‘I had to quit.’

Mrs Elm nodded. ‘And the bond you’d developed with your dad frayed and almost snapped completely.’

‘Pretty much.’

She pictured her father’s face, in the car, on a drizzle-scratched Sunday morning outside Bedford Leisure Centre, as she told him she didn’t want to swim in competitions any more. That look of disappointment and profound frustration.

‘But you could make a success of your life,’ he had said. Yes. She remembered it now. ‘You’re never going to be a pop star, but this is something real. It’s right in front of you. If you keep training, you’ll end up at the Olympics. I know it.’

She had been cross with him saying that. As if there was a very thin path to a happy life and it was the path he had decided for her. As if her own agency in her own life was automatically wrong. But what she didn’t fully appreciate at fifteen years of age was just how bad regret could feel, and how much her father had felt that pain of being so near to the realisation of a dream he could almost touch it.

Nora’s father, it was true, had been a difficult man.

As well as being highly critical of everything Nora did, and everything Nora wanted and everything Nora believed, unless it was related to swimming, Nora had also felt that simply to be in his presence was to commit some kind of invisible crime. Ever since the ligament injury that thwarted his rugby career, he’d had a sincere conviction that the universe was against him. And Nora was, at least she felt, considered by him as part of that same universal plan. From that moment in that car park she had felt she was really just an extension of the pain in his left knee. A walking wound.

But maybe he had known what would happen. Maybe he could foresee the way one regret would lead to another, until suddenly that was all she was. A whole book of regrets.

‘Okay, Mrs Elm. I want to know what happened in the life where I did what my father wanted. Where I trained as hard as I possibly could. Where I never moaned about a five a.m. start or a nine p.m. finish. Where I swam every day and never thought about quitting. Where I didn’t get sidelined by music or writing unfinished novels. Where I sacrificed everything else on the altar of freestyle. Where I didn’t give up. Where I did everything right in order to reach the Olympics. Take me to where I am in that life.’

For a moment it seemed as though Mrs Elm hadn’t been taking any notice of Nora’s mini-speech, as she kept frowning at the chessboard, working out how to out-manoeuvre herself.

‘The rook is my favourite piece,’ she said. ‘It’s the one that you think you don’t have to watch out for. It is straightforward. You keep your eye on the queen, and the knights, and the bishop, because they are the sneaky ones. But it’s the rook that often gets you. The straightforward is never quite what it seems.’

Nora realised Mrs Elm was probably not talking just about chess. But the shelves were moving now. Fast as trains.

‘This life you’ve asked for,’ explained Mrs Elm, ‘is a little bit further away from the pub dream and the Australian adventure. Those were closer lives. This one involves a lot of different choices, going back further in time. And so the book is a little further away, you see?’

‘I see.’

‘Libraries have to have a system.’

The books slowed. ‘Ah, here we are.’

This time Mrs Elm didn’t stand up. She simply raised her left hand and a book flew towards her.

‘How did you do that?’

‘I have no idea. Now here’s the life you asked for. Off you go.’

Nora took hold of the book. Light, fresh, lime-coloured. She turned to the first page. And this time she was aware of feeling absolutely nothing at all.

The Last Update That Nora Had Posted Before She Found Herself Between Life and Death

I miss my cat. I’m tired.

The Successful Life

She had been asleep.

A deep, dreamless nothing, and now – thanks to the ring of a phone alarm – she was awake and didn’t know where she was.

The phone told her it was 6:30 a.m. A light switch beside the bed appeared, thanks to the glow of the screen. Switching it on, she could see she was in a hotel room. It was rather plush, in a bland and blue and corporate kind of way.

A tasteful semi-abstract sub-Cezanne painting of an apple – or maybe a pear – was framed on the wall.

There was a half-empty cylinder-shaped glass bottle of still mineral water beside the bed. And an unopened collection of shortbread biscuits. Some printed-out papers too, stapled together. A timetable of some sort.

She looked at it.

ITINERARY FOR NORA SEED OBE, GUEST SPEAKER, GULLIVER RESEARCH INSPIRING SUCCESS SPRING CONFERENCE

8.45 a.m. Meet Priya Navuluri (Gulliver Research) and Rory Longford (Celebrity Speakers) and J in lobby, InterContinental Hotel 9.00 a.m. Soundcheck.

9.05 a.m. Tech run-through.

9.30 a.m. Nora to wait in VIP area or watch first speaker in main hall (JP Blythe, inventor of MeTime app and author of Your Life, Your Terms) 10.15 a.m. Nora to deliver talk

10.45 a.m. Audience Q + A

11.00 a.m. Meet and greet

11.30 a.m. Finish

Nora Seed OBE.

Inspiring Success.

So, there was a life in which she was a success. Well, that was something.

She wondered who ‘J’ was, and the other people she was supposed to meet in the lobby, and then she put the sheet of paper down and got out of bed. She had a lot of time. Why was she getting up at 6:30 a.m.? Maybe she swam every morning. That would make sense. She pressed a button and the curtains slid open with a low whirr to reveal a view of water and skyscrapers and the white dome of the O2 arena. She had never seen this precise view from this precise angle before. London. Canary Wharf. About twenty storeys up.