Page 61 of What If It's You?

“You knew about that?” I finally managed.

“Of course I knew. I mean…why do you think I left the ring in my underwear drawer in the first place? I figured if you saw it, you’d have a chance to…I don’t know, warm up to the idea?” He threw his hands up in the air, mouth twisting into a sneer. “The funny thing is I thought I was so smart, ‘hiding’ the ring in the one place I knew you’d find it.” He exhaled a single bitter laugh.

“If you know me so well, then you know I’m notreadyfor that,” I said, my sodden guilt and hurt catching the tiniest spark of his anger.

“And when will you be? Ready? Because right now, it feels like you want me to keep my life on hold indefinitely, and honestly…Ican’t do it anymore. I have to make choices forme.” He swallowed hard, all the anger used up, a candle that had drowned in its own wax. “So…yeah. If you really want that job, I get it, but I’m gonna be staying here.”

For a few long seconds we were frozen that way, his pronouncement filling the room like a noxious gas, driving out all the oxygen. When I felt like my lungs might burst if I stayed in that atmosphere for even a second longer, I blurted out the only words I could think of that might help.

“I love you, Ollie. More than anyone.” It was the deepest truth I could think of, the most important one.

“I love you too. I’ve loved you from the moment we met. But I can’t fit my entire life inside yours, Lo.” With a massive sigh, Ollie turned. “I’m going to bed. Let me know what you decide.”

I stared after him, mouth hanging open, breath coming short. How long had he felt this way? Like I was forcing him to give up what he cared about for me, like his life had to be smaller than mine?

The realization hit me like a body blow: In the other world, I’d let Drew turn me into my mother. In this one…was I doing the same thing to Ollie?

The view from the clifftop was spectacular, red and gold and ochre striping the rock face across the canyon, the undulating stone smoothed and polished over centuries into a massive earth-toned ribbon candy. The air was crisp and thin, the whole scene leaving me breathless, literally and figuratively.

“Ollie, take my picture,” I called.

But when I turned, he wasn’t there, it was just another distant canyon wall, wind whipping dust over its surface in a way that made it flicker in and out of focus. I looked around, anxious now, but it was just open air in every direction, emptiness so vast it felt oppressive. Then I looked down and realized I was perched on a tiny needle of rock, hundreds of feet above the canyon floor, the foothold so narrow and sloped that my feet kept slipping on the scree scattered on the top, tiny pebbles flinging off and immediately disappearing from sight as I scrabbled to stay put. I looked around frantically for Ollie, for anyone, but I was alone, and jerking my head back and forth that way had made me so dizzy I could feel myself sliding to the edge and over, stomach lurching as I went into free fall…

I sat up in bed with a jerk, the room taking shape around me in shades of gray shading to black in the corners. Ollie was there next to me, chest rising and falling slowly as he slept, but the vertigo wasn’t dissipating, it was just growing more intense, the darkness oozing from the corners of the room, invading my vision. I gripped tightly to the sheets, the bare skin of my arms simultaneously hot and clammy.

This can’t be happening.

There was no way I was specificallyherein World D, in the bedroom of the apartment Ollie and I shared, sometime in the wee hours between Monday and Tuesday. I couldn’t possibly be overlapping with myself.

Dizziness shuddered through me again, my vision flickering with blasts of light, blinding in contrast to the black-walled tunnel I was falling headfirst into. I reached for Ollie, hoping that holding on to his hand might somehow keep me here, but with the next flicker of light he disappeared, and when I groped across the bed I couldn’t feel him, my fingers meeting nothing but smooth fabric and cold night air, and then the dark was receding, the pulses of light coming faster, and I couldn’t stand it anymore, I had to close my eyes against the maelstrom moving through me…

And then, abruptly, the freefalling sensation ceased, my stomach snapping back into place with a nauseating slosh. Slowly I opened my eyes.

