Page 18 of What If It's You?

“Okay, if you’re sure. But if you start feeling worse, or if anything new crops up—a fever, or a rash or…I don’t know, anything—Iwant you to let me know, okay?”

“Cross my heart,” I said, miming the action.

“I’ll check in later. Do you want me to cancel with Matt and Kari? You know what a hypochondriac she is, and we’ll have a better shot at rebooking the reservation if we give a full day’s notice.”

“No, don’t do that. I’ll be better soon,” I said. Whoever Matt and Kari were, and whatever we had scheduled with them, wasnotmy primary problem right now. Besides, if I said yes, there was every chance Drew would overrule himself and stay home to nurse me back to health, which would be wonderful if, you know,this were my actual life and he were my actual boyfriend.

“Okay, then I’m gonna head. Call or text if anything changes. Seriously, anything at all. If I’m too deep in work—”

“Aaron will give you the message. Don’t worry, I know.” Aaron? Where hadthatname come from? I shuddered lightly at a new wave of vertigo. “Go. Jim’s go-to-market strategy waits for no man.”

“Fine, fine, I see how it is.” Drew laughed, bent to peck my cheek, and hurried out of the bedroom. I could hear the distant sound of a door slamming.

Finally I was alone. In a life—and a world—that wasn’t really my own.

First things first: I needed to get a handle on some of the basics. Not placing Barry the doorman within seconds was forgivable, despite Drew’s outsized reaction, but not knowing where I worked, or how to get there, or shit,my own addresswas definitely gonna raise some flags.

Unless…maybe I could just get back to my real life? I glanced around as though someone might have left a helpful sign on the wall:Stay in Right Lane for the World You’re Supposed to Live In.

Think, Laurel. You fell asleep next to Ollie…maybe if you fall asleephereyou’ll wake up where you’re supposed to be?

I hurried back to the bedroom, flipping off all the lights and crawling back under the covers, eyes squeezed tight as I willed sleep to come.

Obviouslythatdidn’t work. Mainly because I couldn’t get my thoughts—or the pulse throbbing in my neck—to slow enough for sleep to seem like even a remote possibility. I waited for five minutes, trying half-assedly to meditate my way to bodily calm, but no matterhow many times I tried tojust let the thoughts sail past,I couldn’t keep from whipping my head after them, trying to chart their progress on the foreign ocean I found myself bobbing along in. Finally, with a huff, I sat up and turned the lights back on. I never had been a good sleeper, I should have known forcing the issue wouldn’t work.

And of course I had no reasons other than hope and a million eighties movies to believe “just fall asleep again” would get me back anyway.

Maybe there was some sort of…switch to flip somewhere? My eyes darted around the room as though I might find it built into the wall,Whoops, left that in the “wrong life” position again, silly Laurel!

Okay, yes, I knew that was ridiculous. But what else could I try? Without any clue as to how I’d wound up here, how could I possibly hope to find my way back?

I curled up into a ball in the bed, letting the clammy, tingly wave of anxiety crash over me, buffeting me back and forth for a while until my breathing and heartbeat started to slow to something approaching normal. When I opened my eyes again, I was still stubbornlyhere,in this apartment I apparently shared with Drew, in a life where we’d gotten together and then so much more had changed. It wasn’t a “wear a red shirt, get attacked by a pissed-off bull” sort of difference, but a not-small part of me longed for the concreteness of a bovine attack.

But wishing myself back to my real life—or to a personal Pamplona—clearly wasn’t going to be any more effective than feigning sleep, and with the immediate rush of existential terror receding, a part of me was starting to get a little curious. Whathadchanged after my personal bull charge? The metaphor felt more apt than a single stupid butterfly beating one gossamer wing.

Besides, if therewassome hidden switch to flip—maybe at the Pixel offices?—I would need more information to find out how I could thrust it back into position.

The obvious place to start was the internet. I made myself coffee in the space-age machine hulking under the kitchen cabinets—muscle memory seemed to kick in when I faced its intricate array of touch screens and sleek stainless buttons—then flipped open my laptop at the kitchen island, a pristine, glittering white quartz waterfall. The low-backed brass and tan leather stools tucked beneath it were tasteful and obviously expensive, but physically uncomfortable, so I pushed mine back under and opted to stand.

