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Tressa Fay’s apartment hadn’t seen this much action in a long time.

Gayle and James had come on their own. They’d told Tressa Fay there was no one else they would want to invite. He was Meryl’s closest friend, and she was Meryl’s only family in town. Gayle was curled up on Tressa Fay’s sofa with Epinephrine on her lap, while James occupied one side of a big beanbag chair that Tressa Fay had pulled out from under her bed.

Mary was on the other side of the beanbag, and Guy sat in Tressa Fay’s rocking chair with Michael between their legs on the floor. Michael’s sharply barbered dark hair was messed up from running his hands through it so much.

It had taken a while to bring Michael and Mary and Linds up to speed. Tressa Fay wasn’t completely sure it was fair of her to have called so many people here—to have all her people here to support and help her—but she didn’t know how she could possibly handle the utter mindfuck of this situation without them.

She sat on the other end of the sofa from Gayle, her phone on her knee.

Linds, of all people, was holding court in the middle of the rug. In addition to teaching creative writing, Linds was the author of numerous self-published eight-hundred-page queer fantasy and sci-fi books, which was turning out to make her uniquely qualified to clarify what the hell was going on.

“Multiverse theory.” She made an expansive gesture, the sleeves of her loose sweater sliding down and revealing her brightly tattooed arms. “Obviously not a theory. Einstein has been right about everything so far, plus we’ve successfully sent subatomic particles into a parallel universe. Parallel worlds are for real.”

“But you have to explain it like we’re five,” Guy reminded her.

“And without any examples from books we haven’t read, movies we haven’t seen, or from what people talk about on your D&D Discord,” Mary chimed in.

Linds smiled at Guy. “I will if you tell me I’m pretty.”

“You’re gorgeous. But also.” Guy made a get on with it motion with their hand.

Tressa Fay’s phone buzzed on her knee. She didn’t let herself pick it up to look, hating how it made Gayle stiffen. Once they’d all gotten to her apartment, more than an hour ago now, James had firmly requested, for the time being, that they not do anything else in the category of what he called “creating additional reality.” Everyone had agreed Tressa Fay could continue texting with Meryl, but she needed to keep it light, not say anything else about where Meryl should go or not go on September 4, and definitely say nothing about Gayle or James.

Tressa Fay adjusted her body, sliding her phone into her hand, hidden by her thigh, and glanced at the screen.

I know you said you were with your friends and probably couldn’t text, but I worked out nothing was stopping me from texting you.

So far, the keep-it-light strategy was working. Everything was holding at Gayle and James remembering two versions of the night Meryl disappeared. Two different sets of memories—the version where Meryl went missing from Speakeasy, and a new version where she went missing from home. Tressa Fay and Guy also had doubled memories of the consequences of that experiment, including Meryl’s phone disappearing from the reception desk and the newspaper headline changing.

What was weird to Tressa Fay was that having two different memories about the same event didn’t feel unfamiliar . It felt like wondering if she’d left her bag in the break room or in her car, because she remembered leaving it both places. The only difference now was that she had proof that both things had happened. The bag was in the break room, and the bag was in the car. Experimenting with the fabric of reality, it turned out, felt disconcertingly normal .

But if she were Gayle, it still wouldn’t be long before she decided she didn’t give a fig about reality and would rather talk to her sister again. So Tressa Fay jumped when her phone buzzed, even as she glanced down and couldn’t help her smile.

Because I can’t stop now that I know we obviously had some kind of epic missed connection the other night and you don’t think I’m a troll.

She had managed to successfully hold off Meryl from asking too many questions by telling her that the night they were supposed to meet at Canyon had been a “very weird evening” and that she was “with friends right now” but would give her a real explanation later. Meryl was clearly happy to pick up their flirting where they had left off and get her questions answered later.

It was a testament to the power of Tressa Fay’s weakness for Meryl’s freckles and game that she was more preoccupied with getting back to Meryl than she was with hearing about evidence of alternate realities. It was tough out there. Surely space-time was a smaller hurdle to dating than, well, dating .