The light in the room was dim at best, bright only in comparison to the pitch dark I’d left behind. I turned to see the bedside lamp was on, a warm yellow puddle directly beneath the domed metal shade showing the fine graining of the blond wood nightstand. I didn’t need its soft glow to help me pick out the rest of the details of the room; the long velvet curtains, modernist furniture, and spartan décor had become painfully familiar in the last few days. I glanced to my other side and confirmed the bed was empty. This Laurel had also been sleeping, presumably.

In her condo in another part of town. Which meant I’d just slipped between worlds for no apparent reason at all.

Still shaky in the wake of the intense vertigo, I threw my legs over the edge of the bed, taking slow, deep breaths until I was sure it was safe to stand, then padded into the bathroom and took a long drink of water directly from the sleek faucet.

So much for getting out of town.

I moved back into the bedroom, but I was jangling with anxiety now, the idea of sleep was ludicrous. I grabbed my phone and wound through the condo to the living room, the ambient city light through the floor-to-ceiling windows carving out the edges of the furniture and glinting off picture frames and the blank expanse of the television screen, turning the scene eerily beautiful. I tucked my feet beneath me, huddling tightly into the corner of the couch, an animal trying to burrow away from danger, and tapped out an email to Dana explaining the latest development and how it probably ruled out the “just get far enough out of town permanently” solution she’d proposed just a few hours—and worlds—ago.

Then, after staring at it so long that the lines of text started to blur into a mass of tangled wire, I deleted it. She’d told me herself that the “get the hell out of Dodge” plan was a Hail Mary. That we had left the realms of even theoretical, not-universally-agreed-upon science a long time ago. If there was a way to unstick the worlds and get them back to the comfortably nonintersecting tracks they belonged on, Dana didn’t have any more insight into it than I did, not anymore.

And I was officially out of ideas.

My throat thickened and I gulped against the tears starting to prick at my nostrils and the backs of my eyes. I had no plan. I couldn’t even be sure that trying to force a moment of intersection would be enough to throw me back to the world I belonged in, with Ollie by my side—not after what had happened tonight. I literally, physically couldn’t hold on to him, and the thought that I might be doomed to spend the rest of my life here, knowing what I’d willingly given up—thrown away—felt worse than the other possibility Dana had presented, at least in that moment.

I’d had love, with a person who saw me for who I was, whowould have taken even the selfish, oblivious version of me that I was only now realizing I’d been, happy to mistake Ollie’s fundamental kindness—his love—for full-throated support of all the choices I’d made for “us.” And I’d thrown it away for—what? A crush that maybe, in some other life,mighthave led to a happy ending? The fact that I knew firsthand that I wasn’t as happy here, that Drew was an incredible, special person, but that together we teased out each other’s worst qualities, was almost irrelevant—the fact that I’d neededproofwas the problem. Ollie had been ready to offer me forever, and instead of recognizing the glittering shard of hope perched on the top of that ring, all I’d seen was the manacle shape of it, the danger of all thewhat ifsI couldn’t foresee.

And the ones I hadn’t seen even when they were staring me dead in the eye. If anyone had the right to worry about forever, it was Ollie, already cramping from the effort to squeeze himself into the tight confines of the decisionsI’dmade. I’d always assumed he was happy for me to take the reins, the same way I assumed he was happy that I spreadsheeted all our bills and costs and best possible vacation weeks. But maybe it felt overbearing, infantilizing even, and he put up with it because that’s what you did when you loved someone: You accepted the parts of them that were imperfect so you could have all the rest.

I sniffed, disgusted with myself. When had I let fear start making all the choices in my life? Because the more I looked at where I’d wound up, the more it seemed like that was what was really in the driver’s seat. Fear that Ollie and I might not work out. Fear that I might not be able to hack it as a writer. Fear of what life might look like outside the confines of a job that I’d never loved but was so good at that I’d let the gold stars be enough, sacrificed more and more of myself in pursuit of their cold comfort.

I huddled further into myself, shame turning my muscles weak.

Body heavy with the knowledge of what I’d done—not to mention the life I might never escape—I clicked my phone to life, desperate for distraction. I found myself opening Pix, searchingfutilely for Ollie down the familiar paths that didn’t exist in this world.

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