Mom had left a message that she’d be home late. She had a client a couple of towns away, and an accident on the interstate had brought traffic to a standstill. If what I saw earlier was any indication, it was more than just one accident.

Isn’t it strange how we take for granted that the universe works? That the gears all fit together? We can’t imagine it being any other way, because it’s all we know. But when the gears no longer mesh, anything can happen. Murphy’s law becomes as true as the law of gravity. All that can go wrong, will, and without question. We think miracles—if we believe in them at all—are few and far between, but what if the true miracles are the millions of near misses we experience every day? What if they’re all a key part of that functioning clockwork? Perhaps without those commonplace miracles, every car would crash, every plane would fall from the sky, and every bridge would buckle under the force of a million failed bolts, bringing the world as we know it crashing down in a single roll of catastrophic thunder.

That’s what was happening now. The common miracles were failing, not just in the physical world, but in society. The glue that held us together was gone. I turned on the TV to see not just natural disasters, but human ones. Riots and insurrection breaking out all over the world. And it dawned on me that the correction wasn’t a punishment—it was self-defense. The universe was protecting itself from a world without miracles.

My phone rang. It was Layton. I did not want to speak to him. He was a distraction. A heavy arm pulling me into the mundane. I almost didn’t answer it. There’s not a day that I don’t wonder what would have happened if I ignored that call. How things might have gone. But in the end, I picked up the phone, and this game the multiverse and I were playing launched into sudden death.

“Hi, Layton.”

Nothing on the other end at first. As I listened, I could hear him breathing. A little heavy. A little out of breath.

“Layton?”

“Why did you do it, Ashley?”

It caught me off guard. I scrolled through my mind all the things I had done that I wouldn’t want Layton to know about—which was everything.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“How long has it been going on? How long, Ashley? Since he started tutoring you? Was it even tutoring at all, or was that just a lie?”

The picture was still fuzzy but coming into focus. “Layton, calm down!”

“I SAW!” he screamed. “There was this guy, and he got it on his phone. I saw the way you kissed Paul! How could you do this to me? How could you do this to us?”