Page 227 - The Midnight Library

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shared that pain with Ash, and more oen than not it was a bed as Molly

was getting better and better at sleeping through.
ere were awkward moments, of course. Nora never knew the way to
anything, or where things were in the house, and Ash sometimes wondered
out loud if she should see a doctor. And at first she had avoided sex with

him, but one night it happened and aer wards Nora felt guilty about the lie
she was living.
ey lay in the dark for a while, in post-coital silence, but she knew she
had to broach the subject. Test the water.

‘Ash,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Do you believe in the theor y of parallel universes?’
She could see his face stretch into a smile. is was the kind of

conversation on his wavelength. ‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Me too. I mean, it’s science, isn’t it? It’s not like some geeky physicist just
thought, “Hey, parallel universes are cool. Let’s make a theor y about them.”’
‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘Science distrusts anything that sounds too cool. Too sci-

fi. Scientists are sceptics, as a rule.’
‘Exactly, yet physicists believe in parallel universes.’
‘It’s just where the science leads, isn’t it? Ever ything in quantum
mechanics and string theor y all points to there being multiple universes.

Many, many universes.’
‘Well, what would you say if I said that I have visited my other lives, and I
think I have chosen this one?’
‘I would think you were insane. But I’d still like you.’

‘Well, I have. I have had many lives.’
He smiled. ‘Great. Is there one where you kiss me again?’
‘ ere is one where you buried my dead cat.’
He laughed. ‘ at’s so cool, Nor. e thing I like about you is that you

always make me feel normal.’
And that was it.
She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only
see the truth if it is close enough to their reality. As oreau wrote, ‘It’s not

what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’ And Ash only saw the Nora
he had fallen in love with and married, and so, in a way, that was the Nora
she was becoming.