Crowning a tiny electric fireplace was the same picture from Hassan’s desk, with him and the other me in matching tan suits and holding bouquets of ferns and purple flowers with fringed petals like fairy wings. Me and Yusuf both studied the picture, standing close enough that our fingers brushed at our sides. By then, I could read his face like a spin of the Envisioner and knew what he was thinking maybe more than he did. What are we gonna do?

“Our wedding day.”

When I looked up, Hassan was lingering by the narrow entryway to the small kitchen, a stack of woven blankets and pillows in his hands.

I know you can’t really say if someone is happier than you based on a picture because of course they’re gonna be smiling. It’s a picture. But my alternate self—floppy hair gelled down in a bowl cut, laughing brown eyes, clean-shaven and tattoo-less from what I could see of his brown legs poking out from the shorts of his suit—really did look happier than I ever have. Hassan looked alive, too, instead of this husk of a man who yanked the cushions off the couch and pulled out a folding bed.

“I dig his shorts,” I said. Yusuf shot me a mortified look.

“Rui died in the plague a year after that.”

Oh, shit. Which explained why Hassan hated looking at me. Some morbid part of me wanted to know what his funeral was like. Who came, who threw themselves on the casket, sobbing? I clammed up, mostly for Yusuf’s sake.

Rui. My mom had bought this tiny hypoallergenic Chihuahua after I moved out and named it Rui, telling me she really wanted to name me that, but my dad thought it was too weird. She must’ve won out in this universe.

“It’s not much, but…” he trailed, looking down at the couch.

“Thanks,” Yusuf said. “I’m sure this is strange for you. It is for me. We’ll be out of here soon. I promise.”

We talked for a while over a murky bottle of wine. Rui was a nurse, he said. He’d worked graveyard shifts in an emergency room for years, even when he could’ve cashed in on the weird fact that he looked like the mythical Dr. Hayes Figueiredo that every school kid read about. Like, exactly like him—some walking marvel so that he’d bleached his hair and wore green contact lenses for years in hopes that people would stop gawking at him in the streets. He’d even moved from his small hometown in Madeira, where he’d lived with his mom after his American dad had walked, over to London, just for the anonymity of a big city.