“It’s no longer ‘our’ home. And I’m not obsessed.” They both know he’s lying.

“Really? Then what destroyed our marriage?” The question hangs, laden with remorse and shared history.

Eventually, Victor says, “I don’t know what destroyed our marriage, Phaedra. I suppose you could say its demise was an example of quantum entanglement, where cause and effect existed simultaneously.”

An experimental physicist in her own right—and a former student of Victor’s—Phaedra understands the analogy, even though she doesn’t agree with it. “You traded our marriage for your vendetta. If I didn’t support you—”

“You didn’t,” Victor bites.

“Because I didn’t understand you. I didn’t understand why you should be so envious of someone else. Someone who was your friend. I didn’t understand why you had him fired, why you kept him from getting published.”

“He stole my work,” comes the simple reply.

“He built upon your work,” she clarifies. “Isn’t building on the work of others what scientific inquiry—if not all human achievement—is about?”

Victor lets out a long fatigued sigh. How many times must they have the same argument? “He used my work as the foundation for his without even asking me first.” That he doesn’t raise his voice is a triumph.

“And you couldn’t forgive him that one transgression?” Phaedra asks. “He was your best friend.”

“Exactly.”

She stares back at him, incredulous.

“I’ve been in academia long enough to expect slings and arrows from fellow colleagues and professional rivals,” Victor elaborates. “But to be betrayed by a friend . . .” He shakes his head with disgust. “I might not have dealt with it in the most . . . positive way, I admit that. And I regret it.” His remorse seems genuine. “But the betrayal just hurt too much.”

He watches Phaedra process this. For a heartbeat, he allows himself to indulge in the idea that he’s come off as reasonable, sympathetic enough to begin repairing his relationship with her. His only mistake was not getting her to see where he was coming from sooner, why he was so pained and vindictive.

“I’m sorry,” she says, confirming his aspiration. She seems sincerely apologetic. “I’m sorry you can’t see it.”

Victor feels a twinge of worry. “Can’t see what?”

“That no one betrayed you, Victor,” she says, exhaling the thought like a sigh. “Jonas invited you to work with him, and you told him to pound sand.”

Now Victor gives full license to his animus. “Invited me to participate in my own work. Yes. Very kind. I can’t believe I was so wrong about him.” The words are drenched in sarcasm, his tongue snapping out each syllable.

“Get help, Victor,” she says, more in surrender than in earnest. “The university has good people for this sort of—”

“Thank you,” he growls. “I appreciate the concern.”

He turns on a heel and heads into what was once their apartment building. Phaedra watches him go, trailing resentment and vitriol.

It’s the last time she’ll ever see him.

NOW

The first thing Jonas notices when he opens his eyes is that he’s not dead. The highway is gone, replaced by the same shoreline as when he departed Eva’s reality. He looks to the skyline. It’s still recognizable as Geneva, but the Japanese architectural accents are gone, as though erased by an artist’s brushstrokes. In their place are trees and leaves and fields of grass. It’s as if the buildings were constructed by an architect and a gardener working in tandem, a perfect blend of cityscape and nature.

It only takes a clutch of seconds for him to shake off the awe of an entirely new world. He’s a man of singular focus. The reality he has randomly traveled to is of interest only insofar as it contains the possibility, albeit gossamer thin, that Amanda is still alive in this universe.

He hikes up the slope that leads back to the Seidenstrasse, or whatever it’s called in this brave new world. As in his home universe and the one he just departed, cars and trucks whip past. He sets off along the shoulder, clutching his torn shirt closed against the gathering chill, the thumb of his free hand aimed toward the passing traffic. A wry thought intrudes: In this world, is an outstretched thumb a signal for hitchhiking?

It is. A car slides up to meet him, its electric engine emitting a faint soothing hum. A gull-wing door rises, and as Jonas climbs in, he notices that the rear of the car’s body tapers back to a single wheel.

The driver, a woman in her twenties, doesn’t speak English, but Jonas’s French is enough to communicate his destination, the offshoot of Geneva where Eva lives. At least, where Eva lived, an entire universe away. The car—a “tryke,” he’d later learn—lets him off five blocks from where Eva’s apartment should be. He walks the rest of the way. When he arrives, the two skyscrapers that had bookended Eva’s apartment building in another universe are still standing. But here, they buttress nothing but air, the ground dedicated to a public garden.

