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Sliding her hand into her bag, Tressa Fay touched the envelope again.

It was a plain white business envelope, folded in half, that had gotten soft and wrinkled over five months in her bag from her hand brushing over it again and again. Inside was a long, braided lock of Meryl’s hair, fastened at the end with a little elastic band.

“You know what I keep thinking about?” Guy interrupted the silence of Tressa Fay’s living room. “A dream I had this week.”

“It’s rude to tell people your dreams.” Mary tucked herself closer to James’s chest. “I’ll buy you a journal.”

Guy stuck their tongue out at Mary. “Tressa Fay was cutting my hair at the salon, and when she finished, she took pictures with her ring light. Then Gayle and James showed up at the salon to tell us that Meryl had gone missing from some bar. But when I woke up, I thought—I think —that actually happened.”

Gayle sighed, an extensive sigh with a lot of depth to it that was a little funny, because Gayle was their long-suffering friend, too adultish and anxious and stern, but adorable for it, most of the time. “I can remember running into Guy and Tressa Fay in the salon and talking about Meryl, and getting a bunch of food with everyone, but then I can’t even remember if that’s when we all met?” She directed this question to James.

He dropped a handful of Mary’s hair he’d coiled around his fingers. “Don’t look at me. I get out of bed every morning, stretch my fingertips to the sky, say my affirmations, and then tell myself to live in the moment. Then I commune with a beautiful woman.”

“You know what’s happening?” Linds asked. She had come out of Tressa Fay’s kitchen with a mug of tea for Brooklynn, who was perched on Tressa Fay’s sofa in a red velvet jumpsuit and looked like a painting. “Something is breaking apart like a glacier, right before our eyes.” She handed the tea to Brooklynn, who leaned up to kiss her.

“What about this?” James asked. “Today, no matter what we remember, is a day none of us has lived through before. And Meryl hasn’t disappeared.” He gestured at Tressa Fay’s phone.

“Wait.” Mary suddenly stood up, displacing James so that he had to catch himself. She looked around. “This apartment.”

“What is it?” Linds asked.

“ Shhh .” Mary closed her eyes and held her hand up, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Meryl doesn’t live here. She never lived here. By July, Tressa Fay was already treating this apartment like a closet. She didn’t bring…Oh, wait. Wait. Wait. Wait! Epinephrine. ”

Tressa Fay had scooted to the edge of her seat. Everyone was quiet. Mary didn’t always make herself the center of attention, but when she did, something always happened.

Mary opened her eyes. She walked to the arm of the sofa where Epinephrine was napping and leaned over, looking incredibly serious. “Eps. Wake up, butternut. Epinephrine!”

Epinephrine’s ears swiveled toward Mary. He opened his eyes a tiny squint. He yawned until he had to arch his back and get a stretch into it.

Mary knelt down in front of him. “Where’s Spring ?” Mary had pitched her voice into cat register, and she was gazing into Epinephrine’s eyes.

The air left the room.

Epinephrine, who had always loved an audience, pulled his ears up to full listening mode and released a small, questioning activation trill. Oooooooh? He looked around the room. Once. Twice. Oooooooh?

Then he stretched his front paws out, clawing the sofa, looked around, and jumped off the sofa arm, making short, sharp, low little meows that Tressa Fay hadn’t heard for months and months.

Meows that she’d never heard , not out loud. Only in her memories.

It was how he talked to Spring.

She must have made a noise, because Mary looked at her with tears in her eyes. “You talked to the lady at the cat rescue who didn’t remember Meryl or Spring. But I remembered being at Meryl’s when Epinephrine was there, and Epinephrine and Spring were already buddies. Then I thought, why doesn’t the cat rescue lady remember? Isn’t that from the same universe? She should remember.” Mary shook her head, smiling, her eyes bright. “What I mean is, this is proof. Look.” She pointed at Epinephrine, who was sitting in the kitchen, looking around, getting annoyed in his confusion, still talking to Spring. “It’s broken. Really broken. We did something. Linds is right. I mean, as far as Epinephrine is concerned, Spring is here, somewhere. He remembers Spring, and he could only do that if he knew him. We’re losing memories of Meryl disappearing. We’re losing memories of exactly how we met each other, which, after all, was because Meryl disappeared, right?”

“Epinephrine’s cat. He’s here and not here.” Linds giggled. “A universe splits from another because of different decisions, yes, but the general trajectory and story of that universe is the same. Or it is the same universe. Schrodinger didn’t get that far.”