Unless you like that kind of thing. I could roleplay a troll or an orc or a mage so hard. Fur corsets, leather panniers, fairy wings, whatever you want.

Tressa Fay bit her lip to keep in the giggle, looking around to see if anyone noticed. Mary had her eyes narrowed right at her. Oops.

She let the phone drop to the sofa cushion. Screen side up, though.

“Quantum physics,” Linds said. “But before you look at me like that, please let me say that quantum phenomena aren’t rare. It’s not science fiction. It explains so much of what we are otherwise unable to explain.” She put her hand on her chest. “Right now, this second, we are living in one of many extremely similar universes happening alongside this one.”

Michael leaned forward. “All right, but there’s esoteric scientific theories on the one hand, and then there’s a phone disappearing right before our friends’ eyes on the other.”

“I hear that, but I’m trying to tell you there’s nothing esoteric about these theories. Take the quantum theory of superposition. That’s when an object isn’t just an object that you can see and hold. It is that object, the object you expect it to be, but it’s also a combination of multiple possible objects at the same time.”

“Ugh,” Mary said.

Linds gave her a wide-eyed-professor look that meant Stay with me . “The reality of the theory of superposition was demonstrated in the nineteenth century. A guy made two cuts parallel to each other in a piece of paper. He covered one cut and shined a beam of light through the paper to hit a photographic plate. Then he did the same thing again, but he covered the second cut, and he used a second plate. He developed the two pictures. One had a white bar of light on one side. The other had a white bar of light on the other side. Exactly what we’d expect. This is the reality we think we live in, where what we feel and what we see is how it looks. A bar of light on the left, a bar of light on the right. So what happened when he didn’t cover either cut? When he shined the light through both cuts at the same time to expose the plate?”

“There were two white bars in the picture,” James said. “Do I get an A, Professor?”

Lindsey smiled. “Not this time. It seems like there should be light coming out of each cut the way it did the first time, streaming to the plate, making two straight lines. But remember, light’s both a particle and a wave. It’s moving in a wave. So when you have two streams of light next to each other, the projected light beams interfere with each other. And in the time it takes this light to travel to the plate and expose it, the particle waves of light interfere in uncountable different ways. The light takes every possible trajectory on its way to the plate and is in multiple states at once.”

“We can’t see that,” Michael said. “But if the beams of light coming through the paper are close together, we can see that they’re merging. They’d look more like one beam of light than two.”

“Exactly correct,” Linds said. “We can’t see it. The photographic plate can. The picture this photographer developed looks like a wide area of many gradations of white and gray. It shows all the possible solutions, like a math problem where x equals ten and x equals forty-two. We can’t see it, but the photograph records it. The photograph is what’s real. The photograph is a picture of what the universe really, actually looks like, which is something we can’t see. We don’t even recognize that what’s in the picture is the universe we’re living in.”

“So the phone is like the photograph?” James asked. “It’s showing us two universes we expect to be separate, but they aren’t. Because we’re here. Meryl’s there”—James pointed at the phone—“and not here. And we’re here, talking about Meryl while Meryl blows up Tressa Fay’s phone, so it’s like Meryl is here. The phone is showing us reality. And the reality is that Meryl is alive and well. That’s a solution.” James crossed his arms and dared Linds to say different.

Michael took Guy’s hand when Guy reached it down to him. “But we need a solution solution. Happily ever after or nothing.”

Linds nodded. “My limitation here is that the language of physics is math. The math is way more right than the phone, because humans are so unreliable. However, none of us know how to do math like that, so offering up a solution is beyond me.” Linds winced at Michael’s exasperated expression. “But also, there are ideas like entanglement. It’s such a beautiful idea. The theory is there are objects that can’t be described on their own. They can only be described, observed, exist, by describing the other, observing the other, and vice versa. If two things are entangled, they are linked together forever, no matter how far apart they move from each other in space.”

Tressa Fay felt something inside her go still and quiet, listening.

