Mom was home, but on the clock, in the middle of a Zoom meeting with one of her clients. It made me think that maybe, just maybe, today could be an ordinary day start to finish. Then I went to take out the trash, and I saw someone on the roof of our backhouse.

Our backhouse—which my mom likes to call “the carriage house,” as if just having one isn’t pretentious enough—is larger than my house in my original world. In my wealthy worlds, we used to rent out the backhouse on Airbnb, until some bozo threw a party while we were out of town and trashed it. So now the place is reserved for friends and relatives—who can also be bozos, but at least we know where they live.

And today, there was an Edward on the roof. He was grinding along the peak, the sound of his board making an unpleasant hiss. He dislodged a roof tile. It went plunging to the ground and thudded in the flower garden.

I knew he saw me, but he didn’t wave or call out. He just moved back and forth along the peak of the roof, knowing that, no matter how much I wanted to ignore him, I couldn’t. Resigned, I got the key to the backhouse, went in, then climbed up to the roof from the balcony.

“What the hell are you doing up here?” I asked. “Where are the others?”

He stopped skating and kicked his board up into his hands. “It’s just me today,” he told me. “The others are all crunching data and worrying about what didn’t happen last night.”

“But not you?”

“Not me.”

I wasn’t sure which one this was. When they were together, I could tell them apart by the way they interacted.

“Nice view from up here,” he said, sitting down. “Of course it would be even better if this hill was higher. But that would take creating a geological event a few hundred million years ago. Give or take an eon.”

“Easier to just cut down some of the trees,” I pointed out.

“Maybe, maybe not,” he said, with an enigmatic little smile—which is what gave him away.

“Teddy!” I said, proud of myself for having figured it out.

“Excuse me?”

“Uh . . . I mean you’re number five.” Then I told him my little system for naming them, and he laughed.

“We actually do have a name,” he said, but he couldn’t tell it to me, because, not only was it unpronounceable by human tongues, it had a three-second blast of radiation in the middle. So “the Edwards” would just have to do.

I reached down to move a displaced tile back into position. “Are you here to debrief me after yesterday?”

“Nothing to debrief,” he said. “Our best guess is that you were too drained after Wednesday’s shift to do anything meaningful last night.”