Page 158 of Hello Stranger

Hadn’t we been over this? “I’m telling you, I didn’t dump you!”

“Sadie,” Joe said again, waiting this time until he had my full attention. “IamDr. Oliver Addison.”

But that didn’t make any sense.

“Um,” I said, like I was awkwardly correcting him. “You’reJoe.”

“I’m not Joe,” Joe said. “You’ve been calling me Joe for weeks, but that’s not really my name. My name,” he said again for posterity, “is Dr. Oliver Addison.”

He was going to have to give me a minute for my brain to explode.

“I’m sorry. Wait. Are you Joe—or Dr. Addison?”

“I am both,” Joe said. “Those two people are the same guy.”

Now it was my turn to pace around like nothing made any sense.

“Hold on,” I said. “You’re saying… you’re saying the guy who lives downstairs—the guy who fed me dinner at his place when I got locked out, and talked me through a panic attack during a party, and kissed me senseless not that long ago… that guy is the same person as the guy at the vet clinic who rescued Peanut?”

Joe nodded. “The same guy.”

“You,” I said, pointing, “are both JoeandDr. Addison?”

Joe nodded again.

“How is that possible that you’re only one person?”

“How is it possible that you thought I was two people?”

I frowned. Good question.

Joe gave me a minute to try to puzzle it out.

“This isn’t the first time this has happened,” I said, thinking of Hazels One and Two. “Apparently, the brain is an ecosystem. If one part isn’t doing its job, it can throw other things off, too.”

But this much? Really?

We tried to take in the impossibility of it all.

“But… Joe has glasses and floppy hair.” I mimed with my hand the way Joe’s hair flopped over his forehead, even while suddenly noticing that the Joe I was talking to was not wearing glasses and did not have floppy hair. In fact, he had… Dr. Addison’s hair. “And Dr. Addison has”—I reached up to touch it—“this hair.”

Very gently, at my touch, Joe nodded some more. “No glasses at work. Just contacts. But they make my eyes tired, so I take them out before I go home.”

I was trying so hard to make it make sense. “And you slick your hair back for work, but you don’t bother with it at home?”

“It doesn’t stay neat very long,” Joe said.

I was vacillating between struggle and acceptance. “But aren’t you”—and I felt how goofy the words were, even as I said them—“a freelance snake sitter?”

“You think that I’m a snake sitter, and that’s all I do?”

I tried to picture Joe in a white vet coat. “So you’re a veterinarian who… does snake-sitting as a side hustle and also… rescues homeless bulldogs?”

“Broadly speaking, sure—that works.”

“But you don’t look like a veterinarian.”

“I get that a lot. Hence the lab coat.”

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