a quantum love story

Laurel Everett has been with her boyfriend Owen for five years, and she finds herself with a dilemma. She was putting away the laundry when she found a ring in his drawer. She knew he wanted to get married at some point, but now? She’s not ready. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to get married at all. At any rate, she’s thrown. So when they go out to dinner for their anniversary, she picks a fight with Owen so he won’t bring out the ring. She feels bad about that, but she throws herself into her job to try to put it out of her head.

At Pixel, a tech giant, Laurel works in marketing. But her work bestie, Drew, is working on a top secret project with the quantum computer. When Laurel goes to his office to check it out, she finds out that it’s an AI program that offers up alternatives to the users. Drew asks Laurel to set up a profile, because the more profiles the AI has to draw on, the more information it has to draw from.

So Laurel sets up a profile based on one moment in her past where she came up against a crossroads. The program can then take the user through what may have happened in the other timeline. So Laurel chooses as her defining moment the time shortly after she started working at Pixel when Drew had asked her out. But something goes wrong, and the computer won’t let her finish setting up her profile. Drew isn’t sure exactly why it wouldn’t work, but Laurel is fine and heads home to Owen.

The next morning when she wakes up, everything has changed. Laurel is in a different apartment, with a different haircut, and she’s lying in bed next to Drew. Drew has changed also. He’s more confident and better dressed, changing out his t-shirts and hoodies for classier choices. Laurel is thrown for a loop, but she realizes she’s no longer working at Pixel in this timeline. She’s a writer, working on the romance novels she’s always dreamed of writing. But it’s not all fun and games in this timeline, especially as Drew keeps getting called into work. Apparently the quantum computer is not running the AI program the way it’s supposed to.

Over the next several days, Laurel finds herself getting tossed from one timeline to the other. The more she bounces back and forth, the more perspective she gets on what’s going on. The timeline with Drew looks perfect on the surface, but that Drew is controlling and Laurel misses the fun she had with Owen. The timeline with Owen is colorful and artistic, but she has to keep her job in order to pay for their lifestyle. But in both timelines, the computer program is glitching.

Drew and his team are trying in both timelines to fix it (not that they know about the dual timelines), but nothing seems to be working. As a last resort, they’re talking about shutting down the program completely. But if they do that, where will Laurel end up? Since she’s the only one who knows what’s going on with the computer, she feels like it’s up to her to find the solution, so that she can end up in the timeline she wants, or any timeline at all.

What If It’s You? is a clever dual-timeline rom com that asks what would happen if you could go back in time and make a different choice. While it starts out looking at the main choice of which person you want to have in your life, it goes deeper to ask about the other choices that round out our lives. As Laurel tries to figure out how to get home, going so far as to talk to an MIT professor for help with quantum computing, it was fascinating to see her wake up to her life after rolling along on autopilot for a while. This book has a lot of sweet moments, and I loved every page.

Egalleys for What If It’s You? were provided by Dell through NetGalley, with many thanks, but the opinions are mine.