Page 11 of What If It's You?

“I never said that. Iwouldnever say that.” He scrunched his face in disgust.

“Right, you just tell me I’m a shit partner who condescends to you regularly.”

“Laurel,no. I just wanted us to have a nice dinner. I wanted you to—”

Don’t say it don’t say it please don’t ruin us withforever.

“You wanted me to be sweet and not ruin things like I always do? Sorry, failed again.” I pushed back from the table, shaky with a blend of frustration and fear. What if this was it? What if I’d pushed things too far and instead of a proposal, Ollie offered me a beautifully gift-wrapped breakup? The idea made my stomach plunge. The next step for us was off a cliff, my not wanting to take it didn’t mean we weren’t good together.The idea of being without Ollie felt like hacking off a limb without anesthetic.

“I should go,” I said, throwing my napkin on the table.

“That’s probably a good idea,” Ollie said quietly, eyes fixed on the tablecloth.

I wanted to say something else—something meaningful, something that wouldfixthis—but all I could manage was a stupid, useless gulp against the tightening in my throat. Blinking hard, I strode across the restaurant and out the door, somehow managing not to spray arterial blood all over the other diners from the gaping wound I’d just torn in my own chest.

It was what had to be done. If he’d pulled out the ring, gone down on one knee, then I’d either have said yes, which would have felt like walking both of us straight into the maw of some ancient leviathan, or I’d have managed to do the right thing and say no, and I’d never be able to make Ollie understand that it wasn’t because I didn’t love him but because I was afraid that that wasn’t enough, that love was entirely too flimsy a foundation to bear the overwhelming, precariously cantilevered weight of a life.

Somehow, though, I still felt like I’d made the wrong choice.

At first I wasn’t really walking in any direction, I was just trying to move fast enough that Ollie—and the maelstrom of dark thoughts I’d left with him at the table—wouldn’t be able to catch up.

Soon, though, I found myself emerging onto Cambridge Street, looping around the bus depot at Lechmere, making for the place that my subconscious had apparently been headed all along: the office.

Occasionally I wished I were the kind of person who dealt with emotional turmoil at a dive bar.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been in the building long past regular working hours—all of us were expected to crunch occasionally, and no matter when you swiped in, chances were good you wouldn’t be the only one in the building. I made my way up the gigantic central staircase, hesitating at the second floor, where the marketing department lived.

But catching up onmywork wasn’t why I was here, and I knew it. Throwing my shoulders back—as though posture alone might lull the fluttery nerves rousing themselves in the pit of my stomach back to sleep—I continued up to the fourth floor, where the Lightning offices were located.

The frosted glass walls glowed from the inside, and I hesitated on the threshold. Was this okay? Yes, Drew had told me to play around with the program whenever I wanted, but he definitely meant for me to do itwithhim, not on my own, after hours, like some sort of sneak. Besides, what was I hoping to learn? The experience in the cornfield had been incredibly immersive—so much so that within seconds of the program’s starting up, it had been indistinguishable from reality—but Drew said himself the program was still limited in ways they hadn’t figured out how to fix. Even if Icouldsomehow get it to show me an alternate snippet of my life—one in which I’d chosen differently, set myself on a different path from the one I was currently barreling down—a couple minutes in that world would hardly be enough to tell me how to make a huge life decision in this one.

And from a purely logistical perspective: What if someone was working in there? If it was anyone other than Drew, I’d have a lot of explaining to do, regardless of the fact that my ID badge gave me access. Hell, if itwasDrew, I might be in an even more awkward position.

But I couldn’t make myself turn and walk away, that same earworm chorus playing louder now:What if, what if, what if…

I bit my lower lip, searching for some plausible excuse for being there. Drew’s entire team had seen me just a few hours ago…I could claim I’d left something behind on his desk? A folder or…a flash drive. Perfect, I always had one on me, and if anyone got suspicious and wanted to plug it in, it would quickly become clear that it was in fact filled with marketing department materials.

But when I pulled open the door to Lightning, the room was empty, the only light the dim runners around the ceiling that never turned off, and the dramatic spotlights inside the enclosure that held the quantum computer. They gave the otherwise standard-issue office an ominous, watchful atmosphere that sent a shiver down my spine.

“Whose benefit is that for?” I muttered, shaking my head as I crossed to Drew’s desk, checking over my shoulder anxiously, even though I knew no one would be there.

I jiggled his mouse and the monitor blinked awake, the login box bright in the center of the screen. Okay, perfect. If I was able to access the program frommylogin, then there was no reason I shouldn’t. Plenty of projects were password protected, or viewable only by the team working on them. If this one wasn’t protected—or if Drew had specifically given me access—then I didn’t have to feel icky about poking around in it without him by my side.

Keep telling yourself that, Everett.

I logged in, the monitor displaying my familiar desktop layout, a link to our company cloud drive parked in the bottom right corner. I clicked it open and started sifting through the files. It was easy enough to find the Lightning folder, but there were dozens of subfolders inside it from across the entire company, some untouched for years, none conveniently named “AltR.” In fact, most were labeled with strings of letters and numbers that I couldn’t make any sense of. I hovered the cursor over a folder titledquantum,then paused. It was easy to see who the last person to access a folder had been—not that people generally checked that information. Still, Lightning was a silo within a silo within a web of barbed wire. If thiswasn’tthe AltR project, and someone noticed that a random marketing VP from Boston had decided to start poking around in it, how would that conversation go?

Maybe I could just search for the right folder. “AltR” turned up nothing, and “alternate reality” returned hundreds of files.

What would be specific enough to show uponlyin Drew’s files? The answer hit me in a flash—cornfield.

The search returned two folders, both nested under the Lightning umbrella. One was labeled ChiRBou32723. A quick scan of the file inside made it clear that carbon capture was somehow in play. My eyebrows shot up. How many piesdidPixel have its fingers in?

But now wasn’t the time to dig deeper, because the other file, tucked inside a folder labeled BosDBev41821, was titled cornfield_demo.

“Bingo,” I murmured, clicking into the parent folder. After scanning all the files slowly, I clicked onNew_User_Setup. If I wanted the program to run onme,I would need to let it…calibratewas the word Drew had used. Inside was a single icon, presumably for the setup software they’d developed. I took a deep breath and clicked on it. The machine wheezed for a moment, the screen went briefly black, then it flickered to what looked like an old-school DOS interface. The cursor blinked for a few long seconds, then text started scrolling down the screen.

USER: Laurel_Everett

---