Her Heart's Divide by Kathleen Dienne Read Free Book Online Page B

hands. “I can’t talk about it.”
    “You know that’s all the answer I need, right?”
    “What makes you so sure that Jack is saying stuff like that?”
    “So, you have to promise not to make that face.” She started playing with a clear calcite crystal she was wearing as a pendant.
    “What face?”
    “That face you always make when I talk about things unknown to science.”
    I sighed. “I’ll try.”
    “See!”
    “I am more willing than usual to suspend my disbelief, okay? That’s the best I can do.”
    She got up and started pacing in front of the sliding doors. “The thing is, Jack is probably telling the truth, because he’s not really Jack. I mean, he’s Jack, in that we’re all basically the sum of our experiences, and he’s got mostly the same experiences as our Jack.”
    I rubbed my eyes. “I’m confused.”
    “I’m not explaining it very well. It started with my new subliminal CD.”
    I stifled a groan. Allison had a billion of these things. Some crazy nutjob in California had a synthesizer, a wave machine and a very soothing voice. It was essentially guided meditation and a little autohypnosis, and every single CD was identical, except for his vocal track in the second half of each one. The discs purportedly had subliminal messages that would reinforce his instructions to quit smoking, eat less, be more popular and explore past lives—but not all of those things on one CD. You had to buy a different CD for each concept. The main thing that was accomplished was making the nutjob rich, so really, maybe he was crazy like a fox.
    “What was this one for?”
    “Getting a glimpse at alternate realities.”
    “And why do you want to do that?”
    She stared at me. “How can you be not even a little curious to see how things might have turned out in the present if you made a different choice in the past?”
    I shrugged and smiled. “I can always ask you if I’m feeling curious.”
    “Goon.” She smiled back and then grew serious. “So, here’s the thing. The retreat I was at had a workshop on building a window between our reality and the alternate reality we wanted to view. Lila, you’re making the face.”
    “I swear I’m not making the face.” I might have been making a face, actually, but it wasn’t the one that she suspected. I had a feeling I knew where this was going, and I didn’t want to believe it.
    “Okay, okay. So with my CD I’d been curious to see what my life would have been like if I hadn’t married Jack. It was the biggest fork in the road in my life, really. But the images I was getting with the CD just weren’t very clear. I thought exploring that alternate reality at the workshop would be…fun.”
    My voice cracked. “Fun?”
    “Well, it wouldn’t change my decision to marry Jack in the here and now. Honestly, being married to Jack has brought us both a lot of happiness and peace. I assumed I’d see validation for my choice, if you know what I mean.” She sighed.
    I was afraid of where this was going, but I had to ask. “So how’d you know Jack’s gone insane in this world?”
    “I’m getting there. I’m not going to bother going into all the details because I know how you feel about this stuff, but here’s the short version. There was a ceremony that was supposed to cut a temporary window between the worlds that I could look through. Something went wrong. I fainted and came to literally in that alternate world. And—”
    “And you didn’t marry Jack in that world because I’d already married him before you realized you cared for him that way.” Now I really was feeling dizzy.
    She looked at me kindly. “Yeah. And I had a hell of a time getting back here too. The other people at the retreat realized what had happened right away when the alternate me woke up in Sedona and started raising hell. It still took a week for everything to work out right.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, the window has to be opened, which isn’t trivial, and it