Clearly the first task had to be food—I couldn’t let something as banal as hunger distract me from my goal. I started pulling open the sleek white cabinets in turn, their faces bare of any ornamentation, with slim cylindrical handles in a gold tone that matched the metal on the stools. Plain white dishware, elegantly featureless, sat in regimented stacks, even the mugs neatly nested, perfectly engineered for their purpose. I uncovered a high-end blender, a sous-vide machine with an ample stock of vacuum-sealable bags, a set of weighty stainless steel pans, and dozens of fancy kitchen utensils, neatly arranged in a drawer next to the stove. It was everything you could ever need for a chef-level cooking experience. Did Drew use all this stuff? When could he possibly have the time?

Eventually I opened the tall doors of the pantry and found a neat system of modular shelves subdividing the slide-out drawers, their promise of increased storage wasted on the half-empty space. The breakfast offerings were slim, and entirely of the “tastes a bit cardboardy so you know it’s healthy” variety. Hopefully that just meant Drew and I both tended to eat at the office? The idea that I chose a life exclusively filled with “no sweetener added” hempseed granolas and their ilk felt virtuous, but a little sad.

But at least it wassomeclue to the texture of my days here. I poured out a bowl, topped it with oat milk—the only variety in the fridge—and plopped down in the little breakfast nook, staring blankly at the sixties-era MBTA map, the brightly colored train lines spidering out from the nexus of downtown, hanging above the table.

As the fog cleared further with each flax-fortified bite, my curiosity increased. This was anactual different lifeI’d stepped into.Forget the factoids I’d need to dig up and study so that I had them fully internalized by the time I saw Drew next—I couldn’t have him sending me off for a battery of tests, there was nowaythe path back was through an MRI machine. Still, those data points were individual stars; I needed to zoom out far enough to recognize the shape of the galaxy I was in. And this room felt like a major constellation. Clearly we cooked, or at least one of us did, but it didn’t seem like the homey casseroles and butter-drenched starches Drew and I had both grown up with were on the menu. If the variety of high-end gadgetry was any indicator, we opted for the challenging, complex cooking that felt like a gold-star-kid version of the hobby. I had a sudden mental image of a Thanksgiving spread, all of the dishes incredible but none of them nostalgic, an assortment of the “elevate the classic ___” offerings that food magazines published every year, carefully arranged along the simple midcentury modern table I’d glimpsed in the dining area just off the kitchen. An echo of pride flitted through me as I imagined—remembered?—the edible work of art.

Wait…wasIthe home chef? That was just…I mean, it’s not likeI’dhave the time for it, either…right?

Still, if I was being honest, the idea was enticing. A huge part of me had always aspired to a life like the one that, to all appearances, Drew and I had built together. Something clean and classy, filled with bright points of understated luxury: the too-expensive napkins in colors guaranteed to stain, flatware that doubled as abstract art, centerpieces that gestured elegantly to the season without ever doing something so déclassê as actively telegraphing it. I’d only ever seen that in catalogs growing up, usually the ones that slid through the mail slot addressed to Mom, even years after she’d left, a painstakingly tasteful reminder of everything we’d lost.

In this world, it seemed that I’d fulfilled that dream.But how?What formula had I unlocked in this life that was seemingly beyond my grasp in my life with Ollie, our weekends spent scouring flea markets for something interesting he could fix up, not perfectingmy cassoulet technique, our apartment brimming with warmly eclectic hand-me-downs when apparently, all along, we could have chosen…anything. We could have actually committed to a style, saved up for the version we wanted instead of impulse-buying something goofy and sweet that appealed in the moment, could have created allthis.Sure, I couldn’t imagine the sophisticated, perfectly matched dishware having a particularly interesting story behind it—almost everything in my life with Ollie had a story, down to each of our dozen or more mismatched coffee mugs—but did you really need all that when you could live in such an aesthetically pleasing, clutter-free, mildly money-scented retreat?

Though maybe Drew and I just made much,muchmore money than Ollie and I did. Which brought me back around to the biggest mystery of my morning (well, second-biggest, but “What the fuck happened with the program that it was able to suddenly port meinto another life” probably wasn’t something I could google my way out of in a couple hours): What did Ido?

I wandered around the apartment, so pristine it was hard to know where to start looking, but luckily, a basket on a table just inside the front door held a thin stack of recent mail. Promotional flyers, a cellphone bill for me—so clearly I lived here full-time, that was something—and at the bottom, a letter from Lakeside Mortgage Services.

Mortgage. So we—or he—mustownthis place. Impressive. Boston real estate was notoriously expensive, and we were in the kind of building that not only had views all the way to the Charles, it had a doorman. That couldn’t come cheap.

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