There’s a headmasterly aspect to the question and I feel somehow disappointed in myself, as if I’ve let everyone down, but him most specifically. ‘I mean we’ve been trying to find the answers, but it’s been impossible to get any traction when I keep skipping every few days. And the skipping is random, like one time it’s after a day, and then I wait four days before the next one. It’s hardly been the most conducive set of conditions for making significant scientific progress.’
‘There’s no need to be so defensive.’
I scrub my hand over my face. ‘Actually, there is.’ My voice is soft. ‘I should have done more. I should have figured this out sooner. Saved us all.’
‘Hey, hey,’ he says and reaches out a hand to touch my shoulder. ‘This isn’t all on you.’
But that’s where he’s wrong. ‘And who exactly else is it on?’ I demand.
The tables have turned and now I’m the one who’s berating me.
‘Let’s take a step back, okay? Think about this all from the very beginning again and then we make a plan. A proper plan. One that I can help you start and then the next Tyler can pick up and onwards we go. And we keep going until we figure this out.’ He cracks me a smile. ‘After all, who else in the world could possibly be better placed to figure this out?’
His words sink in. Whatwouldhave happened if I was just a normal person? If I wasn’t a physicist whose first thought was I had slipped into an alternate universe?
Imagine this scenario from the perspective of someone else.
So I wake up and my flip-flops are different. Faulty memory? Is that what I’d think? Well, of course it is. We know because that’s exactly what I did think. I didn’t look atthe Havaianas and immediately jump to ‘oh yes, an alternate universe, what super fun’.
I struggle to remember when exactly I realized I was slipping through worlds. When did that become the default assumption? What was the thing that made me understand I had actually jumped and it wasn’t my mind playing tricks on me.
Cesca. That was it. When Cesca answered the phone that morning when we were supposed to be hungover – that was when I knew. My sister would not go to the gym before it was barely light. There are some things that change, some decisions we take that seem against the essence of who we are. But that was taking the piss. That wasn’t my Cesca.
But where is my Cesca?
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. Itisa 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 tocollect 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.’
