“I was going to ask you the same thing.” Theo leans against the door. “You look at me like I’m a puppy you’ll have to put down. What happened?”
At first I want to make up a lie, but why? Theo’s strong enough to hear the truth. I look into his eyes and say, “You killed me. Then you died for me.”
He listens, slack-jawed, as I explain what happened in the Egyptverse and then in the Triadverse. “Conley thought that if he ordered you to kill me, it would force you to see me as an enemy,” I finish. “But he was wrong. Once the Triadverse’s Theo had to face what he was really doing, once he actually had to see it for himself—he couldn’t do it anymore. He finally turned against Wyatt Conley, and I think he removed that entire universe as a threat.”
“Jesus.” Theo runs one hand through his fashionably spiky hair. “I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t know how you can look at me.”
“I can look at you because that wasn’t you.” I touch his shoulder. “Our choices matter more than anything else. And you’ve always chosen to help and protect me.”
Theo’s smile is crooked. “What about Paul? How’s he doing?”
“I haven’t seen him since the Spaceverse. We left things badly.” I take a deep breath to get through it. “Paul’s splintering messed up his brain—for real. The scan we ran looked like shattered glass. One of the other Pauls told me that you could recover from being splintered, or compensate for it at least, but you have to try. To try, you have to believe. And Paul doesn’t.”
“Little brother.” Theo groans and thumps the back of his head softly against the front door. “Don’t worry, Marguerite. You’ll get through to him eventually.”
“I hope so.” How do you undo the programming of a lifetime? Paul was literally raised to believe there was no such thing as unconditional love, and I don’t know how to convince him otherwise.
“You will.” Theo’s dark brown eyes meet mine, wistful and resigned. “You’ll be one of those college freshman girls convinced she’s going to marry the guy she’s already in love with. Except all those other girls will have broken up with their long-distance boyfriends by homecoming. You and Paul? You’re going to make it.”
“Theo—”
“You’re looking at me like I’m too wounded to ever recover.” He slaps one hand on his chest, exaggerating the wound, even though I can sense the very real pain he still feels. “Trust me, Marguerite, I’m gonna be just fine. I broke enough hearts along the way, so I had it coming.”
“Nobody deserves a broken heart. Everybody deserves to be loved.”
His smile falters, but only for a moment. “I am loved. Just not the way I was hoping for. Right?”
“Right.”
“Here’s what’s going to happen. I’ll go do my postdoc work somewhere else, at a university far away from California, far away from all of you. You and me and Paul, we’ll still Skype and text, just a little less often than we used to. I’ll spend some time feeling sorry for myself and listening to emo music, then I’ll spend some time partying too hard and probably sleeping with a few of the wrong people, and finally someday I’m gonna meet a woman who actually makes me glad I didn’t get you. Because she’ll be to me what Paul is to you, right? She’ll be the one.”
“Yeah. She will.” My words come out hoarse, strangled by the lump in my throat.
Theo continues, “Someday you’ll come to my wedding, and I’ll come to yours and Paul’s—where I expect to be best man, remember—and eventually we’ll argue about whose babies are cutest. Mine, probably, because look at this face.” He points at his own widening smile. “And we’ll drift further apart, but you and me and Paul—we will never, ever let go.”
“Because we’re friends, always.” I sniffle as I try to smile back. “How can you be so . . . okay with this?”
“Because I want you to be happy. With or without me, whatever it takes.” Theo sighs. “That’s the difference between wanting someone and loving them.”
“Thank you. For everything.”
“You’re most sincerely welcome. Now—one final request—all these other versions of me get to kiss you. I’d like to kiss you just once, as myself.” He hesitates, the mask of cocky self-confidence slipping for a moment. “Only if you’re okay with it. I’m going for poignant, not pathetic.”
“Poignant works,” I say, and he takes my face in his hands.
When Theo kisses me, it’s gentle, even tender—demanding nothing. We embrace in this one still moment stolen from time, surrounded by the currents and choices that could have swept me away from Paul and onto Theo’s shore. In infinite worlds, we are together, our other versions loving each other with their own sense of a perfect, unshakable destiny.
We don’t live in any of those worlds. We live in one where Paul is my only love. But Theo has accepted that. He is content to be here with me, to hold me close just this one time.
At last our lips part. We smile at each other. “Paul’s going to get this right,” Theo murmurs as his thumb brushes along my cheekbone. “He’s going to come back to you.”
“I hope so.”
Our wistful mood is instantly shattered as we walk through the door to hear Wicked’s voice. “They won’t pay you anything. We can pay you everything.”
“Money is merely a necessary artifact of late-stage capitalism.” Mom perks up as she sees us. “Oh, good. You’re back. There have been some bribery attempts since you left.”
“You don’t know Mom and Dad at all,” I say to Wicked. “I would’ve thought that by now you’d seen enough alternate versions to know how little they usually care about being rich.”
“Believe me,” Wicked shoots back, “I know how little they care.”
I pause. I want to use this knowledge against her—but is it possible I might get through to her?
So I pull out a chair to sit opposite from Wicked. “You think Mom and Dad don’t love you, because they’ve been so upset about losing Josie. I know that’s not true.”
Wicked laughs. “You have the luxury of being sentimental. Me? I see the world the way it really is.”