She nods.
‘And how often did you come here?’
‘For the first few days I came every night. But then it got more difficult for me to sneak out, so it slowed to maybe twice a week, although generally on different nights.’
Every few nights. Never more than four nights between. ‘Do you know which dates?’ I ask.
‘I kept records,’ Amina tells me with the exact same tone Alesha uses when she tells me she’s done the same thing. A dash of pride, a hint of a challenge for someone to criticize, and a dollop of smug. Amina is like a prism, refracting the light in a million different ways, each one reminding me of someone else I’ve met along this journey, as though all of us Bethanys seek certain people in our lives and Amina has had to take on many of those roles.
She hands over a small notebook covered in neat writing, each word carefully penned in block capitals. It’s a list of dates and observations of the conditions and the outcomes.
‘This is every time I tried to run a correction.’
I trace the dates backwards, calculating the gaps between Amina’s attempts. There’s a familiarity there and I try to remember the sequence I repeated as I ran it through the algorithm a stupidly precocious Tyler had written.
I almost want to laugh. But I know there’s a chance that hysteria will take over me and I’ll never stop.
Because Amina wasn’t pulling her Bethany back to this world.
She was pulling me.
‘We need Tyler,’ I tell her.
‘Tyler?’ Amina’s face is blank.
‘Tyler Adams. You must have heard of Tyler Adams?’
‘Is he famous?’
‘Only the most famous man in theoretical physics. Youmusthave heard of him.’
But Amina is adamant. In this world Tyler Adams is an entirely unknown entity in her and Bethany’s life.
Where is he?
I start to hunt for Tyler while Amina heads out of the storage unit to find us some coffee and sandwiches. I smile slightly to myself. It seems Amina also fills the void of Cesca in this Bethany’s world, the one who always makes sure there are snacks and drinks and suitable provisions for any adventure.
‘Any allergies?’ Amina asks me from the half-opened door before she ducks beneath it.
I stare back at her and wait for her to realize what she’s asked.
‘Right,’ she says and a blush blooms across her cheeks. ‘This is still the same Bethany’s body. Got it.’
The bizarreness of the situation doesn’t even seem to faze her.
Tyler Adams doesn’t work at the university. I can’t find any published works attributed to him since the paper on quantum computing he published two years after he completed his PhD in 2016. It’s like he just dropped off the face of the physics planet.
A cold hand snakes up the back of my neck.What if… I push down the thought. I’m sure that isn’t it. But my fingers shake as I type “Tyler Adams obituary” into Google.
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.
I dig further, searching for more information and then I hit the jackpot and find Tyler listed on a faculty page. It’s true. In this world, the brilliant and charismatic and eminently fanciable Tyler Adams became a science teacher. There’s more detail when I click on the link by his name. The school talks about his dazzling early career and how he realized his calling back in 2018 and so joined the science department. His life is so different in this world it’s almost uncanny.
