Chapter Fifty-Three
I press enter and send my search into the ether. But “Tyler Adams obituary” returns nothing.
I heave a sigh of relief and resume my search.
Eventually I track him down on Instagram.
He only appears to post very occasionally and mainly when he’s out drinking with Nessie.
He looks different in this world; his hair longer and his tan deeper.
From the looks of his profile he seems to spend a lot of time stand-up paddleboarding in Brighton.
He also mentions being a teacher but there are no more details.
And then I remember something one of the other Tylers said.
About his motivation. About how beating me had become his thing, driving him forwards in his career.
Perhaps in this world he didn’t have anyone he thought he needed to compete against and instead found another way to make his life fulfilling?
I spot the name of the school – Battersea Park Academy – written underneath a crest I knew back in my world. This is the first school Cesca worked at, one from which she stole an inordinate number of mugs emblazoned with the crest. My parents have been using them for years.
Tyler Adams has Cesca’s old job. What a funny small world.
I pull out my phone and start to compose the email.
The one that tells this world’s Tyler all about my predicament and that he’s already met me in another world and I can prove it with my list of things about him I shouldn’t know but somehow do.
The same email that has worked so many times before.
After all, Tyler is one of the most consistent people I’ve met; never changing, never diverging in any of the worlds I’ve travelled through.
Until now. This Tyler is not the same.
I send the email anyway.
Every other Tyler has replied within minutes with a time and a place for us to meet. He has believed me unconditionally.
This Tyler also replies quickly; he must be on his lunch break. But he doesn’t offer to meet me.
I don’t know who you are and please do not contact me again.
Amina comes back to find me staring at my phone, my righteous indignation starting to fade into something else. She’s armed with coffee and croissants filled with cheese and ham, but even these don’t cheer me up.
‘He told me to fuck off,’ I tell her and then take the biggest bite of croissant I can fit in my mouth.
‘Show me,’ she replies, flapping her hand in my direction. I hand over my phone. ‘Ahem,’ she says a few times as she reads the email I sent and his reply, occasionally taking dainty nibbles on the edge of her own croissant.
She reaches out to give me back the phone. ‘Well, he doesn’t seem like he wants to help you.’
‘That’s an understatement. I mean, all of that stuff though. I know him. This proves I know him. Why can’t he see that I’m telling the truth?’
Amina takes a sip from her coffee cup. ‘You said he’s a teacher here, but not in your world?’
‘Not in any other world. He’s been a constant, every world, every version of him, they’re all the same.’
‘But here he’s different. So what if the ways that you know him, the other hims, don’t track over into this world. What if he looks at the version of him you paint in this email and he doesn’t recognize himself?’
‘Then he’d think I was a lunatic and …’ I falter as reality hits me. Amina is right. ‘And,’ I continue, ‘he’d tell me to leave him alone.’
‘Bingo,’ Amina says.
‘I need to go and talk to him. If I can see him in person I can find some way to make him believe me.’ I stand up, brushing crumbs from my lap onto the floor.
‘It’s almost three,’ Amina tells me with a hint of something that sounds like a warning in her tone.
‘So?’
‘It’s Tuesday.’ Amina is staring at me like that should mean something.
‘Right … you need to help me out here. I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh, sorry, I keep forgetting.’ She shakes her head. ‘You’re not my Bethany.’ She gives me a wry smile. ‘Sometimes I look at you and I can tell you’re not her. But then you’ll do something and it’s like she’s back. It’s kind of disorientating.’
‘Yeah, tell me about it,’ I mutter.
‘On Tuesdays at four p.m. Nick picks you up so you can both go for early drinks with his mother at the Beaverbrook Hotel.’
I stare back at her. ‘Really? But that sounds …’ I try to find the right word.
Amina finishes the sentence for me. ‘Hideous.’
‘That’s exactly the word I was aiming for.’
‘It’s what my Bethany always used to say.’
We straighten up the storage unit, clearing away the wrappers from lunch and sweeping up the crumbs I dropped on the floor.
With my back to Amina, I finally pluck up the courage to ask her the question that’s been burning a hole in my brain since the moment I woke up from the coma.
‘Why did I marry him here in this world?’
‘Why didn’t you in yours?’ she replies, as if that’s a good answer.
‘Because I realized he was awful.’
‘How?’
‘There was this thing that did the rounds on Twitter at the time. Cesca was obsessed with this account that would post all the worst shit that men did, like it’s literally just trash takes.
She would read them all and seethe and rage, but then she would take that fire and use it to make the world a better place. It was like fuel for her.’
‘Tammys_Tales?’ Amina asks.
‘Yes!’
‘Big fan.’
‘Right. So Tammys_Tales posted this video of a woman at her graduation ceremony. She looked so proud standing waiting for her turn, like this huge smile on her face over such a massive achievement. But then her boyfriend comes bounding onto the stage and right there, in the middle of the greatest moment of her career, he proposes.’
‘Yeah, I remember that one.’
‘So, in my world, Cesca sent me the tweet and I remember watching it and I thought, aww that’s kind of sweet. And then I read all the comments and I realized it wasn’t sweet. It was controlling; he took her light and shone it back on himself. Like he couldn’t even let her have that one day.’
Amina nods. I’m assuming she knows where this story is going.
‘So then, on the day of my master’s graduation, Nick bounds up on the stage and proposes. This huge grin on his face like this is the best idea he’s ever had and I am about to be the luckiest girl alive. In my world, I told him to fuck off.’
Amina sucks in a breath. ‘You actually said that?’
‘Yep. In front of the dean, and my parents, and every single person I’d studied with.’
‘Wow!’
‘Yeah. But in this world …’ I spread my arms out. ‘Well, I’m married to him. There’s a picture of my engagement ring in the same frame as my graduation photo.’
‘Here you did not tell him to fuck off.’
‘Exactly. But why not?’
‘Perhaps you didn’t see the tweet?’
She makes it sounds so simple. But could it really be that banal?
My whole life changed because I didn’t see a fucking tweet?
‘Cesca sent it because she was stuck on a train that had lost power. She was there for four hours and didn’t have much else to do but scroll Twitter and send me memes.
She was travelling back from having lunch with me.
We’d debated having another drink, but Cesca said we should probably be sensible.
She was meant to be going on a date that night and she didn’t want to miss it.
But I convinced her to stay and so she was on the train when the power went out. ’
‘So what if in this world she got the earlier train?’
‘Yeah. She wouldn’t have sent me the video. I wouldn’t have had my epiphany. I would still have married Nick.’
‘So one tiny choice created this whole ripple.’
‘Crazy huh?’
‘Yeah.’
‘But,’ I add, ‘not as crazy as why this Bethany is still married to him after all this time.’
Amina is quiet for a moment. ‘She didn’t want to be,’ she says quietly. ‘She hated him. But she needed him.’
I think of the prenup, the fact that he had found a way to make sure she couldn’t leave. ‘I would still have run.’
Amina points at the machine this Bethany built in a storage unit on an industrial estate. ‘She did run.’