I stood up from the chair. So did Tai, and she wrapped me up in another embrace that went on too long.

“Are you staying in the hotel again tonight?” she asked.

“Probably. I can’t go back to the apartment yet.”

“I’ll call you before I head home.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

She squeezed my shoulder, and I gave her an empty smile of thanks. I turned away, but then, as an afterthought, I remembered what I wanted to know.

“By the way, who’s Eve Brier?”

“What?”

I gestured at the poster near the ballroom door. “She’s the speaker at the event tonight.”

“Don’t you know her?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s strange,” Tai replied.

“Why?”

“She told me she picked the hotel on your recommendation.”

“On my recommendation? She said she knew me?”

“Definitely.”

I took another look at the photograph of Dr. Eve Brier and felt the same sensation that her eyes were sending me an invitation. Come closer. Get to know me. Yes, she looked familiar, but I had no recollection of meeting her.

“Maybe I ran into her somewhere and gave her my sales pitch,” I speculated, although I didn’t think that was true. “Who is she?”

“She’s some kind of new age self-help guru,” Tai explained. “She left me a copy of her book, but I haven’t looked at it. Whoever she is, she’s very popular. We’re planning on a big crowd for her talk.”

“‘Many Worlds, Many Minds,’” I said. “What does that mean?”

“Apparently, she applies a theory from quantum mechanics in physics to her psychotherapy practice. It’s about how we’re all part of an infinite number of parallel worlds. Every time we make a choice, a carbon copy of ourselves makes the opposite choice in a different universe.”

“Parallel worlds?” I said skeptically.

I couldn’t wrap my brain around the concept. Maybe that’s because I was focused on the other two words she’d used.

Carbon copy. Like a double. A twin. A man in a storm.

“That’s what she says,” Tai replied. “When Eve was signing the contract for the ballroom space, she told me that an entirely separate universe had already been created in which she didn’t sign it.”

“What did you say to that?”

Tai winked. “I said to make sure that she lived in the universe where she paid the bill.”

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 3

On my way to meet Edgar at the Art Institute, I stopped in the museum’s south garden, near the Fountain of the Great Lakes, where the water flowed from clamshells over the bodies of five beautiful bronze women.

This place was flush with memories for me.