Multiverse theory

Multiverse theory is the idea that alternate versions of the past and future exist in separate universes, with each quantum event branching reality into multiple outcomes. In the novel, this model does more than solve a theoretical paradox: it gives Natasha a vocabulary for imagining the lives that different choices might have produced, even as the story leaves her actual future uncertain. The possibilities are neither confirmed as worlds she can visit nor dismissed as empty abstractions; they make contingency visible at moments when her life feels shaped by forces she cannot control.

Definition and Paradox

The theory is introduced as one possible solution to the grandfather paradox and is attributed to Hugh Everett. At the quantum level, each event splits the current universe into multiple universes; consequently, every choice has counterparts in which a different choice was made. Rather than forcing mutually incompatible outcomes into one history, the theory assigns each outcome its own branch. Its answer to the paradox is therefore structural: all possible results can exist, but in separate universes.

The explanation extends from isolated outcomes to the possibility of living multiple lives. A choice does not simply close one future and open another; in this account, the unchosen futures continue elsewhere. The concept supplies a speculative framework for considering what could have happened without claiming that the characters can know or enter those alternate histories. That distinction matters throughout the novel: the imagined branches illuminate Natasha’s circumstances, but they do not change what has happened in the narrative she inhabits.

Natasha’s Imagined Branches

Natasha considers the theory while wondering which universe she is living in. One possibility is a world in which Samuel Kingsley does not derail his daughter’s life; another is one in which he does derail it but Natasha manages to repair the damage; a third is one in which she cannot. The branches give different outcomes to the same family crisis, but they do not tell Natasha which outcome is hers. Multiverse theory makes room for uncertainty rather than resolving it.

The idea returns when Natasha notices the cracked screen on her phone and remembers her earlier fall. She imagines a universe in which she stayed home and packed as her mother wanted: her phone and headphones would be intact, but she would not have met Daniel Jae Ho Bae. In another branch, she would have gone to school and been safe in English class instead of nearly being hit by a car; there, too, she would not have met him. The intact belongings mark the cost of one imagined alternative, but the more consequential absence is the encounter itself.

She also constructs a more intricate version of the day. In a universe where she went to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services but never met Daniel in the record store, their conversation would not have delayed her; she would have reached the crosswalk before the BMW driver arrived, avoiding the near collision. Her phone and headphones would have remained intact. Yet the branching possibilities do not all offer safety: Natasha also imagines a universe in which she met Daniel but he could not save her at the crosswalk, leaving more than her belongings broken. These counterfactuals connect small accidents, a chance meeting, and physical danger without treating any one outcome as inevitable.

Chance, Fate, and Causation

The branching model sits beside differing beliefs about why events happen. Natasha’s mother interprets events through fate and a plan; Natasha believes in determinism, in which one action leads to another and actions determine outcomes. Daniel Jae Ho Bae occupies an uncertain middle ground: perhaps meeting Natasha was not meant to happen, and perhaps it arose from random chance. The concept of multiple universes gives imaginative form to that uncertainty, since every possible choice can be pictured as having its own consequences.

Yet the novel distinguishes the possible accident of the meeting from the relationship that follows it. Daniel wonders whether their encounter was chance, but once they have met, their love is described as inevitable. That contrast does not establish a single doctrine about destiny. Instead, it lets chance and necessity coexist at different scales: the beginning may have been contingent, while what grows between them takes on the force of inevitability. Multiverse theory supports this tension by keeping unchosen beginnings imaginable without reducing the meaning of the chosen one.

Order Across Time

Ten years later, Daniel remembers Natasha’s argument about how many events had to go exactly right for their universe to form, and her claim that falling in love could not compete with that chain of conditions. Daniel has always thought she was wrong. His reflection is expressed through scale: up close, everything looks like chaos, but with enough distance and time, order emerges. He wonders whether their universe is simply taking longer to form.

This later thought does not prove the existence of alternate universes, nor does it settle whether the couple’s reunion was governed by fate or chance. It shifts the emphasis from cataloguing branches to looking for patterns among events. In that sense, multiverse theory and Daniel’s reflection perform related but distinct work: the first multiplies possible histories, while the second imagines that apparent disorder may acquire coherence over time. Together they let the novel hold open both the fragility of a particular chain of events and the significance Daniel finds in the life that chain produced.