“Try me.”

I took a breath and considered what I would say. I’d thought about trying to pry my life’s history out of him without telling him what was really going on, but Roscoe was my best friend, and we still had a pledge of never lying to each other. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure if a doctor would take a leap of faith about unseen worlds as readily as a priest. Somehow, I had to prove that what was happening to me was real.

“Where should I be right now?” I asked him.

“What do you mean?”

“If I wasn’t here in the clinic with you, where would you expect to find me?”

“I don’t know. At your office, I guess.”

I leaned across his desk, picked up the phone, and handed it to him. “Call me.”

“What?”

“Call my office. Ask to talk to me.”

“Why?”

“Please, Roscoe. Just do it.”

With a look of confusion, he punched a button for the speakerphone and then pressed a speed dial number. The phone buzzed on the other end, and after several rings, a young woman answered.

“Chicago Housing Solutions.”

“Dana, it’s Roscoe Tate,” he said, his foghorn voice as deep as ever.

“Oh, hey, Dr. Tate. Are you looking for Dylan?”

“I am. Do you know where he is?”

“Sure, he’s on the other line. Do you want me to tell him you’re holding?”

Roscoe didn’t say anything for a long time. He stared across the desk at me, and his brow furrowed, like a mathematician confronting an insoluble problem. He stayed silent for so long that the woman on the phone finally broke in again.

“Dr. Tate? Are you still there? Do you want me to get Dylan for you?”

His eyes never left me. “Dana, are you saying that Dylan’s in the office with you? Are you sure about that?”

“I’m looking right at him,” she replied. “Actually, he just finished up his call. You want me to put him on?”

“Yes, please.”

A few seconds passed. Then we both heard my own voice on the other end of the phone. There was no mistaking it.

“Roscoe. Hey, buddy.”

“Dylan,” Roscoe murmured. He opened his mouth to talk, but seemed unable to decide what to say next.

“What’s up, Doc? You need something?”

Roscoe propped his arms on the desk and then balanced his chin on his hands. Our faces were barely a foot apart. He didn’t have the look of a man who thought he was in the midst of a prank or an April Fool’s joke. His eyes were serious, the same as mine. He spoke into the speakerphone, but he stared at me as he did.

I knew he was talking to both of us.

“Listen, I have a strange question for you,” Roscoe said. “It came up with a patient today, and I thought you might remember. There was an old woman who used to work behind the counter at Lutz’s bakery for a while. I think they found out her husband was some kind of Nazi. We used to make fun of her name while we were eating our pastries. Do you remember what it was?”

On the phone, Dylan answered immediately in a singsong chant.

So did I, mouthing the same words silently to Roscoe from the other side of the desk.

“Friedegunde, Friedegunde, face like die Hunde.”

Roscoe closed his eyes in disbelief. We’d both passed the test, and neither one of us could have faked it. A long time passed before he said softly, “Yes, that was it. Now I remember.”

“We weren’t very nice back then, were we?” Dylan said with a laugh.

“Well, we were nine,” Roscoe replied, opening his eyes and considering me like an alien come to earth. Which, in some ways, I was.

“So why did you want to know about old Friedegunde?” the other Dylan asked.

I put my finger over my lips and shook my head.

“I’ll tell you later, buddy,” Roscoe said into the speakerphone. “Gotta go for now.”

“Okay, catch ya later,” Dylan replied.

Roscoe stabbed the button on his phone to end the call.

“All right,” he said to me, his voice a block of ice. “Who the hell are you?”

CHAPTER 29

I’d barely begun telling Roscoe the story when he shut me down. At the first mention of the Many Worlds, he put up his hands, unwilling to hear more. He had patients to see, and they came first. What it really meant was that he needed time to process the idea in his head. Roscoe never leaped to judgment about anything. He thought about things. He evaluated all the factors and made plans. He was cautious. In other words, he was everything I wasn’t.

