answer will be in a book.’
‘No. But I’ve rented a room for the day. I needed space to think and sometimes a change of scenery from my boring office can help unlock the creative part of my brain.’ He smiles in this stupidly dorky way. ‘And I need to draw.’
‘You have a whiteboard?’
‘Even better.’
The room he’s rented doesn’t have a whiteboard. It is a whiteboard. And not made from sheets stuck to the wall like my office at home; this is state-of-the-art panelling. ‘Wow,’ I whisper as he shows me.
‘Yep,’ he replies, and then gives me a few moments to collect myself. Sorry, this is the kind of stuff I can nerd out over for days.
‘So, what was the first thing you noticed as being different?’ Tyler asks, his voice level and imbued with this gravity that makes me immediately think harder about the question. He really should have been a teacher or a lecturer; he has an uncanny knack for this.
‘Umm …’ I’m not sure I want to tell him that the very first thing I noticed was my flip-flops had changed colour. I mean it hardly screams calm and professional scientist who has her life together except for this teeny issue of being in the wrong universe.
He tilts his head to one side and appraises me, one eyebrow raised. He’s waiting for my answer.
And then it hits me: it wasn’t the flip-flops. ‘I wrote down the theorem and then in the morning it wasn’t in my notebook. I thought at first I’d just dreamt it, writing it down. It was just before I went to sleep that the final pieces came together.’
‘But something else was out of place too?’ There’s that eyebrow again.
I sigh. ‘Okay. So it sounds dumb but I’d bought some shoes and they were a different colour to the ones I’d chosen.’
‘You’d just bought them?’
‘A few days before.’
‘Okay.’ He pauses, deep in thought. ‘And then when you skipped again?’
‘That time I knew because Cesca was in the gym at seven in the morning and I wasn’t hungover from going out with her the night before. Oh—’
I stop myself. Because suddenly I remember a day.
It was about a month before this all started.
I was on the Tube, flicking idly through a copy of the Metro that someone had left on one of the seats – I don’t normally read the paper, but I do like to have a quick glance at the Guilty Pleasures celeb gossip when there’s a copy hanging about.
There was an advert. A woman who looked a lot like one of the girls I went to school with.
Felicity: all blonde hair and icy blue eyes and the kind of haughty expression you can only master if Daddy is an earl or at least a minor baron.
It wasn’t actually Felicity – this girl in the advert was extolling the virtues of some nutritionally controlled food delivery service, something Felicity would never have even dreamt to put her face to – but it made me smile and I’d sent a picture of the page to Cesca.
She’d replied back with a stream of crying-laughing emojis. Imagine if it really was her?
Anyway, Cesca had been starting to worry about how often she was getting Deliveroo and Just Eat, so she decided to check out the service the advert was selling.
She discovered it was over four hundred pounds a month and called me to say how f-ing ridiculous it was and how she couldn’t believe the audacity of this company to charge that much for a few ready meals and some shrink-wrapped oranges.
They kept hounding her though, offering her a trial month at less than half price.
Eventually I told her to block the email and the salesperson who kept calling.
Except, in the world where Cesca was in the gym at seven a.m., she hadn’t blocked them and had been suckered in when she was feeling low after consuming a family-size tray of spaghetti and meatballs from Casa Romano.
‘Earth to Bethany,’ a voice stage-whispers in my ear, making me jump.
‘Sorry!’ I try to shake off the memory of Cesca bitching about guerilla sales tactics in my world.
‘You were a million miles away,’ Tyler says.
Slowly the whiteboard in front of me comes back into focus and I see it clearly for the first time.
‘I feel like each time I skip, I’m less like the real me.
’ I enunciate the words clearly, speaking slowly as my brain jumps ahead to try to chase down the conclusion just brushing the edges of my thoughts.
‘Like each life diverges further and further. Ohhh …’ I close my eyes.
This is it. ‘It’s like the point of divergence is further and further back. ’
He squints. ‘I’m not sure I’m following …’
I take the whiteboard pen from his hand. ‘It’s like this.’
I start by drawing a blob at the right-hand edge of the whiteboard, towards the top.
‘This here is me. The real me. I will be Bethany A.’ Then I draw a line running to the left, a straight horizontal line all the way towards the left-hand edge.
On it I mark a series of diamonds. ‘Each of these represents a decision, or a thing that happened.’ I point to the one just to the left of the Bethany A blob.
‘This is me buying flip-flops at the start of the summer. In my world I bought beige ones. But in another universe I went with white.’ I draw an arrow down. ‘This is Bethany B.’
Then I take a step to the left and point at another diamond.
‘This is me telling Cesca to block the irritating food delivery sales team person. But,’ I hold up a finger, ‘what if in another world I didn’t tell her to block them and that was why Cesca ended up taking the discounted trial and therefore why she was in the gym at seven a.m.’ I draw a line downwards, a few centimetres longer than the last horizontal one from the flip-flops choice.
‘So, you’re saying that in each universe, the thing that makes it not your original world is something that happened further and further back in your timeline?’
I grin at Tyler. This is why he’s so impressive, that brain just latching on to exactly what I’m trying to say. ‘Bingo.’ I wink at him and then my cheeks flare at just how corny an action it was, so I turn back to the board and continue to plot out the divergences. Eventually I get to this world.
‘So what is the key thing here?’ Tyler asks.
I wrack my brain, because what is it? Of course. The white hairs covering my black T-shirt are testimony to what is different here. ‘I have a cat.’ He makes the smallest grimace, so quick I almost miss it. ‘I know you’re a dog person,’ I tell him.
‘It isn’t that I don’t like cats, I just …’ He shrugs. ‘You know, prefer dogs.’
‘Me too. Which is why it is explicitly odd that here I have a cat.’
‘So, why do you?’ He cocks his head to one side as he tries to figure me out.
‘There’s only one time I’ve even contemplated a cat …
’ I start to tell him but then I trail off.
I’m not sure I want to tell him this story.
About how, approximately six months after Nick and I broke up, I ended up in a pretty dark place, somehow convinced I’d never find love and I’d end up alone.
I thought I may as well lean in to the whole ‘crazy cat lady’ thing and went to look at a litter of kittens one of the neighbours was selling.
But then Cesca persuaded me that a week in the Maldives with her was a far better idea.
All the kittens had been claimed by the time we came back and that was that.
‘Earth to Bethany,’ Tyler says, jolting me back to the present.
‘Sorry,’ I mumble, but then I realize something. The divergence in this life was in the winter of 2018. If we’re right – and I really don’t think we’re wrong – then I’m edging closer and closer to the biggest decision I’ve ever made. The one that changed me in more ways than I can ever articulate.
But what if I had made another choice?