I've been waiting to see who the Feds would send to us next, and last night I had an answer. We've been keeping an eye on the apartment that Jane used to visit, although her "Aunt Edna" seems to have vacated the place, and sure enough, today Roman brought word that a new girl had moved in. Young, he said. Ordinary looking.

Today I saw her-from a distance-and the whole world held its breath. I could feel my entire body reorient itself, as though nothing was more important than my awareness of her location. I forced myself to keep walking, to keep answering questions about the public lecture on string theory we'd just attended, but I wasn't paying attention. I was focused on her, reaching out to try to assess her reaction to the two who were trying to recruit her. It was all I could do to keep from running across to where she sat and begging her to come back to my apartment, where I could stand sentinel over her and keep her safe.

Except I can't.

I can't keep her safe. I don't even know how to keep my own people safe, except by increasing their awareness of the parallel worlds that surround us, and the possibility of incursion and distortion.

Even now, Alice says she can see storylines falling to ruins in the worlds we've been to: threads disrupted, pairings broken, happy endings thwarted and denied. I have no idea how much guilt I bear for all of that, if any. Being what we are, doing what we are able to do, may already in itself be a distortion of the way things are "meant to be." As soon as I understood that by entering a world, we blend with our in-world selves, I saw the danger. When we step out of worlds we have visited, that world's version of "us" leaves too. Just by crossing over, I have removed other Edwards from the storylines they were meant to inhabit. How can I ever recompense for the losses I have caused? How can I atone for that damage?

On Carlisle's advice we have all been limiting our travels, to try to do no harm. But the only answer, for all those girls left with no possibility of love, is to take this world's version there-if, that is, she even has the ability to cross-and, in so doing, remove her analogues. Blended with them, as I have blended with mine, we have only to be together to provide a happily-ever-after that will resonate through all the worlds.

There is, Rose reminded me, another possibility. Rose, in all the time I've known her, has hated and feared our abilities, and worried that we should have never crossed, never tried to enter any world other than this. She thinks we risk our very souls, in tampering with the lives-the storylines-assigned to us here on this earth. Sometimes she says bitterly that she wishes she had never learned about the other worlds; the least I can do, she says, is leave those heartbroken by my desertion in peace now. Perhaps the other-world girl of my dreams can find someone else, she said. Some other man, to make her happy. Leave her alone, and let her have her chance at normal happiness.

But the thought fills me with rage and despair. It cannot possibly be the right answer, can it? Not now, having seen her and felt myself falling already.

She must be mine. I would move heaven and earth-would spend my existence searching all the worlds; would shake reality until it released her-to have her at my side, through this lifetime and all eternity.

Is it wrong that I can't imagine life without her? Should I warn her away from me, though every fibre of my being longs to pull her close? At the end of the day, I cannot tell what I am meant to do. I have only my heart to guide me.

So I shall let her come to us, and make her own choice to explore our ideas or turn away. But I know my weaknesses. I am lonely. I want, more than anything, to have a wife to cherish and protect, to serve and to command. I want not to be alone anymore, wrestling with these questions of how to live with this strange ability to exit one reality and enter another. I want my soeur mystica, my angel in the house, my better self.

And now I have seen her. There is no going back.