The Love That Split the World

Natalie Cleary is an eighteen-year-old girl of Native American and white heritage, adopted at eleven days old by a loving white family in Union, Kentucky. On the eve of her last day of high school, she wakes to find Grandmother, an elderly apparition who has visited her since she was six, sitting in the rocking chair in her bedroom for the first time in nearly three years. Throughout Natalie's childhood, Grandmother told her creation myths and stories drawn from various First Nations traditions, serving as a source of comfort against the terrifying hallucinations, such as black orbs and spectral figures, that plagued Natalie at night. Grandmother's visits stopped after Natalie underwent EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), a psychotherapy technique that seemed to resolve the trauma driving the visions. Now Grandmother returns with an urgent warning: Natalie has three months to save someone whose identity Grandmother will not reveal. She tells Natalie to find a woman named Alice Chan, then looks past Natalie's shoulder as though seeing someone else in the room and vanishes.

Strange disruptions immediately begin. At school, everyone around Natalie disappears for a few seconds, leaving her alone in a pitch-black hallway. At Senior Night, a boy with broad shoulders and long dark hair flickers into view on the football field while the seniors vanish in alternation. No one else sees him. Later that evening, Natalie follows piano music to the band room and finds the same boy, a local young man who has been secretly using the school's piano, playing alone in the dark. They hide behind a curtain when Natalie's friends wander in, sharing whiskey and quiet laughter. He introduces himself as Beau, and the encounter leaves Natalie shaken and fascinated.

Natalie has spent the years since Grandmother's disappearance withdrawing from her old identity: quitting the school dance team, ending her relationship with Matt Kincaid, the popular quarterback, and preparing to leave for Brown University in the fall. Searching online for Alice Chan, Natalie discovers she is a psychology professor at Northern Kentucky University (NKU) whose research focuses on visitations and psychic phenomena surrounding hypnopompic and hypnagogic hallucinations, the sleep-related experiences Natalie had as a child. Natalie drives to NKU and meets Alice, a blunt, sharp-tongued researcher. Alice agrees to work with Natalie, theorizing that unprocessed trauma holds the key to reconnecting with Grandmother.

The reality disruptions, which Natalie calls "the Wrong Things," intensify. During Spirit Week, the school vanishes and Natalie finds herself standing among rolling hills where buffalo graze. Her house's shutters flash a different color; her dog blinks out of existence and reappears; familiar buildings are replaced by ones she has never seen. At Matt's birthday party, a painful confrontation erupts: Matt, drunk, kisses Natalie against her will and pins her down when she tries to push him away. She shoves him off and storms inside, only to find him in bed with Rachel Hanson, a former close friend. Fleeing the house, Natalie discovers the world around her has subtly changed. Beau appears in his truck and picks her up. They spend the entire night on the football field, sharing stories and opening up about their lives. Beau's home life is difficult: his father has an alcohol addiction and is absent from the family, occasionally mailing Beau bottles of whiskey, while his mother disappears for months chasing relationships. In the early morning, Beau kisses Natalie for the first time.

One night, Beau arrives drunk at Natalie's window and confesses the truth: He has experienced the same reality shifts since he was five. He can move between two versions of Union, primarily through playing the piano or drinking, and he can travel forward in time, watching the world speed past, though he cannot stop and live in another moment. The critical revelation is this: In his version of Union, Natalie does not exist, and in hers, Beau does not exist. They are the only two people without doubles in the other world. To demonstrate, Beau holds Natalie's hands in her darkened closet and moves them together through time. They watch days, seasons, and centuries cycle past while they remain solid and unchanged to each other.

Alice proposes that a wormhole exists within Natalie's consciousness, a tear in time created by a traumatic event, and that Natalie's "Closing," the permanent sealing of this wormhole, will happen within three months. She urges Natalie and Beau to practice crossing between worlds, recommending they combine their abilities: Beau plays piano while Natalie dances in an NKU studio late at night, the meditative quality of movement potentially deepening Natalie's connection to Grandmother's world.

Events take a devastating turn when, after a party, Matt confronts Natalie in a drunken rage and shoves her against his car. Beau intervenes violently, and Matt drives away intoxicated. That night, Natalie's parents wake her: Matt has been in a serious car accident and is in an induced coma with potential brain damage. The accident occurs in both versions of Union. Natalie is crushed by guilt, though Rachel later reveals that Matt had an alcohol addiction, a condition that existed regardless of Natalie's or Beau's presence in his life.

Under hypnosis with Alice's colleague Dr. Wolfgang, Natalie recovers a suppressed memory: When she was four, her mother fell asleep at the wheel, and their car collided with another vehicle and crashed into a creek. The recurring nightmare that has haunted Natalie her entire life was not a dream but a real event her mother kept hidden. Natalie confronts her mother by phone, and the conversation ends badly.

Then Matt is declared brain-dead. Rachel calls with the news: There is no brain activity, and life support is all that remains. That same night, a black orb, the terrifying hallucination from Natalie's earliest childhood, appears floating over her bed. She recognizes it as the sign of her Closing. In a panic, she drives to the intersection where Matt's memorial stands, the same intersection where her childhood accident occurred. Pushing against time, she glimpses other markers occupying the same space: a stone engraved with her own name and a wooden cross reading "BEAU WILKES."

Natalie travels through time to her childhood bedroom and finds Grandmother. The old woman reveals the truth: She is Natalie herself, decades in the future. There are not truly two parallel worlds. The car accident that traumatized Natalie as a child also killed five-year-old Beau, whose father was driving the other vehicle while intoxicated. Natalie's time-slip ability opened a wormhole, an alternate branch of time in which Beau survived and Natalie did not. Grandmother explains that she lived through the same summer long ago, fell in love with Beau, but failed to act before her Closing sealed the wormhole and erased Beau's timeline permanently. The choice before Natalie is stark: Let the Closing happen and lose Beau forever, or travel back to the night of the accident and place herself in harm's way so that Beau survives.

Grandmother cannot promise another way but tells Natalie it will be okay. Before leaving, she shares one last gift: Their birth mother's name was Bridget, and she never stopped caring.

Natalie drives to the intersection. Using Beau's song as an anchor, she pulls time backward until she identifies the moment of the original crash. She stands in the middle of the road, raises her arms, and shouts into the oncoming headlights. The light swells and consumes her, reminiscent of the beautiful blue unknown from Grandmother's first story, the Woman Who Fell from the Sky. She hears the screech, the thud, and her mother's panicked voice. Then she is gone. The final chapter, told as a fairy tale, describes a girl who offered her life for the boy she loved. A voice called Love intervenes, telling the girl to set down Death's knife. The girl wakes on the first day of a new life with no memory. She sees a boy on a hillside who looks both familiar and unfamiliar. They call to each other, as though beginning again.