“But why a manifestation like this? Why am I seeing other versions of myself?”

“That I can’t tell you. The brain reacts to trauma in unusual ways.”

I thought about the poster of Dr. Eve Brier in the ballroom at the hotel. She was a stranger to me, but I could still picture her face in my memory with unusual clarity. “Well, there’s a speaker at the LaSalle Plaza tonight who believes that we’re living in the midst of infinite parallel universes. So I guess there must be a lot of other Dylan Morans out there. Maybe they’re paying me a visit.”

“Are you talking about the Many Worlds theory?” Alicia asked.

I chuckled in surprise. “You’ve heard of it?”

“Of course. Most scientists have.”

“Is it legit?”

Alicia shrugged. “Many physicists believe it is.”

“Parallel universes? How the hell does that work?”

“Well, this isn’t my field, but as I understand it, the math of quantum mechanics creates a strange paradox. According to the math, particles have the ability to exist in two different states at the same time. However, whenever we look, we only see one state. That’s the problem.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “This is about Schrödinger’s cat.”

“I’m impressed, Dylan,” she replied with a smile.

“Hey, I watched The Big Bang Theory.”

“And you’re correct. Erwin Schrödinger used the story of the cat to explain the paradox. There’s a cat in a box with a vial of poison that may or may not be released depending on whether a single atom decays. Until an observer opens the box to check, quantum theory suggests that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Except we all know that’s absurd. Well, a Princeton scientist named Hugh Everett came up with an answer: when the box is opened, the universes split. One observer sees a cat that is alive, and in a parallel universe, another identical observer sees a cat that is dead. That’s the Many Worlds theory.”

“That sounds insane,” I said.

“Not according to the math of quantum mechanics. And the math is pretty solid. That’s why we have things like the atomic bomb.”

I shook my head. “Well, I’m not a cat in a box, so what do I do? I’ve lost everything, and now I can’t even trust my own mind.”

“Try not to obsess about it,” Alicia suggested. “I can’t really explain why this is happening to you, but I suspect the hallucinations will go away as you deal with your grief.”

I wanted to believe her, but I kept seeing my doppelgänger in the museum. His face. My face. The way he looked at me. “You know what really scared me about that other Dylan?”

“What?”

“It was what I saw in his eyes. I felt this cloud of menace from him. He was capable of anything. And he was me.”