She follows Mallory and Ilena into the service elevator of Grayson’s building, a place she never wanted to see again.
“Every time?” Aubrey says. “Every choice? I don’t understand.”
Mallory leans against the wheelchair she had Noreen borrow from the rehab center on the ground floor of AIM’s building with an excuse Aubrey doesn’t want to know.
“I don’t either, not really,” Mallory says, “but a split happens.”
“That’s not logical,” Ilena says, slipping on a pair of blue surgical gloves. “How can a choice create an entire new world?”
Mallory shrugs. “Physics, apparently.”
“And that’s how we got here?” Aubrey asks. “Physics? Will it get us home?”
Mallory hands Aubrey an identical pair of blue gloves. “Maybe, if we knew enough.”
Ilena clucks her tongue. “Great. So one of us gets a PhD in physics, and then we get to go home? Good plan, love it.”
Mallory counters with “I didn’t say that was my plan.”
“You didn’t say you had a plan at all.”
Mallory taps the wheelchair. “Well, then, what’s this?”
Aubrey wriggles her fingers into the gloves, fighting the churning of her stomach. “This isn’t going to work,” she says softly.
“Maybe not,” Mallory says. “But there’s no alternative.”
But there is. Isn’t there always a choice? That’s what trips Aubrey up even more than making the wrong choice—the abundance of choices.
Yet if what Mallory said is somehow true, it doesn’t really matter what Aubrey chooses. Somewhere, in another place, another Aubrey didn’t play Fuck, Marry, Kill at the outing, another Aubrey didn’t force herself out of the bathroom stall at the start-up program to eat salad with Ilena and Mallory, another Aubrey didn’t text Ethan, and he’s still alive.
Like he is here. But with no memory of dollar oysters.
The door dings, opening into an alcove at the back of Grayson’s penthouse. Mallory exits first, pushing the wheelchair. Ilena follows, and then Aubrey.
This Aubrey, who maybe didn’t forgive Ethan for choosing the arcade for their first date like she did and didn’t say yes to a second. Or maybe he never asked.
She moves slowly through Grayson’s penthouse, the knowledge of what they’re about to do making her skin crawl. Making her think of Ethan, the utter stillness of his body on the hospital bed in the ER.
She aches for him, the him who knew dollar oysters and that she loved peanut butter in smoothies and who’d decide on sushi or pizza for dinner so she wouldn’t have to make a pro-con list.
They’re not together here. Maybe they weren’t supposed to be in her world either. Did she force it? Did she push against the universe and the universe eventually pushed back? Taking away Ethan because Aubrey was too timid to admit that she would have preferred a hip cocktail bar over the arcade? His death a result of a long line of cause and effect, from every choice Aubrey had ever made? Starting with the boy in high school who’d promised her a pool house and a future she was naive enough to believe but that only lasted long enough for her to lose her virginity in his parents’ storage shed? Did it even matter that ever since, she’s taken her time, doesn’t make snap decisions, that she considers and debates and agonizes? She feels like she’s drowning, unable to surface long enough to stand.
Hot dog or salad, joining AIM or staying with the start-up that became Tinder, texting Ethan or not texting Ethan. If a version of Aubrey lives every choice taken and not, how will this Aubrey—how willshe?—ever know what’s right?
How will she not make the wrong choice again?
She has to figure out the truth. She has to find out why this Aubrey and Ethan aren’t together. If they shouldn’t be. If they never should have been. If not being together could have saved her Ethan’s life too.
She takes a breath, pushes herself above the surface, and stands beside Mallory as she opens the freezer chest.
14
Ilena
Friday Afternoon
One DayAfterthe Outing
