In my first years of solitude, when my primary concern had been survival, the idea of keeping a diary had seemed a deeply foolish one. And yet that simple act of writing entries as if I were describing events to Alice had somehow kept me sane – or relatively sane, at any rate. The routine of putting the words down, of describing the daily struggle to survive, kept me from cutting my own wrists. Later, when I wandered my alternate in a hopeless search for other survivors, I had managed to fill two thick books with crabbed writing and sketches. They had become so precious to me that I had, at times, risked my life in order to protect them.

And now I found myself staring at a dozen notebooks identical in appearance in every way to the ones that now sat in my own house, on the other side of town.

I reached down and pulled out the last of the notebooks on the right, assuming they were arranged, as my own were, in chronological order. I expected to find mostly blank pages, since this was the last notebook in which I had written immediately prior to my own retrieval.

At that time, my entries had grown increasingly sporadic as the Alice in my thoughts took on a kind of reality of her own. Each day was becoming too much like every other, and the less I wrote, the more I struggled to find reasons to keep on living.

I had thought that I might start writing again, about the new life the Authority had gifted me with. But, in a way, a spell had been broken. I had barely written anything since a few short days after emerging from quarantine.

I opened my other self’s last diary, but instead of finding the blank pages I had expected, I found them to be filled with tight, cramped handwriting identical to my own.

I flipped back to the beginning with shaking hands, finding the same sparse, barely descriptive passages I remembered making in the days immediately before my retrieval: a few brief words about necessary repairs to my home and observations about the weather.

I moved on to the newer, unfamiliar entries. I began to read, my heart racing in my chest.

It’s been nearly a year since I first came here, I read, and maybe it’s time I started writing in this thing again.

I slammed the notebook shut and threw it on the floor. That other Jerry had sat on this couch, slept under this roof, eaten in the kitchen I had seen through the door on the other side of the hallway.

I felt my skin crawl, literally crawl, the hairs on the backs of my arms bristling with terror.

‘We lived here together,’ said a voice from behind me. ‘I guess you figured that out by now.’