I whirled around, to see Chloe Wicks standing at the entrance to her living room. She held a paper bag full of groceries from the commissary. I had not even heard her come in.

She put the bag down on the floor, then walked past me, dropping into a chair opposite the couch. ‘I’ve been meaning to do something about them,’ she said, nodding towards the notebooks. ‘Stick them in the attic, maybe burn them. I hadn’t really decided.’

‘It must have been hard,’ I managed to say, ‘seeing me walking around the island, like . . .’

The words faltered in my mouth, and I let myself sink onto the couch. Despite everything, my mind at that moment was filled with the memory of that one, fleeting kiss before I knew anything about her.

‘Like a ghost,’ she said. ‘I heard about what Oskar said to you. Winnie told me just now, down at the commissary.’

There was a moment’s awkward silence. ‘It’s been hell, actually,’ she said finally. ‘You look like him, talk like him . . . but you’re not him.’ A perplexed look came over her face. ‘I–I don’t know. It’s confusing.’

‘There must be some differences,’ I said.

I saw the flicker of a smile. ‘Well, you’re a couple of years younger than him, for a start. You’re the same age he was when they retrieved him.’

‘You almost make it sound like time travel,’ I said.

‘Weird physics, more like,’ she said. ‘It’s how they can sometimes visit alternates before, as well as after, an extinction event. That’s how Casey got that footage he was showing everyone that night we . . .’

I nodded. She didn’t need to say which night. ‘So I’m the same age he was, when he first arrived here?’

‘Pretty much.’

I cleared my throat. ‘I spoke to Rozalia this morning.’

Chloe stared at me, alarmed. ‘Oh God. How is she doing?’

‘Pretty much as you’d expect. She told me you might know a few things about the . . . the other Jerry.’ I looked around again, at the diaries, the photograph. ‘But I think I’ve got it pretty much figured out.’

‘So you came here,’ she said, ‘to see if it was true.’

‘There’s another reason.’ She looked at me, waiting. ‘Rozalia came to see me because she thinks Nadia’s death . . . well, she seems to think it might not have been an accident. That it might somehow have been connected to what happened to your Jerry.’ I shrugged. ‘She talked about him carrying out some kind of, I guess, investigation, for want of a better word. Does any of this mean anything to you?’

Instead of laughing at me or telling me I was crazy, she merely asked, ‘Was that all she said?’

‘Pretty much.’