‘So,’ wondered Mrs Elm, looking at Nora. ‘What are you feeling?’

‘Like I still want to die. I have wanted to die for quite a while. I have carefully calculated that the pain of me living as the bloody disaster that is myself is greater than the pain anyone else will feel if I were to die. In fact, I’m sure it would be a relief. I’m not useful to anyone. I was bad at work. I have disappointed everyone. I am a waste of a carbon footprint, to be honest. I hurt people. I have no one left. Not even poor old Volts, who died because I couldn’t look after a cat properly. I want to die. My life is a disaster. And I want it to end. I am not cut out for living. And there is no point going through all this. Because I am clearly destined to be unhappy in other lives too. That is just me. I add nothing. I am wallowing in self-pity. I want to die.’

Mrs Elm studied Nora hard, as if reading a passage in a book she had read before but had just found it contained a new meaning. ‘Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.’

‘I thought that was it. The one with Dan. But it wasn’t.’

‘No, it wasn’t. But that is just one of your possible lives. And one into infinity is a very small fraction indeed.’

‘Every possible life I could live has me in it. So, it’s not really every possible life.’ Mrs Elm wasn’t listening. ‘Now, tell me, where do you want to go now?’

‘Nowhere, please.’

‘Do you need another look at The Book of Regrets?’

Nora scrunched her nose and gave a minute shake of her head. She remembered the feeling of being suffocated by so much regret. ‘No.’

‘What about your cat? What was his name again?’

‘Voltaire. It was a bit pretentious, and he wasn’t really a pretentious cat, so I just called him Volts for short. Sometimes Voltsy, if I was feeling jovial. Which was rare, obviously. I couldn’t even finalise a name for a cat.’

‘Well, you said you were bad at having a cat. What would you have done differently?’

Nora thought. She had the very real sense that Mrs Elm was playing some kind of game with her, but she also wanted to see her cat again, and not simply a cat with the same name. In fact, she wanted it more than anything.

‘Okay. I’d like to see the life where I kept Voltaire indoors. My Voltaire. I’d like the life where I didn’t try and kill myself and where I was a good cat owner and I didn’t let him out onto the road last night. I’d like that life, just for a little while. That life exists, doesn’t it?’

The Only Way to Learn Is to Live

Nora looked around and found herself lying in her own bed.

She checked her watch. It was one minute past midnight. She switched on her light. This was her exact life, but it was going to be better, because Voltaire was going to be alive in this one. Her real Voltaire.

But where was he?

‘Volts?’

She climbed out of bed.

‘Volts?’

She looked all over her flat and couldn’t find him anywhere. The rain patted against the windows – that much hadn’t changed. Her new box of anti-depressants was out on the kitchen unit. The electric piano stood by the wall, silent.

‘Voltsy?’

There was her yucca plant and her three tiny potted cacti, there were her bookshelves, with exactly the same mix of philosophy books and novels and untried yoga manuals and rock star biographies and pop science books. An old National Geographic with a shark on the cover and a five-month-old copy of Elle magazine, which she’d bought mainly for the Ryan Bailey interview. No new additions in a long time.

There was a bowl still full of cat food.

She looked everywhere, calling his name. It was only when she went back into her bedroom and looked under the bed that she saw him.

‘Volts!’

The cat wasn’t moving.

As her arms weren’t long enough to reach him, she moved the bed.

‘Voltsy. Come on, Voltsy,’ she whispered.

But the moment she touched his cold body she knew, and she was flooded with sadness and confusion. She immediately found herself back in the Midnight Library, facing Mrs Elm, who was sat this time in a comfy chair, deeply absorbed in one of the books.

‘I don’t understand,’ Nora told her.

Mrs Elm kept her eyes on the page she was reading. ‘There will be many things you don’t understand.’

‘I asked for the life in which Voltaire was still alive.’

‘Actually, you didn’t.’

‘What?’

She put her book down. ‘You asked for the life where you kept him indoors. That is an entirely different thing.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes. Entirely. You see, if you’d have asked for the life where he was still alive I would have had to say no.’

‘But why?’

‘Because it doesn’t exist.’

‘I thought every life exists.’

‘Every possible life. You see, it turns out that Voltaire had a serious case of’ – she read carefully from the book – ‘restrictive cardiomyopathy, a severe case of it, which he was born with, and which was destined to cause his heart to go at a young age.’