Now Ava was literally at sea, in an alien universe, at the whim of her shitty retail job. She had no control. Her limbs were already drifting toward exhaustion. And she was calm.

“We should conserve our energy,” she said softly.

“Why?” Jules said brokenly. “What’s the point?”

There was no point, and they both knew it. So Ava ignored the question. “Here, float on your back,” she said, thinking of long-ago swim lessons. “Like this.”

She let Jules go and shifted in the water until she was horizontal, arms and legs akimbo. The salty water buoyed her, made her feel weightless.

“What if we float away from each other?” Jules asked.

Ava turned her hand over, holding it out to them.

So they floated like that, quietly holding hands. It felt too normal for the situation. Here they were in another universe, facing death by drowning and/or hypothermia—but the touch, the calmness, felt, in some ways, more normal than the last three days, since Jules had walked out of Ava’s apartment. More normal even than the month preceding it, after the shift in their relationship that Ava couldn’t articulate but that she felt in her bones; her body knew it had been the end, looming. And it had been sudden and inexplicable and, like all ends, utterly implacable. The more desperately Jules had tried to fix it, the more irreparable it seemed.

But that wasn’t quite it, was it? The more Jules had tried to fix things between them, the more broken Ava had felt. Breaking up with Jules felt like the only way she could salvage anything of herself.

Ava imagined what the two of them looked like from far above: two bright specks against the dark sea, dressed in the same sky-blue polos and khaki pants. She wondered if their bodies would ever be found; if there was life in this sea that would eat them, take nourishment from them.

“Do you think there’s a universe out there where we didn’t break up?” she asked Jules.

Jules was quiet a moment, then answered. “There are infinite universes.”

“So there are universes where we … worked. Where my brain wasn’t garbage.”

“And I didn’t run away from my problems.”

Ava thought she should argue, but she was too exhausted. “Where we stayed together, had a big gay wedding, adopted kids, and then died together. In our nineties, in the same bed.”

Jules snorted. They knew The Notebook had left an outsized impression on Ava’s preteen mind. “Sure,” they said. “And just as many universes where we never met at all. Or stayed together and were completely miserable.”

“Or broke up and managed to be friends.” There was salt in her mouth; seawater or tears, maybe both.