“Except people do bring unhappiness on themselves with their attitude, don’t you think? Negative thinking brings negative energy into your life.”

“I don’t believe that.”

I have to smile. “Well, I guess that means I don’t either, since you’re a part of me, right?”

“I originated in your memories of me,” she says, “but the longer I stand outside of you in this world, in this wood, the more I seem to be gaining a reality of my own.” She held up a hand and looked at it. “How odd.”

“You mean like Christiana—Christy’s shadow self?”

Her gaze moves to my face.

“I don’t know. The otherworld . . . there is so much about it that remains unknown. On the one hand, it can seem as though anything is possible here, and yet it follows its own set of rules. The trouble,” she adds with a humourless smile, “is that no one seems to know what those rules are.”

“So I’m here and you’re here,” I say, “and the longer you’re here, the more real you become. Or at least until I wake up, I suppose. I wonder how long we have before that happens.”

She gives me a confused look. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you know. My body’s still over there, sleeping in a hotel room. At some point it’s going to wake up and I’ll be drawn back.”

“But your body is with you.”

I look down at the twenty-something girl I am, where I should be seeing an older, crippled woman.

“Yeah, right,” I say. “This isn’t the body I went to bed with. I was drunk, but not that drunk.”

“And yet, it is your body. You are wholly here, with all that that implies.”

“How’s that possible?”

“I don’t know.”

She cocks her head and I get the sense she’s looking inward.

“There’s not much that I do know,” she finally adds.

“Because you were born out of my memory.”

She nods.

This is so way off the make-sense scale that I don’t even know where to start with it. Then something else she said registers.

“What did you mean when you said ‘with all that that implies’?” I ask. “What’s implied?”

“Your light shines so bright . . .” she begins, her voice trailing off when she sees that I get it.

Like Joe hasn’t talked to me about this a hundred times before. Like she—the real her—didn’t tell me herself the last time I met her in the otherworld.