Page 2 of Parallel

I know that house.

I want to look away. My heart is beating harder, and the fact that people are going to notice makes it beat harder still, but already a picture is forming in my head—a wide deck, a long, grassy slope leading to the water’s edge.

“How can the grass be so dry with all this water around?” Abby asks, but her voice is growing dim beneath this sudden ringing in my ears.

And then, her words disappear entirely. There is no ground, no light, nothing to grab. I’m plummeting, and the fall is endless.

When my eyes open, I’m flat on my back. Soil clings to my skin and the sun is beating down so fiercely it drowns out all thought. I’m in some kind of field with a house in the distance, and a woman is leaning over me. Have I met her somewhere before? It feels like I have but I can’t place her at all.

“Quinn!” she cries. “Oh, thank God. Are you okay?”

The light is too much. That drumming in my head turns into a gong. I need it to stop, so I squeeze my eyes shut. The smell of parched grass assaults me.

“Why am I here?” I whisper. The words are slurred, the voice barely my own. God, my head hurts.

“You fell,” she says, “We’re at the inn. For your wedding, remember?”

The woman is pleading with me as if I’m a child on the cusp of a tantrum, but nothing she says makes sense. I am already married. And since when did London get so hot? It’s never like this here.

A man comes jogging toward us. His build is similar to Nick’s—tall, muscular—but even from a distance, I know he’s not Nick, not even close. My eyes flutter closed and for a moment, I feel like I’m with him again—watching the smile that starts slowly before it lifts high to one side, catching the faint scent of chlorine from his morning swim. Where is he? He was right next to me a second ago.

The man drops to the ground beside me, and the women scurry out of his way. “She must have tripped,” one of them says, “and now she’s really out of it. I think she may need to go to the hospital.”

I’m not going anywhere with these people, but I feel that first burst of fear in my chest. The throbbing in my head is growing. What if they try to force me to leave with them? I don’t even know that I’d be able to fight them off with my head like this.

“Where’s Nick?” The words emerge wispy and insufficient, needy rather than commanding.

“The hotel manager is Mark,” says another voice. “Maybe she means Mark?”

“Can you sit up?” the guy asks. “Come on, Quinn.”

I squint, trying to see him better in the bright sun. How does he know my name? There’s something familiar about him, but he also just has one of those faces. “Are you a doctor?”

His jaw sags open. “Babe, it’s me. Jeff.”

What the hell is happening here? Why is this guy acting like we’re old friends? I focus on him, trying to make sense of it.

“Your fiancé,” he adds.

For a moment I just stare at him in horror. And then I begin scrambling backward, a useless attempt at escape. “No,” I gasp, but even as I’m denying it, praying this is a nightmare, some part of my brain has begun to recognize him too, and remembers a different life, one in which Nick does not exist.

Nick does not exist.

I roll face down in the grass and begin to weep.

2

QUINN

My memory has mostly returned by the time they’ve gotten me into the car. My mother and Jeff look at each other carefully, but say nothing about the fact that I, for a period of time, did not recognize either of them. I rest my aching head against the seat as they quietly argue outside. God only knows what my mother is making of this.

“It will take you an hour to get back to D.C.,” she says. “There’s a state-of-the-art hospital in Annapolis.”

“Even a state-of-the-art hospital is not going to be as good as Georgetown,” he replies. “Look, just finish up with the contract here. I swear I’ll take good care of her, and I’ll let you know what they say the second I hear anything.”

I swallow hard, willing away this desperate thing in my chest, the one I woke with. They tell me I collapsed, but the things I saw seemed so real—Nick seemed so real—that it’s hard to believe I imagined them. A dream, a hallucination—it should be shadowy, vague. This is not. I remember our first date, our second date, the weeks that went by afterward. I don’t see Nick as some blurry figure I could only describe in generalities. I remember his eyes, his mouth, that dimple of his. I remember how familiar he seemed from the moment we met, that I knew before he’d even opened his mouth how he would laugh, how he would smile, how he would kiss. It was as if our relationship wasn’t new at all. It was a path so well-tread we could run rather than walk.

My eyes open. Two feet away, Jeff and my mother continue to discuss me, and my chest pinches tight. Jeff’s the person I’ve loved for the past six years. The man I wake up next to each morning, the one who made crepes for my birthday and gave up a day of fishing to walk through the Hirshhorn with me last weekend. I hate that I’m sitting here right now wanting someone I’ve never met.