He told me to meet him at six o’clock at a bar just off the Kennedy on Montrose. The location he picked felt like another test. This was the bar where I’d gotten drunk and wound up in a street fight with a man who was abusing his girlfriend. Roscoe had come to collect me from the police station, and he’d never made it home alive.

The fact that Roscoe was alive meant that evening had gone differently in this world. And yet the fact that he chose the bar as our meeting place told me that the location still had some kind of special significance for Dylan Moran.

When I got there, I didn’t recognize the bartender, which was probably a good thing. If anyone knew me here, I doubted they would serve me. I sat at the end of the bar and tried to hold back the flood of memories from that night. Me confronting the man four seats down, his girlfriend telling me to mind my own effing business, him throwing a drink in my face. It was a karaoke bar, and I could still hear someone doing a painful rendition of “Coma” by Guns N’ Roses as the soundtrack to the fight.

“You want a drink?” the bartender asked me sullenly. She was an Asian girl with cherry-red hair.

“Vodka rocks,” I said. Then, as she walked away, I stopped her. “Hang on. Forget that. Just club soda.”

She shrugged. “Whatever.”

When she brought me the drink, I sat and nursed it with a clear head, and then I ordered another. I tipped her like I’d ordered Grey Goose. The bar began to fill up as the after-work crowd arrived, and people came and went over the next couple of hours. By six fifteen, Roscoe hadn’t shown up, and I began to wonder if he was planning to pretend that I’d been a figment of his imagination.

However, at six thirty, he slid onto the seat next to me. His eyes took note of the club soda, but he didn’t offer to join me in my sobriety. Roscoe had always been a Southern Comfort man, even as a priest, and he still was. He ordered it on the rocks and said nothing until he had it in his hand and had taken the first sip.

“I drove by your office,” he said. “Although I guess it isn’t really your office, is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

“Dylan was inside. I saw him. Then I drove straight over here, no stopping, and here you are. I needed to see it with my own eyes, know what I’m saying?”

“I do.”

He shook his head. “Many Worlds, Many Minds. I looked it up. The whole thing sounds pretty crazy to me.”

“That’s how I felt about it, too. But that’s what’s happening to me.”

“You’re a different Dylan. I mean, you’re the same, but you’re different.”

“That’s right.”

He eyed me as he sipped his drink. “It’s easier to believe when I really look at you. You’ve got a different edge, no doubt about it. It’s in your face, your eyes, how you hold yourself.”

“I met another Roscoe who told me the same thing.”

“You’re more like my Dylan was a few years ago. He’s changed since then. You? Not so much. You haven’t found yourself yet, not the way he did. Although I like the not drinking part. That’s a start.”

“You’ve changed, too,” I told him.

“Let me guess. In your world, I’m a priest.”

“You were.”

He laughed to himself. “Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I’d taken that path. Maybe we all do that.”

“Believe me, I’ve been obsessed with that idea recently.”

Roscoe nodded as he looked around at the bar. “I asked you here for a reason, you know. This place right here is where my Dylan’s life changed.”

“Mine, too.”

“So tell me what happened to you here,” he said.

I picked up my club soda and swirled the ice, watching it clink around the glass. “Four years ago, on the anniversary of the night my parents died, I came here. I got drunk, and I got into it with a guy who was calling his girlfriend names. The cops came and arrested me. When they let me go, I called you, and you came to pick me up.”

Roscoe knew there was more. “And? What happened next?”

“There was a car accident. You died.”

A blink was his only reaction. He took another sip of Southern Comfort. “Oh.”

“I blamed myself.”

“Of course you did.”

“There’s more. I met a woman that night. It was a coincidence, a weird twist of fate—or at least, that’s what I thought at the time. Now I don’t know. She rescued me. She helped me recover. We got married. Then very recently, I lost her, too.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Roscoe glanced at me from over the top of his drink. “What was her name?”

“Karly. Her name was Karly.”

“Did you love her?”