Chapter 7 — My Name Is Owen

"My name is Owen Mercer," I told her. "Five years ago, I woke up inside a novel as Julian Ashford. I lived his life. I married you. I helped raise Maisie. But I had a life before any of that, and I'm keeping it."

Vivian looked at the license again.

"Julian—"

"Owen. And I'm not marrying you again. I'm not going back to be your husband."

A bus stopped across the street. People stepped down, opened umbrellas, went home.

Vivian stood beneath the entrance light with nowhere to go.

"You remember everything," she said.

"Yes."

"Then how can you say you're someone else?"

I put the license away.

"I'm saying I was someone before I met you."

She reached toward the phone, toward the photograph still on its screen, but stopped short of touching it.

"Was any of it real?"

"Maisie was."

Her face tightened.

"I meant us."

"I know what you meant."

For a while neither of us spoke. I could see a seam beginning to come apart at her coat pocket. In Bellwether, someone would have replaced the coat before she noticed.

Here, she pushed her cold fingers through the torn lining.

"You loved me," she said.

It would have been easier to deny it. To call five years an accident and step neatly out of them.

But I remembered her sitting on the kitchen floor because Maisie would only stop crying if we both stayed down there. Vivian had been exhausted, barefoot, singing half the words wrong.

I had loved that woman.

"Yes," I said. "I did."

She took one step closer.

"That doesn't mean you can ask for the same life back."

She stopped.

Rain began to collect on the shoulders of her coat.

"After you left, I kept thinking about the things I said. I would remember wanting to tell you something, and then remember saying the exact opposite."

"What things?"

"At the hospital. After the accident. I wanted you to know I was frightened. Then I heard myself accusing you."

"I remember."

"It felt like something was pushing. Like there was only one way a conversation could go."

I looked past her at the street.

The book had described conversations I hadn't yet had. I knew she wasn't inventing the possibility.

"Maybe it was pushing," I said. "But you hurt me. I still had to live through it."

"I'm trying to explain."

"Then explain why you needed to make sure I'd come when you lied about Maisie."

She looked down.

"I wanted to know I could still reach you."

"You could call me."

"That wasn't what I wanted to know."

There was the truth, finally small enough to fit between us.

I picked up my bag.

"Do you have anywhere to stay?"

She shook her head.

"Your phone?"

She showed me a dead screen. The case was the one I remembered. She had carried that much across, at least.

I didn't know whether its accounts would mean anything here.

"Wait under the awning," I said.

I stepped aside and called Ben.

He answered with a mouthful of something.

"Forget your leftovers?"

"Someone from a relationship I haven't told you about is here. I'm going to let her warm up while we work out where she can go."

He stopped chewing.

"Do you want me there?"

I considered it.

"Yes."

"Ten minutes."

When I returned to Vivian, I kept the door closed behind me.

"This is temporary help. It doesn't change anything I just said."

"I understand."

"Listen first. My bedroom stays private. You don't go to my work or contact my parents. You don't wait outside the building to make me talk. Tomorrow we work out your next step."

Her mouth moved as though a different answer had nearly come out.

Then she nodded.

Ben arrived before I took her upstairs.

He introduced himself, carried the leftovers, and behaved as though awkward strangers appearing in my life were something we could handle with enough tea.

I was grateful enough to find it difficult to look at him.

Inside, Vivian stopped beside the bookshelf.

There was no wedding photograph on it. No child-sized shoes by the door. My cutting tools lay on a folding table between two unpacked boxes.

"You work here?"

"Sometimes."

"You could have had a proper studio."

Ben glanced at her.

She caught herself.

"I mean—"

"I have a job I like," I said.

I gave her a towel and pointed out the bathroom. While she was inside, Ben lowered his voice.

"You can change your mind about letting her stay."

"I know."

"Do you?"

I looked at the closed bathroom door.

"I'm learning."

He stayed until I had made up the couch. We agreed he would call in the morning. He left without asking for the story I wasn't ready to tell.

Vivian sat with both hands around a mug.

"Is he your best friend?"

"Yes."

She nodded, absorbing one more fact nobody in her world had known.

I put three hundred dollars and a spare phone on the table. The phone could use the apartment's Wi-Fi. We would find a better arrangement in the morning if she needed one.

"Food, transport, whatever comes next," I said. "You don't owe me affection or an explanation for spending it."

"I have money."

"Can you access it here?"

She looked at the phone she had brought.

"I don't know."

"Then use that for now."

I went to the desk and unlocked the drawer.

The book lay exactly where I'd left it.

Vivian set her mug down too hard.

"That was in my hands."

"It's been here since last night."

We looked at the damaged corner together.

She told me what she'd written before crossing. I turned to the last page.

Her sentence was there, in the hard, slanting handwriting I remembered from grocery lists and notes left on my pillow.

I am leaving this life to find Julian.

Under it, my own sentence had returned.

I give up the part of Julian Ashford. I am going home.

Different choices. The same page.

"Is he still there?" she asked. "The man whose name you used?"

"There wasn't someone else watching from inside. It was me. I remembered his childhood, his training, things I hadn't done. But I was the one making choices."

"The one who held Maisie when she was born."

"Yes."

She closed her eyes.

I let her sit with that. I wouldn't pretend another man had suffered in my place just because it would make our separation easier to explain.

"Did the woman say anything about closing it?" I asked.

Vivian repeated the warning about a passage not being an invitation.

"I thought if I could find you, the rest would be simple."

"It wasn't simple for me to leave."

Her fingers tightened around the edge of the blanket.

"What do you need me to do?"

I looked at her. It was the first question that night without an answer hidden inside it.

"Tell me everything she said. Exactly."

Vivian began again, more slowly.

I wrote her account in a notebook beside the book. When she reached the old woman's answer about returning, a page lifted without either of us touching it.

A line appeared in the middle of the paper.

Maisie Ashford waited for her mother.

A black stroke passed through the name.