That’s how my secrets feel inside me—they’ve been pouring down like rainfall for months and I don’t have space to hold them all anymore.

“I saw my mother,” I tell him. “Alive on one of the paths in the future.”

Bram sucks in a sharp breath. “That must have been …” He trails off. Shakes his head. “Actually, I can’t even imagine what that must have been like.”

“Terrible. Wonderful. Confusing.”

“Was it a good future?”

“Not for most people, no.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes,” I say. “Me too.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. If I could see her again … there are so many things I wish I could say to her.”

“Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.” Bram was so much younger when he lost his parents. He must have a lifetime of things saved up to tell them.

“Watching all of Latham’s paths unfold is exhausting. Even though most of them never happened, once I’ve seen them, they feel as real as anything else, you know?”

“Does your other path feel real too?”

“More than you can imagine.”

“That must be strange.”

I sigh. “To put it lightly.”

Bram shifts on the wall, turning his body toward me, and then away again like he’s not sure where he wants to be. He scratches the back of his neck. “Do you want to tell me more about what happened there? Between us, I mean?”

“Why, so you can laugh at me?”

His eyebrows pull together. “I never laughed at you.”

“You did. When I first told you we were matched on my other path, you laughed.”

“Not at you. The idea seemed so far-fetched then.”

Then?

I trace patterns in the cobblestones with the toe of my boot. “And now?”

The corner of his mouth twitches. “Do you want to tell me about it or not?”

“We were matched,” I tell him, “and you hated it. You were so angry with me at first.”

“I was angry?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I wasn’t very kind to you in the beginning. You remember the prison boat from when we were children?”

He nods.

“We each saw that event very differently. It took a while for us to trust each other.”

His expression goes tight, as if he’s remembering that day and the thick wall of resentment that used to be between us. But Bram has been different on this path. It’s as if he’d already let go of his bitterness the moment he came back to Midwood. Is it because he felt sorry that my mother died? Is it because I’m different in this reality? Or did our connection on my other path imprint on us both somehow? Maybe deep in his soul he knows I apologized long ago for how things were when we were children, even if he never heard me say it.