“Think about your first love,” Linds said. “No matter how long you live, how far away you are from that first love, you’re linked to them. Your story can’t be completely told without them. You’re entangled.” She shifted her position, looking up at the ceiling, and blew out a breath. “That doesn’t seem hopeless to me.”

“No,” Mary said solemnly. “I like the way that sounds.”

“Like, even Schrodinger’s box was asking us to think about quantum reality,” Linds said. “It’s probably the most famous example. Schrodinger was the scientist who explained all of this by asking us to imagine a cat closed in a box with poison. Until we open the box, we don’t know if the cat is alive or dead. Until we see the cat, the cat is both. There is no alive cat without also dead cat, and I don’t mean in our imaginations. I mean if you see a dead cat in the box when it’s opened, there is a you in another universe who finds a living cat. There is a you who never opens the box. All of those are real. They’re entangled. Nothing in the universe is truly lost.”

Tressa Fay shook her head. “But.” She fished around for the question she wanted to ask. “ But is all I got. Consider it a question that breaks this whole thing open.”

“Maybe your question is why?” Linds tipped her head to the side. “As in, why us? Why now? Why Meryl?”

“That’s my question,” Gayle interjected. “I’ve been struggling to come to terms with what the police have told me is Meryl’s likely death while I’m still desperately trying to find her. Forgive me if observing my sister text in actual, real time with an actual, real person right in front of me brings up more buts and whys than a desire to get out a calculator.” Gayle glanced at Tressa Fay’s phone. “She’s there, so my heart tells me she’s here . Or at least she can be.”

James pointed at Gayle. “That’s where I’m at.”

Linds’s eyebrows arched with fascinated interest. Tressa Fay was glad that at least one of them was in their element. “The why question is actually a how question. How have we come to experience two universes at the same time? Or managed to travel from one to the other? Because that’s what we’re talking about.”

Mary groaned. “ How , then? I’m starting to feel the way I felt in Mr. Arts’s science class in high school. Which is angry.”

Now James pointed at Mary. “What she said, also.”

“I’m afraid the only answers I have to offer aren’t going to help anyone’s feelings.” Linds wrapped her arms around her knees. “Most people don’t seem to find the multiverse exactly comforting. Many-worlds theory is very hotly debated. So, okay, hang in with me. Say we’re observing an electron.”

“I would never do that,” Mary said. “Ever.”

“I know, but pretend. Pretend the electron is a little star. And when you’re looking at it, it’s waving up and down. A bright star moving up and down and making a wave across the night sky.”

“Okay.”

“But as soon as you look away, the wave collapses, and it goes back to being a star. A single point of light. You determine what something actually is. The phenomenon we’re observing is changed by us. It’s changed by everything we can imagine it could be. It depends on us. Because we know a cat can be alive and it can be dead, our knowing that matters and affects the cat. Us. Everything. Absolutely everything.”

Tressa Fay reached over to put her hand protectively on Epinephrine, who had left Gayle’s lap and found a good spot on the back of the sofa to watch the proceedings. “No cats may be harmed.”

“Agree,” Linds said. “Schrodinger went about explaining many-worlds theory in the most gruesome way possible, and we do not approve.”

“No,” Gayle said. Her tone made it clear that she wasn’t talking about cats. “ No .”

“No,” Linds said softly. “We don’t need an experiment that hurts a cat, or a person, to give us permission to simply wave a hand over what is happening and make a good guess that something like this theory, at least, is what’s happening. There’s a world where a series of events unfolded that led to Meryl’s disappearance. Our world, we can call it. And there’s probably worlds where she didn’t disappear. And there’s hers”—she pointed in the direction of Tressa Fay’s phone, which vibrated softly as though in response—“where she hasn’t yet , because time unfolded a different way. And maybe in that world, Meryl won’t ever disappear. We can’t know.”

Was that too much? Not enough?

I was teasing, but now I’m interested in the answer because my bedroom’s just dim enough I can’t be embarrassed.

Instead of the golden hour, it’s the mood lighting hour.

A picture popped up in the chat. A good picture—twilight making all those coppery waves fade to a pale fawn, glasses, oversized T-shirt draping in a way that suggested little other clothing.