“God, it sounds like all I do is run around hating things. Actors, TV shows, husbands. I keep breaking up with perfectly nice-seeming guys.”

I feel a little sick, wondering if that is how I am in LA too. Annoying and restless when everything is arguably fine.

“Just the one nice guy, really,” she corrects. “And you’ve only broken up a few times. It’s really more the fact that, even when you do break up, you can’t stop being around each other, and you keep hurting each other that way.”

“Tell me I’m not as bad as I sound.”

“No! You’re grand. I mean, you’re always down for a good kippy chat, but you’re not really a shite-talker or anything like that. I think your problem with Theo has more to do with your past—”

“Wa-wa-wa-wa-wait,” I say. “She married fucking Theo?”

“So you do remember him of all people?” she asks, confused.

“I mean, they were together in high school and then they got back together in college. Yeah, I hated him. That’s a judgment I can stand behind.”

“Okay, so you remember everything up until being, what, like, eighteen?”

She swats at a mosquito; I pause to think it funny that mosquitos are part of this delusion, hallucination, whatever it is.

“No, I remember everything up to this moment. There are no gaps in my memory, it’s just that the lives seem to have sort of … diverged when I went to college. Because you seem to think I’ve been here that whole time, right?”

“Since the first year of college, yeah. I mean, you visit home now and again of course, but yes, you’re here.”

I shake my head. “How did you and I meet?”

She hesitates, and then half sits on the wooden split rail fence behind her.

“We were in classes together. I was getting a degree in art. Painting, specifically, but we all had to take classes in the other disciplines, you know. I met you and Aimee in a basic acting class. It was not for me, let me tell you.”

“Okay, and how did Aimee end up here?”

“She came in the second semester of your first year.”

“How? She didn’t get in, right?”

“Taken off the wait-list, I guess. Well, look, why don’t you try to piece your life together for a day or so and then think about reaching out.”

This is crazy. If I’m right that this is the life I would have lived, then it sounds like everything would have gone according to plan if I’d just come. It’s almost too much to comprehend.

“Well, it doesn’t matter that we’re fighting, I’m going to call her. Is the whole Theo thing why we’re on bad terms?”

My heart is pounding.

“That’s where it started.”