He glances sideways at me then back to Alice. “Started when I was five or six.”

“Okay,” Alice says, leaning so far forward over her knees that I’m waiting for her to tip over and face-plant into a stack of books. “Describe that for me—the first time you can remember.”

Over the next hour, Alice manages to drag just about as much information from Beau as I got in ten minutes in the closet. But she seems content, and she doesn’t stop writing once, not even while she’s asking questions, despite most of his answers being four words or fewer.

When she runs out of questions, she starts tapping on her mouth and doing that flip-flopping thing with her head again.

“There’s something else,” I say, taking the opportunity to speak. “Our friend Matt was in an accident. In both worlds. But in my version, I sort of caused it. And obviously I didn’t cause the other one, but it still happened.”

“Hmm.” Alice draws a spiral on the page as she thinks. “So, like Brother Black and Brother Red.”

“I guess,” I say. “But my friend Megan—she’s different in the other world. At least a little bit. In my world, she’s gone off to college already, to train with her soccer team. This Megan hasn’t. But she has a memory that I have too.”

“Sheesh.” Alice rubs at the corner of her eyebrow and blinks rapidly a few times. “This is complicated.”

Beau looks over at me, and I warm under this gaze. “Yeah.”

“It’s still possible it’s just the two of you causing the differences,” Alice says. “Maybe your existence or lack thereof affects some things but not others.”

“But why us?” Beau says quietly.

“That’s the million-dollar question.” Alice chews on the end of her pen but keeps talking. “Why are there two worlds, and why is it you two who can pass between them?”

“And where does Grandmother fit into all of this?” I add.

“Is it possible that, in Beau’s world, she lives in your house?” Alice posits. “Maybe she’s just a lonely old woman whose Closing never happened, and now she’s spitting out advice just to have company.”

“She doesn’t live there,” Beau says. “I’ve seen the family who does.”

Alice scrunches up her mouth. “Didn’t think so. It couldn’t be that simple.”

“And Grandmother knows things,” I say, shaking my head. “I trust her.”

The timer on Alice’s phone starts to beep, informing us our session is over. She swears under her breath and flops her notebook on the desk. “You’re right, Natalie. Grandmother is different. I’m trying to make sense of all this, but we still don’t have enough information. Nothing’s going to help as much as you speaking with her again.”

“Alice, I only have two weeks before I leave for the rest of the summer,” I say. “What if it’s Matt? What if he’s going to die unless I do something? Or have brain damage for the rest of his life? Or what if it’s someone else, my dad or—” I can’t make myself say Beau’s name. I don’t want to put the thought into his head that continuously gnaws at the back corner of my mind.

Three months to save him.

“I’m doing the best I can,” Alice says, massaging her thin dark eyebrows. “We’ll try hypnotherapy again on Thursday. In the meantime, you two need to spend as much time together as possible. Every waking second you should be bouncing back and forth between the two worlds, maybe even looking for a third you haven’t accessed yet. Natalie, stay stressed.”

“No problem,” I say, digging the heels of my hands into my eyes.

“And keep recording your stories. As many as you can. The stories are the key.”

“Okay,” I say.

One story, one phrase keeps replaying in my mind. It grips my stomach mercilessly, fills me with fear.

It’s about the cost of love. To grow up is to love. To love is to die.

Who is going to die?

“We should stop at the hospital,” I say on our way back to Union.

Beau and I haven’t been speaking. There’s a heaviness between us. His eyes dart over to me, and my chest aches under his gaze, the sunlight slanting through the window across his hazel irises.

“Okay,” he says.

In the hospital parking lot, it occurs to me that Beau and I are here to see two different Matts. “How should we do this?” I ask.

“Meet back here in half an hour,” Beau says.

I stop walking and he does too, holding eye contact. I can’t find the words to say it, but I don’t want to go inside without him. The waiting room will be too cold, too bare, too scary. The world will feel too dark. The truth—that regardless of whether Matt recovers or not, Beau and I will likely never see each other again after I leave in two weeks—weighs me down. I reach out and touch his side.

He looks down to my hand then back up, slowly, and I’m sure we’re about to kiss again when I manage to drag my gaze from his and say, “Thirty minutes.”

He turns and walks off toward the hospital’s automatic sliding doors. Before he reaches them, both he and his truck are gone.

I talk to the man at the desk, and one of Matt’s nurses takes me back to his room, where his mom is sitting beside his bed. She stands up and gives me a hug. “He’ll be so happy to hear your voice,” she says.

I look down at Matt’s unconscious face. There are four inches of staples along his hairline, and his left eye and cheek are severely bruised. A lump of gauze is taped over his nose, from which thin plastic tubes extend and connect to machines. Joyce pulls back from me and wipes at her eyes. “His back was broken when he was thrown from the car,” she says. “They won’t know much more about the physical damage until he wakes up.”

“Oh.” It’s all I can get out. The floor seems to be swinging under my feet, all the balloons and flowers and teddy bears stacked along the far wall swaying right along with it. The entire world is a Viking ship ride, and the clear blue water on either side is made up of all the things I can’t get to.

“Will you stay with him while I go to the ladies’ room?” Joyce says. “I didn’t want to leave him alone, just in case . . .”

She trails off and I nod. “Sure.”