“But where’s Meryl?” Gayle asked. Then she shook her head as though to dislodge a confusing thought. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve asked that a million times before, but this time I mean it, like, both ways, because for a second, I thought, Why didn’t we invite Meryl tonight? Is she coming? Did someone not call her or what? ” Gayle took a breath. “That’s how it feels. Like I just need to call her.”

Tressa Fay watched Epinephrine walk in a circle around the kitchen, and she couldn’t tell if her mouth felt so horribly dry from terror or hope. Every time she tried to work out what Mary’s demonstration meant, she felt something like déjà vu—confusion mixed with the certainty that this had happened before.

So she stopped trying to work it out. She started trying to just feel it. Feel her heart beating. Feel the truth inside of herself. “It’s in our hands,” she heard herself saying. “We have to not get afraid. We have to believe they can have what they want. What we want.” Her voice was shaking, but she knew she was right. She knew it. She put her hand on the phone on her lap. The charger connected to it was warm.

Outside, it had been snowing for days. Tressa Fay had a tough time getting around in her Fiat over the packed snow on the roads. She’d slid around at every intersection.

This morning, she’d found her mom’s dress on a hook outside of her closet under three other things that had been put over top of it, and when she buried her face in it, she could smell Meryl. Like burnt sugar. Caramel. Like the honey hair wax. Real.

“This is different.” She turned to look at Linds, her fingers tight around the phone in her lap. “Remember? None of this is like how it was. And we wouldn’t want it to be.”

Tressa Fay’s phone lit up.

I love you. Three people have told me they love my hair.

She took a deep breath, then started typing.

I wouldn’t change anything, Meryl. I wouldn’t. no matter what happens, I wouldn’t make anything different

I choose you, and I don’t believe I’ll ever lose you

Her phone choked out a shuddery buzz, and Meryl’s name flashed for hardly a second, indicating she’d tried to call.

It hadn’t done that. Not one time since that first night in October.

Even though Tressa Fay’s phone had gone quiet, the incoming call no longer visible on the screen, she answered aloud. “Meryl?”

Everyone looked at her, arrested.

Nothing.

“What’s going on?” Gayle asked.

Tressa Fay shook her head.

Michael’s and Guy’s arms were around each other, and Mary was leaning against James’s side. Linds had moved herself close to Brooklynn. Epinephrine was in Gayle’s lap now, still alert to the room, as if waiting for Spring to leap out from under a chair, even though Spring had never been in Tressa Fay’s apartment.

“Gayle, honey,” she said. “Talk to your sister.” She handed the phone to Gayle. “Just talk to her, though. Like, regular. Don’t get mawkish.”

Gayle started typing. She was smiling.

“Hey, nerds,” Mary said. “I asked James to marry me, and he said yes. So everyone has to feel happy right now.”

“Oh my God!” Tressa Fay jumped to her feet. “For real?!”

James laughed, and then Linds and Brooklynn and Michael and Guy all stood up, and Gayle, too, and they were on James and Mary, congratulating and hugging and cheek kissing and exclaiming. Tressa Fay was part of it all, genuinely excited.

Gayle gave Tressa Fay back her phone, caught up in a laughing conversation with James.

Tressa Fay sat back down on the sofa and folded her legs under her.

me again. how hard will it be for you to keep this big news to yourself?

I mean, maybe impossible. How hard is it going to be for you?

also, possibly, impossible

But James and Mary would be so so so annoyed if we spoiled their engagement for them.

Tressa Fay looked up from her phone at James running his thumb over Mary’s bottom lip and smiling at her before taking a fast, hot kiss.

Meryl believed she and Tressa Fay would have to keep their mouths shut so they didn’t spoil the future for James and Mary.

Meryl believed , and it made everything snap into place.

like, extremely very annoyed

LOL.

And so Tressa Fay had a very, very good moment, in this liminal space she had been dreading—the space between waking up on this day and when it was over—listening to everyone she and Meryl had introduced to each other, texting the woman time had introduced to her, sometimes scrolling back up, up, up to everything they’d said to each other, remembering how their words had disappeared and rewritten themselves depending on their experiences with each other.

And she thought, maybe there were worlds where Michael had watched Guy drive away on the last day of law school and never seen them again.

Maybe there were worlds where James and Mary hadn’t met.

But maybe, too, her dad was right, and there was a world, somewhere, where Tressa Fay still had her mom.

And definitely, definitely, there was a world where she and Meryl were making out furiously in the snow, everything cold except all the places where they could manage to touch each other. She had never, ever been more certain, now that she knew Meryl was, too.

Epinephrine jumped into her lap with an annoyed grunt-meow and looked at her.

“Don’t worry.” Tressa Fay scratched his chin. “You’ll see him soon.”