The other Rael was always in the kitchen. Small kitchen, dark tiles, morning light coming from the left. She was always thirty-four. Always making coffee or finishing it. Rael had watched for eleven years and the other version had not aged a day.
Her own mirror was in the bathroom. She stood at it every morning before work, brushed her teeth, and for two or three seconds (never longer) the face looking back was not hers. Same eyes. Same jaw. But the lines she had accumulated in her forties were not there, and something in the expression was different in a way she had never been able to name.
She had studied the kitchen. Dark tiles. A window she couldn't see through. On the wall behind the other Rael, something that might be a child's drawing: she had looked carefully for eleven years and still could not confirm it. The edges blurred the way the peripheral things always blurred in the mirrors.
She had tried to reconstruct the choice. She had been thirty-six when she first noticed the other version, which put the branch somewhere before thirty-six, perhaps much before. The other Rael was thirty-four, which meant the timelines had been running differently for at least a decade. She had made lists. Jobs she had left or stayed in. Cities. People. The lists ran long and proved nothing.
What she kept returning to was this: the other version did not look unhappy. She did not look happy, either. She looked like a person having her coffee before work. She looked, Rael thought, like a person who had stopped wondering about the other kitchen a long time ago.
The other version set down her cup. Rael turned off the light.