“I always expect to find a dead body in the lobby,” Pete said. “Or a severed finger stuck to one of the elevator buttons. I know you love Tribeca, Hil, but this place is like a House of Horrors.” The decrepit lift cranked its way up to the fifth floor and the metal gate slammed behind us as we stepped onto the platform. We laughed noisily. There had been a bottle of wine at dinner. 

It was true; the dank old industrial building set a perfect scene for murder most foul. But I thought it was wonderful—a loft apartment with high ceilings, tall, warehouse windows that looked out to the sparkling Manhattan cityscape, walls of exposed brick, heavy doors that rolled on metal tracks, and best of all a spacious mezzanine, the place where I built my lab, where I did my life’s work, where I found, that same night, my cousin Sara lying on the floor.

She was semi-conscious, her clothes singed and reeking. When I touched her shivering body she became hysterical, crying, speaking nonsense. But I knew what had happened. She’d just killed my family. 

Their deaths had always been a mystery, a source of torment to me. And now I knew. 

Later, when she was cogent and could hear me, I told her it wasn’t her fault. But the words stuck in the air between us because of course it was her fault and we both knew it. The odd thing was this: my family had died fifteen years ago when Sara was just four years old.

That was the year my life had been changed by a terrible tragedy—a fire that destroyed my family home in London. I’d stayed out late having fun with friends. When I got home the house was lit up in raging flames and everyone inside was dead: my dad, my mum, and Poppy. Poppy Hillyer was my granddad; he lived with us because the house was his and had been his father’s before him and four generations of Hillyers had lived in the house until that night when it burned to the ground. 

The three ruined bodies were found in the basement, in the laboratory where they’d been working, where I would have been working too if not for the lure of a night at the club. That laboratory was the center of my family’s life, where all the Hillyer secrets were kept. But while I was out pounding pints, listening to music, dancing, there was a fiery explosion and all the secrets burned up along with my family. Nothing much left of anything but what remained in my head. 

The investigators never found out what caused the explosion—of course there were plenty of  hazards in the lab but I thought it best to play dumb about the charred and shattered equipment in the basement. I said very little. For months I was gutted, overcome with grief but also with guilt that I hadn’t been home. I was somehow convinced that if I’d been home the fire wouldn’t have happened, that I would have been able to prevent the deaths. That it was my fault. I couldn’t do any work—the laboratory was gone—couldn’t focus on my studies, couldn’t face people at the university who were all colleagues and admirers of my family’s work and who constantly reminded me of my loss with their well-meaning sympathy. I moved into a sadly furnished two-room flat that smelled of cigarettes and cabbage—a plummet from the stately Georgian manor that had once been my home. It wasn’t a lack of money that put me in such a sorry place. It was a lack of will. 

A cousin—second, I think, with something removed—had been urging me to come join the American branch of the family, the only family I had left. In a resolute move to escape my trauma, I relocated to New York City. And there I met Sara. 

I was twenty-five and naturally had nothing in common with my cousin’s five year old daughter. I ignored her at family gatherings for several years. One Thanksgiving I noticed her sitting alone reading my favorite book. By this time she was nine.

“Isn’t that book too difficult for you?”

Sara was clearly offended. “I can read books harder than this. But this is my favorite. My great-great-grandfather wrote it.”

“Yes, I know. He’s my great-grandfather.”

“Have you read it?” 

“Of course I have.”

“I’ve read it three times.”

“Good for you. Which is your favorite part?”

“I like when he goes into the future and the Sun is big and red and there are strange creatures flopping around in the ocean. That’s really cool. What’s your favorite part?”

“Actually that’s my favorite part too.” We chatted for a bit. She was dark-eyed with a mop of kid-hair and long, skinny limbs.  

“I know why people call you Hil.”

“I imagine you do.”

“Because your last name is Hillyer. Same as me. But why don’t they call you by your first name?”

“Because my first name is Clara. Please don’t ever call me Clara.”

“Okay, Clara.” I expected that and glared at her. “Just kidding,” she said. 

She had no siblings; like me, she had parents who were distracted scientists and had considered their species obligation fulfilled at one offspring. At holiday get-togethers there were other young cousins running amok but Sara mostly sat in a corner with a book. I always brought her more books to read—it became our thing—and I no longer ignored her.

#

Fast forward. 

I had bought and renovated the Tribeca loft apartment and outfitted the laboratory with the basics of what I would need. It was paltry compared to the sophisticated workings in the London lab but well enough equipped for me to resurrect old family secrets. 

Despite her parents’ warnings about my eccentric branch of Hillyers, Sara became curious about my research. She was now an amiable young woman and quite gifted, so when she entered secondary school I persuaded her to quit her job scooping ice cream on weekends and come work in my lab. When she showed real interest I eagerly brought her into the fold of my top secret project. It quickly became our project and I was thrilled to once again have comradery in the lab. She graduated secondary school early and attended Columbia, designing the specifics of her major around our main hypothesis. But she wasn’t supposed to be working the night we found her on the floor. 

