‘I can take Molly,’ said Nora. ‘If you’ve got a big day.’

‘Oh, it’s an okay one. A gall bladder and a pancreas so far. Easy street. Am going to get a run in.’

‘Right. Yes. ’Course. For the half-marathon on Sunday.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter,’ Nora said, ‘I’m just delirious from sleeping on the floor.’

‘No worries. Anyway, my sister phoned. They want her to illustrate the calendar for Kew Gardens. Lots of plants. She’s really pleased.’

He smiled. He seemed happy for this sister of his who Nora had never heard of. She wanted to thank him for being so good about her dead cat, but she obviously couldn’t so she just said, ‘Thank you.’

‘For what?’

‘Just, you know, everything.’

‘Oh. Right. Okay.’

‘So, thank you.’

He nodded. ‘That’s nice. Anyway, run time.’

He drained his coffee and then disappeared. Nora scanned the room, absorbing every new piece of information. Every cuddly toy and book and plug socket, as if they were all part of the jigsaw of her life.

An hour later, Molly was being dropped off at her infant school and Nora was doing the usual. Checking her emails and social media. Her social media activity wasn’t great in this life, which was always a promising sign, but she did have a hell of a lot of emails. From these emails she divined that she was not simply ‘stopping’ teaching at the moment but had officially stopped. She was on a sabbatical in order to write a book about Henry David Thoreau and his relevance for the modern-day environmentalist movement. Later in the year she planned to visit Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, funded by a research grant.

This seemed pretty good.

Almost annoyingly good.

A good life with a good daughter and a good man in a good house in a good town. It was an excess of good. A life where she could sit down all day reading and researching and writing about her all-time favourite philosopher.

‘This is cool,’ she told the dog. ‘Isn’t this cool?’

Plato yawned indifference.

Then she set about exploring her house, being watched by the Labrador from the comfy-looking sofa. The living room was vast. Her feet sunk into the soft rug.

White floorboards, TV, wood-burner, electric piano, two new laptops on charge, a mahogany chest on which perched an ornate chess set, nicely stacked bookshelves. A lovely guitar resting in the corner. Nora recognised the model instantly as an electro-acoustic ‘Midnight Satin’ Fender Malibu. She had sold one during her last week working at String Theory.

There were photos in frames dotted around the living room. Kids she didn’t know with a woman who looked like Ash – presumably his sister. An old photo of her deceased parents on their wedding day, and one of her and Ash getting married. She could see her brother in the background. A photo of Plato. And one of a baby, presumably Molly.

She glanced at the books. Some yoga manuals, but not the second-hand ones she owned in her root life. Some medical books. She recognised her copy of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, along with Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, both of which she’d owned since university. A familiar Principles of Geology was also there. There were quite a few books on Thoreau. And copies of Plato’s Republic and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which she did own in her root life, but not in these editions. Intellectual-looking books by people like Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. There were a lot of works on Eastern philosophy that she had never read before and she wondered if she stayed in this life, and she couldn’t see why not, whether there was a way to read them all before she had to do any more teaching at Cambridge.

Novels, some Dickens, The Bell Jar, some geeky pop-science books, a few music books, a few parenting manuals, Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, some stuff on climate change, and a large hardback called Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape.

She had rarely, if ever, been this consistently highbrow. This was clearly what happened when you did a Master’s degree at Cambridge and then went on sabbatical to write a book on your favourite philosopher.

‘You’re impressed by me,’ she told the dog. ‘You can admit it.’

There was also a pile of music songbooks, and Nora smiled when she saw that the one on top was the Simon & Garfunkel one she had sold to Ash the day he had asked her out for a coffee. On the coffee table there was a nice glossy hardback book of photographs of Spanish scenery and on the sofa there was something called The Encyclopedia of Plants and Flowers.

And in the magazine rack there was the brand-new National Geographic with the picture of the black hole on the cover.

There was a picture on the wall. A Miró print from a museum in Barcelona.

‘Have me and Ash been to Barcelona together, Plato?’ She imagined them both, hand-in-hand, wandering the streets of the Gothic Quarter together, popping into a bar for tapas and Rioja.

On the wall opposite the bookshelves there was a mirror. A broad mirror with an ornate white frame. She no longer got surprised by the variations in appearance between lives. She had been every shape and size and had every haircut. In this life, she looked perfectly pleasant. She would have liked to be friends with this person. It wasn’t an Olympian or a rock star or a Cirque du Soleil acrobat she was looking at, but it was someone who seemed to be having a good life, as far as you could tell these things. A grown-up who had a vague idea of who she was and what she was doing in life. Short hair, but not dramatically so, skin looking healthier than in her root life, either through diet, a lack of red wine, exercise, or the cleansers and moisturisers she’d seen in the bathroom, which were all more expensive than anything she owned in her root life.

‘Well,’ she said to Plato. ‘This is a nice life, yeah?’

Plato seemed to agree.

A Spiritual Quest for a Deeper Connection with the Universe

She found the medicine drawer in the kitchen and rummaged through the plasters and ibuprofen and Calpol and multivitamins and runners’ knee bandages but couldn’t find any sign of any anti-depressants.

Maybe this was it. Maybe this was, finally, the life she was going to stay put in. The life she would choose. The one she would not return to the shelves.

I could be happy here.

A little later, in the shower, she scanned her body for new marks. There were no tattoos but there was a scar. Not a self-inflicted scar but a surgical-looking one – a long, delicate horizontal line below her navel. She had seen a caesarean scar before, and now she stroked her thumb along it, thinking that even if she stayed in this life she would have always turned up late for it.

Ash came back home from dropping Molly off.

She hastily dressed so he wouldn’t see her naked.

They had breakfast together. They sat at their kitchen table and scrolled the day’s news and ate sourdough toast and were very much like a living endorsement for marriage.

And then Ash went to the hospital and she stayed home to research Thoreau all day. She read her work-in-progress, which already had an impressive word-count of 42,729, and sat eating toast before picking Molly up from school.

Molly wanted to go to the park ‘like normal’ to feed the ducks, and so Nora took her, disguising the fact that she was using Google Maps to navigate her way there.

Nora pushed her on a swing till her arms ached, slid down slides with her and crawled behind her through large metallic tunnels. They then threw dry oats into the pond for the ducks, scooped from a box of porridge.

Then she sat down with Molly in front of the telly and then she fed her her dinner and read a bedtime story, all before Ash returned home.

After Ash came home, a man came to the door and tried to get in and Nora shut the door in his face.

‘Nora?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why were you so weird to Adam?’

‘What?’

‘I think he was a little bit put out.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You acted like he was a stranger.’

‘Oh.’ Nora smiled. ‘Sorry.’

‘He’s been our neighbour for three years. We went camping with him and Hannah in the Lake District.’

‘Yes. I know. Of course.’

‘You looked like you weren’t letting him in. Like he was an intruder or something.’

‘Did I?’

‘You shut the door in his face.’

‘I shut the door. It wasn’t in his face. I mean, yes, his face was there. Technically. But I just didn’t want him to think he could barge in.’

‘He was bringing the hose back.’

‘Oh, right. Well, we don’t need the hose. Hoses are bad for the planet.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’