My stomach contracts and my shoulders tighten. “Like maybe my parents didn’t decide to adopt me.”
Alice jams her mouth shut. “Or maybe your birth mother decided to keep you. Or maybe someone offered your mom a different job and in Beau’s world, you live in Timbuktu. Natalie, it could be anything—there’s no way to know that hitting the snooze button on your alarm clock one extra time couldn’t have been the point at which these two worlds split. The point is—the two theories don’t strike me as altogether compatible. We’re still missing something important.”
“Couldn’t both theories be true? I mean, what if it’s just one enormous, windy time Slinky with a zillion arms?”
“I have no idea. Believe it or not, I haven’t spent a ton of time studying time travel. I’ve made some calls to supposed experts, but if we’re being realistic, we probably know more than them at this point. They’re operating on math-based theories, with no experiential element.”
“And we’re following trails of silver light and your gut.” I drop my face into my hands and grip my hair near the scalp. “I don’t even care. I don’t need to understand how all this works, or even understand why. I just need to find Grandmother and figure out how to save Matt, or whoever else might be in danger, and we’re no closer to that than we were last week.”
I close my eyes until I’m sure no tears will come, then look up at Alice again. She’s back in her chair, her mouth screwed up and fine lines drawn between her brows. She leans forward and awkwardly covers my hand with hers. A few seconds pass, and she lets go and comes to sit beside me. “We’ll keep trying.”
“Someone’s going to die,” I whisper.
Alice sighs and leans her head back against the couch. “Maybe,” she says softly.
We stay like that for the rest of our time together, and that’s how I know: We’ve both given up.
When I stand to go, she grabs my elbow. “You’ll be here Thursday.” It’s somewhere between question and statement.
“Probably,” I manage.
For the rest of the day and most of Wednesday I call Beau at thirty-minute intervals, but still I can’t get through to his burner phone. I spend my time pacing in Megan’s room, hiking listlessly through the woods, stumbling through painful small talk over the dinner table with Mrs. Phillips, and driving out to Beau’s house to sit in the room that should be his.
Around midnight, I’m lying in bed when my phone starts to vibrate beside my ear. “Hello?” I answer, immediately alert.
“Natalie.” Beau breathes my name out like a sigh of relief.
“Thank Grandmother,” I say.
“I missed you,” he says. “I thought maybe . . .”
He trails off, but I know what he was going to say. “No, not yet.”
We haven’t seen each other for the last time yet.
“Can I come there?” he asks.
“To Megan’s?”
“I can’t be at home right now.”
I debate it in my mind for a minute. I don’t want to be disrespectful to Megan’s family, but so much more than that, I don’t want to lose any time with Beau. “Park down on the street and come to the back door.”
“I’ll be right there.”
“Can we stay on the phone?” I ask. “Just in case.”
“Yeah,” he says. “We can do that.”
I don’t hang up until he’s standing in front of me on the other side of the glass door, his phone to his ear and that heavy smile across his face as he raises one hand. I toss the phone into the chair and slide the door open, pulling him against me. He nestles his nose into the side of my face.
“You’re here.”
He turns me around so my back presses against the half-open door and his fingers rest on the waistline of my shorts. “I’m here.” He stares at me hard through the dark, and everywhere his eyes touch me, I feel heat.
“Do you think if we had more time, it’d stop feeling like this?”
“That depends,” he murmurs.
“On?”
“On how this feels.”
Before I can reply, the lamp beside the bed winks out, and the empty layers of sheets surge upward around a body that wasn’t there before. “Oh my God,” I gasp, then clap my hand over my own mouth.
Beau glances over his shoulder toward the softly snoring person in the bed: the Other Megan. “Come on,” he mouths, pulling me outside and sliding the door shut.
We move off down the patio to the wooden lounge chairs and little table where Megan and I used to sit on Saturday mornings, drinking coffee and eating sugary cereal to stifle mild hangovers. “What am I supposed to do?” I ask Beau. “Even if she disappears, I could go back in there, fall asleep, and wake up spooning a version of her who’s only met me for, like, five minutes.”
Beau rubs the pinched spot between his eyebrows. “This is getting a little crazy.”
“No kidding. We really can’t go to your house?”
He stares at the ground and runs his teeth over his bottom lip. “It’s not good there.”
I touch the side of his face, his skin warm and sleek with sweat. “Okay.”
We sit down in the dewy lounge chairs, heads leaned against the side of the house. “I wish we could find out,” Beau says.
“Huh?”
“How it would feel later,” he says, “if we had more time.”
I sigh and pull his arm around my shoulder. “Probably you’d get sick of me shouting out what I think’s going to happen in every movie, and I’d get sick of you drinking and leaving your clothes wherever you took them off. I’d hate how messy you keep your room, and it’d drive you crazy how I can’t do anything without planning every detail first.”
Beau laughs.
“What, you think I’m wrong?”
He looks over at me. “I think that’s a lie and you know it.”
“Okay, fine. You tell me what would happen.”
“We’d get married,” he says.
“Oh? In my world or yours?”
“Both,” he says. “Then someday, ten or fifteen years from now, you’d have a baby.”
“What would we name him?” I say, playing along.