Jonas walks. There’s no point in hitchhiking. Hitchhiking is for people who have someplace to go. But he is lost. Not in Geneva—he knows the city as well as any local—but in the multiverse. Without conscious thought, he walks east before noticing that he’s navigating toward the closest university, the Université de Genève.

He sleeps atop the heating vent of the university library like a homeless person. In the literal sense, it’s strikingly true. Several universes removed from his own, Jonas is as homeless as anyone has ever been.

Eventually, the morning light rakes across him, slapping him awake. He walks laps around the campus for the three hours until the library opens.

Once inside, he locates the public computers. The sight of a man who appears as though he slept in his clothes draws more than a few curious stares, but Jonas ignores them and sets to work. He starts by opening Google, but a “404” code informs him that http://google.com doesn’t exist. This prompts a laugh. Who could fathom a reality without Google? Eventually he finds this reality’s preferred search engine. In this universe, Apple has apparently added internet search to the breadth of its domain.

He starts by typing Eva’s name into the search field. The query yields no results. Henri Thibault is next. Jonas’s heart leaps with hope as the screen cascades with mentions. He scans the information spit out by the search: Grammar school teacher. Science fair. Fan fiction. Comic book collection. Two children. Jonas darkens. Thibault’s life took a very different turn in this reality.

He types his own name next. The search returns websites that tell an encapsulated story of his life. Specifics are in short supply, but the major details are encouraging: PhD in physics, PhD in quantum mechanics, PhD in quantum field theory, professor at Columbia University. At least, until two years ago. Then the trail goes cold. He clicks on his Columbia University profile and gets an uneasy feeling, which is confirmed when he reads the bio.

He died two years ago.

With rising urgency, he delves deeper, eventually surfacing his own obituary. It’s a discordant reaction, but his spirits rise at seeing the account of his death. What he reads causes him to exhale with volcanic force as the lungful of air he wasn’t even aware he’d been holding escapes him in a ragged breath. Not for the first time, other library patrons cast suspicious, uncomfortable glances in his direction. He doesn’t care. He just reads the same eight words over and over.

Doctor Cullen is survived by his wife, Amanda.

His heart sings with a lightness he hasn’t felt in two long years. His head grows fuzzy, and he thinks he might pass out from relief and joy.

She’s alive. She’s here, and she’s alive.

It’s beyond improbable. It’s impossible. Like finding a specific single grain of sand along a beach. And yet . . .

Maybe the universe has granted him a mercy. Maybe his calculations were not as far off as he’d assumed. Maybe his arrival in Gillard’s universe was an anomaly, a quantum hiccup of some kind. Maybe his reality-slipping ended exactly where he had always intended to be. He turns to the screen again for confirmation. Doctor Cullen is survived by his wife, Amanda. Its meaning doesn’t change, no matter how many times he reads it. Incredibly, he’s arrived in the one reality Thibault had promised where the car accident claimed him instead of her.

He types with breathless urgency, and another search confirms that Amanda still lives in their apartment in Manhattan. The same apartment. It’s almost beyond imagining.

His mind gallops. His first impulse is to call her, to hear her voice, to assure her that he’s still alive and will explain everything once they’re finally together. But then better instincts take over. He doesn’t want to frighten her. A call from a dead man? No. She’s likely to think it some kind of scam. Better their reunion be in person. Suddenly, there’s no rush. Suddenly, he has—they have—all the time in the world.

He feels lightheaded but not just with euphoria. He’s hyperventilating. He works to steady himself and slow his breathing. We have all the time in the world. The most important thing is that he’s found her.

He grips the desk, breathing deep and deliberately. He has to get to her. He has to get halfway across the globe with no money, no passport, no form of identification whatsoever. Again it occurs to him that calling her would be easier. She could fly to him. Wouldn’t that be easier? But then a new thought strikes him with a force that feels almost physical. He grimaces at the simplicity of the solution and types:

recovery of stolen credit card

It takes Jonas less than ninety minutes to hitchhike from the university to Aéroport de Genève, where the American Express office is situated atop a row of escalators, sandwiched between an OMEGA store and a Ralph Lauren. The Amex representative behind the counter is a pleasant woman who Jonas calculates can’t be older than twenty-seven. This is fortunate, he tells himself. With age comes cynicism, and he’s going to need a little credulity to pull off what he has planned.

He tells her his prepared sob story about how he was the victim of a pickpocket, how he had kept his US passport, credit cards, driver’s license, and cash in the same travel wallet. “So stupid,” he berates himself, adding with a hapless shrug, “but Switzerland has the reputation of being one of the safest countries on earth.”