Page 46 of What If It's You?

“Sorry, what’s up?”

“I was waiting for you at the register. Work stuff has come up, I need to get back to my computer so I can assess the scope of the problem.”

“I’m sure those two minutes won’t change things too much,” I said with a soft smile. Annoyance tightened Drew’s mouth. Clearly that didn’t land as the gentle tease I’d intended. Though I wasstarting to suspect that in this life I didn’t intend it that way at all. And really, why should I? Yes, Drew’s work was important, but we’re not talking life and death here.

We made our way to the checkout, Drew’s impatience becoming more and more evident as the person in front of us chatted with the clerk. By the time we left the store, he was practically vibrating with his need to reach his precious laptop. Which was actually for the best, since I would never have been able to locate, or even identify, our car if he hadn’t been a few paces ahead of me through the parking lot. I slid into the passenger seat, sending up a silentThank youwhen Drew didn’t seem to find it out of the ordinary. With Ollie, I usually drove.

We started back through Cambridge, Drew’s grip on the wheel tightening at each ambling pedestrian and missed light. I sneaked a peek at my messages to make sure I was up to date with the situation, but they were very terse—just “at register 11…Laurel, are you seeing these?…I need to get home asap…”

“Did you want to tell me what came up that’s so urgent?”

He glanced sideways at me, jaw set like he was expecting a fight, but I just waited, silent, and finally his shoulders lowered half an inch.

“You know how I mentioned AltR was bugging yesterday? In ways we couldn’t quite figure out?”

I nodded.

“It’s getting worse. Aaron can’t get it to run any new sequences, at least not from his profile. It just keeps spitting out the same error message.”

“What’s the error?” I said, staring through the windshield, working hard to keep my face blank.

“It says there’s not enough processing power. Which makes absolutely no sense, Aaron has checked five times now, from multiple different logins—as far as we can see, all users are in sleep mode, nothing is actively running right now. The AI should just be training itself in the background, maybe expanding on existing inputs.”

It can’t be a coincidence that in both worlds something is going wrong with the program.

But then, in both worlds I’d apparently had the same picnicky urges. Been drawn to the same handbag. Just because there were echoes between the worlds, that didn’t necessarily mean anything sinister was happening, right? Maybe both versions of Drew’s team wrote the same faulty code? Maybe the instincts of an entire team of computer scientists were one of the many things that hadn’t really shifted based on who I’d decided to sleep with?

It had to be a clue to what was going on…but what did it mean? In this world, I didn’t even work at Pixel—there was no way I’d set up a profile. How could I be the bug if the program had never even heard of me?

“I’m sure you’ll sort it out,” I said vaguely, my focus still on the problem of what was happening—it had to be me, but it couldn’t be me, so where did that leave me? I spared a small sliver of my gigantic anxiety pie for how closely Drew was tailgating the car in front of us, his body tense withGet there faster. Whatever was happening in either world, grievous injury in a car wreck definitely wouldn’t help things. “It’s not like anyone expects the program to be running perfectly yet, right?” I tried to use a calm voice, but I was so jittery it came out like a chirp.

“Right,” he ground out, eyelid twitching.

Had Drew always been this much of a perfectionist and I just hadn’t seen it? Or was control freak the more accurate description? If I really thought about it, snagging a leadership position in one of Pixel’s most coveted divisions would have to take more than just talent. There was a part of me that was still drawn to it, the intense drive that had probably always been running the show for Drew, invisible behind the scenes of our friendship. Hell, I reflected it; “You’re too hard on yourself” had been my dad’s refrain for years, and he wasn’t wrong. I’d always retort that people who are content never do anything interesting, which never seemed to appease him.

But another part of me, possibly a larger part, just felt sad for Drew. If the AltR program were working right now, would he really be happier, or would he just be waiting for the other shoe to drop? Pushing himself to make it bigger, faster, better?

Was that true for my friend and he’d just hidden it from me? Or was this tense, panicky energy one of the many subtle things that were only true forthisDrew? The work uniform, the confidence, the appreciation forJim Donovan—clearly something, possibly something fundamental, had changed. Would “my” Drew be so dismissive of romance novels? Or was that even a distinction that it was possible to make?

Ten minutes later we pulled into an underground garage filled with a somewhat alarming number of Teslas. I trailed Drew to the elevator, making a show of rearranging grocery bags as he swiped his fob and pressed a button.Eleven, right.I’d memorized our address, butUnit 11Swas sitting in my short-term memory bank, not my muscle memory. I arranged our smattering of groceries in the expansive, half-empty fridge while Drew flipped open his laptop on the kitchen table, brow creasing with a familiar look of concentration. Based on the items I was tucking away, we might have been planning a picnic of our own—all the staples had been delivered yesterday, this trip had been charcuterie-focused. But a picnic probably wasn’t in the cards anymore…

“Are you hungry? I could make up a cheese board,” I said after an hour flipping through channels on the couch. Probably I should be working too—I finally had a “meaty” idea, after all—but his intense focus made me feel perversely indolent, as though I could persuade him to chill out a little through my own inertia and continual application of reality TV.

“Hmm? Uhh…no.” He frowned at the screen, clicking a few times with his mouse, then jerked his head up to actually make eye contact. “Wait, what did you say? Sorry, I was in the middle of something.”

“I was just wondering if you were hungry.”

“Actually, yeah, food would be great.” Drew flashed his gentle, sweet smile at me and my mood thawed slightly. “Is it okay if we have it here instead of up on the roof? I know we were supposed to watch the sunset, but the whole team is working on this right now, I can’t really step away.”

“Sure,” I said, jaw tightening. It’s not like Drew was actually salting my plans with him—this was the first I’d actually heard what our planswere—but the hurt tightening around me was instinctive, the feeling of not being chosen, not beingenough,the same no matter what world I was in.

It didn’t feel worth mentioning that the sun had set about ten minutes ago.

I arranged cheeses and nuts, crackers and olives glistening with oil, tiny little pickles and a handful of dried fruits on a simple wooden board I’d dug out of one of the cabinets—Drew didn’t seem to notice how long it took me to figure out where it lived. When I placed it between the two of us on the kitchen table, Drew reached for my hand around the side. Warmth spiraled through me at the gentle look he gave me, the soft pressure of his hand on mine. It was strange to realize that in this world, Drew loved me.

“This looks incredible. Thank you, Laurel. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

I smiled back at him and spread a thick blob of cheese across a cracker, flicking open the news app on my phone when it became clear he was only going to look up long enough to snatch something off the cheese board, eyes already back on the screen as he stuffed whatever it was in his mouth. I wondered idly whether for him, love was as organized and subdivided as our kitchen cabinets, something you pulled out when you needed it. The same sadness I’d felt in the car broke over me again, a sort of damp, wrung-out feeling ofIs this really it?I couldn’t remember feeling it before, and it made me wonder what, specifically, about life with Ollie inoculated against it. Maybe just overall genetic diversity. Drew and I seemed like only slightly different varietals grafted to the sametry-hard root stock, growing or wilting together. And for some reason I’d let him yank me up and stuff me in a pot, where I was clearly choking on the too-abundant resources he kept feeding me.

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