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Until one day, two years later, the name Julian Marlowe reappeared — not in a lab, but in a bookstore window. His name stamped across the cover of The Camphorwood Guardian — a detective novel about crimes, secret research, and puzzles.

Anna had stared at that cover for a long, long time to make sure this is the Julian Marlowe she had worked with.

He hadn’t gone mad. He’d gone fictional.

And the craziest part? It was on the best-selling list for that month.

Julian Marlowe — the man who once argued Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics — was now sitting comfortably beside crime writers and thriller novelists.

Anna walked into the bookstore and bought the book right away.

And as soon as she started reading, that familiar feeling crept in — like muscle memory she didn’t know she still had. There were puzzles buried beneath the mysteries. The same kind of puzzles Julian used to lose sleep over — only now disguised as riddles about locked rooms and impossible crimes. But the patterns were there. The obsession with cause and effect. The twists that bent reality just slightly out of shape. The questions that sounded like fiction, but felt eerily like quantum physics.

Page after page, she found echoes of old arguments they’d had in the lab. Obscure references only someone from their world would even notice. The way his detective would rant about the limits of perception, it was exactly how Julian once ranted about wave-particle duality.

Julian hadn’t stopped trying to solve the universe.

He’d just switched mediums.

Stories were his new experiments.

......

Out of curiosity, Anna walked into the bookstore the next day to see if she could find more of Julian’s books.