What would I invent if I could invent anything?

That was the prompt question. Professor Sanchez had urged us to think about the society around us for clues. To brainstorm ideas both personal and universal.

What's missing in your life?

What would make it whole?

Before I knew it, I sprang up out of bed, feeling an itch work its way up my spine. I started rifling through the old jewelry box at the back corner of my chest of drawers, letting long-forgotten earrings and random childhood keepsakes fall through my fingers. I didn't wear jewelry much anymore as the MIT aesthetic was determinately geek-chic. Anything more dressy than a sweatshirt would provoke at least one inquiry of "Are you going somewhere fancy after?"

I had gotten a helix piercing through the upper cartilage of my left ear at the beginning of last semester during a wild and somewhat misguided night out with Piper. Now I just left in the dangling chain that connected it to my earlobe all the time. I never bothered with anything else.

Yet standing in my room, I couldn't help but run my fingers over the three raised scars of my inner left wrist, desperately seeking something to cover them. A bracelet, a bandage, anything. I had become more aware of how often I touched them lately—when I felt nervous, or overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work at school, or just lonely. My fingers would gravitate to them like a heliotrope to the sun.

They were Adam's scars. And Sage's, I guess. And everybody else's in the world that Adam and I had destroyed the year before. Somewhere out there, a version of Sage remained, though maybe not the same one I had last seen in the diner beneath the lake.

I reached for her diamond ring, buried as it was beneath a year's supply of God knows what, and slid it onto my right ring finger. It still fit perfectly, like it had the first time Adam had shoved it on there.

Someday, I promised myself yet again, I would get this ring back to Sage. Someday I would see her again, even if it was an altered version of her.

Would I see him too?

"Where are you, Adam?" I asked the room. The silence echoed back to taunt me.

And then the room filled with a ringing.

My phone vibrated so forcefully on the bed that it nearly wormed its way off. I froze momentarily; no one ever called me. My feet shuffled slowly and then quickly so I could grab it.

Unknown number.

I took a deep breath—ridiculous, really; it was certainly a robocall—and clicked "accept."

A silence lingered on the other end of the line. "Hello?" I asked nervously, my voice quavering.

More silence was my only response.

"Hello?" I tried again.

And now I could just barely make it out: breathing. Someone was there.

"Please say something," I asked pitifully. And then again, this time almost begging, "Please."

Another moment lingered before a voice finally relieved the tension.

"It's me," he said.

I knew the voice immediately, and though it wasn't Adam, it was someone who still made my lungs deflate a little too completely. I found myself half sitting, half collapsing on the bed, trying to catch my breath.

"Brady?" I asked tentatively.

"Yeah," he said.

I wanted to cry, even though I didn't know why he was calling yet. I had spent months trying to get Brady to talk to me, to ask him to forgive me for cheating on him with Adam. He had never responded. I finally realized it wasn't up to me to change his mind. It was his right never to speak to me again. I had to accept that that might be the end result.

"Hi," I said now. "I'm glad you called."

"I got all your messages," he said, referring to the voicemails I had left him last spring.

"Okay," I said, and then, simply because I couldn't think of what else to add, "Thank you for listening to them."

"I didn't listen to them."

"Oh."

"You know," he said now, his voice growing stronger as he talked, "It's not like I thought you and I would last forever. We were going different places. Anyone could see that."

I swallowed down my shame, not wanting to interrupt him.

"But I didn't think it would end like that."

"Neither did I," I admitted. "I'm so sorry I hurt you, Brady. You didn't deserve it. It just..." I stopped myself from saying anything more.

It just happened isn't an excuse. Not a good one, anyway.

"Sometimes I get so mad at you," he continued, "thinking about what my life would have been if you hadn't changed things last year... you and Adam, I mean."

I nodded, trying to keep my shaking nerves at bay. It was still hard to hear Brady say Adam's name. I couldn't tell which one of us he hated more. Because Brady was right, of course. Before I changed things last year, giving him back the memories of Piper leaving him for Robbie, his life had been pretty great.

He and Piper had been living in Colorado together, as they'd always planned. At least, until she had left him anyway, some invisible pull yanking her away from him and towards a life she knew was waiting for her elsewhere. I had to remind myself of this now: his life wasn't perfect before. I didn't destroy everyone's world. Just the one beneath the lake.

"I think we deserve to know the truth," I said now, though my voice wasn't as confident as the sentiment.

"I think so too," he agreed. "And so now I know the truth."

"What does that mean?"

"When we were in the world beneath the lake, and you got so sick from your vaccine pellet, do you think any of that was real?"

"Real?" I asked, not sure what he meant. "Of course it was real. But it doesn't matter now. That world is gone."

"Yeah. Yeah, right."

"Brady, are you okay?" I asked, hearing something off in his voice. Something distant and removed, as though he had already checked out. Something that scared me to my core.

"But that's not really how DW works, is it?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"Gone. Nothing's really gone. Nothing's forever. Except the future, maybe."

I felt the strangest sense of déjà vu, trying to place what he was saying into a moment in time, until a memory came crashing back, a phrase I hadn't thought about in years. It was something Robbie used to say when we were kids: Nothing lasts forever.

"Brady, I don't understand what you mean." I realized my fingers were clutching my bed covers into clumps and then releasing them again. Next door, Robbie and Piper were talking in excited whispers, their voices reverberating through the apartment. The room seemed to be ebbing and flowing with the sound.

"Even walls," he continued now. "Even doors."

"Brady?"

But he was silent again.

"We don't have to worry about any of that now," I said, trying to strike a comforting tone. "The world beneath the lake is destroyed. DW is covered up. And no one else will ever find any of it now. We're safe now."

"Yeah," he said, an ironic sneer working its way into his tone. "That's what Elaheh said."

My heart plunged into my stomach, and I found myself jolting straight up like a lightning rod on my bed. "Who?" I asked. "Do you mean Elaheh Farghasian?"

"Goodbye, M."

"Brady?" I stood up, my feet tripping beneath me as I started pacing the room. "Brady?"

But the line was dead.

I stared at the phone in my hand, cradling it like a stillborn baby, not sure which direction I was supposed to go.

I was still standing there five or ten minutes later, time having become a vacuum that I couldn't seem to swim my way out of, when Robbie and Piper knocked gently on the door and let themselves in.

Piper was beaming, her long chestnut hair springing into extra-vibrant life. "We have news," she said, and Robbie turned to stare at her as though all his earthly delights could be found somewhere in her infinitely promising face.

"We're getting married."

****

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