Pete was an old beau who’d recently sidled back into my life. He was a fiber optics engineer with beachy looks and an exceptional smile. Sara and I had sought out his expertise to help with our project. He wasn’t privy to the secret but he humored us, followed our parameters, and completed his assignment brilliantly. We’d started dating again. But now Pete’s creation was lying on the floor tangled in Sara’s legs. 

Sara would not stop crying. We got her cleaned up, made sure she was unhurt, then gave her a pill and put her into my bed. When her babbling and weeping faded into a drugged sleep I pulled Pete out of the bedroom and explained that the jumpsuit he’d created for us, that Sara had been wearing and had apparently tried to crawl out of, was in fact a time travel vehicle.

“She traveled back to the night my family was killed,” I told Pete, and then spent the next hour trying to explain to him that what he was hearing was real. Of course he didn’t believe a word.

“Maybe you should go,” I finally said. 

“No. I’m staying. Something happened to her and I want to hear what she says. I want to know what the hell is going on.”

There was no use trying to maintain the cloak-and-dagger.  Until now, the subterfuge had been easy—Sara and I had hidden the truth in plain sight by using the language of quantum physics to explain to Pete what we were doing. It might as well have been Mandarin. Pete had shrugged and nodded pleasantly at our mad scientist prattle and had unknowingly designed the perfect time travel suit. Now I had to make him believe. 

#

A week earlier I’d been wearing the travel suit myself. It was a stifling day and the air conditioning from the lower level didn’t quite reach the mezzanine. Still, I was perspiring less from the heat and more from my ragged nerves. It was our first human trial. 

Sara argued with me but I insisted that I be the first to jump. Not for the glory or any proprietary claim but because I felt I should be the one to take the risk. After all, it was my crazy branch of the family that started it all. If someone’s atoms were going to blow apart and be scattered to the ether it should be mine. I decided my first jump would be to travel back one week to my bedroom downstairs where I would be safe. Sara was upset with that decision too.

“Do you seriously mean,” she said, “you’re going to use this incredible invention to travel back to last Sunday?”

“Well, where and when do you think I should go?”

“The Jurassic! The Cretaceous!”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Oh please! Come on! Dinosaurs!”

“No. Too dangerous.”

“Okay, how about later? Australopithecus africanus! Neanderthalensis! Homo erectus!”

I looked at her in horror.

“Well, maybe not those guys, but really. Mammoths? Saber-tooth cats?”

“Sara, no.”

“How about the Ides of March?”

“Sara…” 

“The Gettysburg Address? The grassy knoll? Dr. King at the Lincoln Memorial!”

All good targets for future jumps, but for our first human trial I opted for caution.  Back one week. To my bedroom.

With little ceremony and Sara’s pale, frightened face, I jumped to last week. 

The hood on the travel suit was blind; it had no opening and no visor because the traveler’s body had to be surrounded entirely by the transference energy or there was a risk that part of the whole would not be transported. So when I jumped I could see nothing until I unzipped the hood and pulled it back. 

I was where I was supposed to be—my bedroom. I checked the chronolemma on the wrist control and all was normal. But. I heard voices from the lab upstairs, voices that were clearly mine and Sara’s. That was wrong. We had specifically stayed out all that day to ensure the loft would be empty as there was no way of knowing what would happen if I came face to face with myself. Maybe nothing. Maybe a dimension-shattering quantum implosion. We thought it best not to risk it. But something had gone wrong, and now here I was just feet away from me.

I assumed the chronolemma had somehow inaccurately calculated the time or date and my finger hovered over the panic button, the emergency escape that would whisk me immediately back to the present. Forward to the present. But I didn’t press. I had to see.

There was a set of stairs directly from my bedroom to the back door of the lab. Slowly, quietly, I climbed the stairs. The door was ajar. I took the last few steps and peeked.

There we were standing together at the big table, a familiar scene from a thousand and one days we’d worked together before. Except one thing. I was hugely pregnant. 

For a moment I was completely lost in this shocking vision. Then I noticed that Sara’s voice had faltered. She was looking up, right at me. 

“What the hell…?” 

I ducked back quickly, not sure if she’d actually seen me, and whipped up the hood. Just as I pressed the panic button I could hear my voice…

“What’s the matter?”

…and my breath was sucked out of me as I flew across time and landed back in the lab a week later. I pulled off the hood, my heart thundering. Sara was hugging me, exulting in our first human time travel. I pushed her away.

“What’s wrong? What happened? Are you okay?”

I tried to be calm as I told her what I’d seen. 

The chronolemma had not malfunctioned. I’d traveled back in time accurately, but I had crossed membranes onto a different timeline. I’d traveled to a day when we knew for certain there would be no one in the lab, yet there we were. I had never been pregnant, yet there I was. Sara and I had proven the existence of the multiverse.

Physicists who study the multiverse hypothesis conjecture that there could be any number of parallel universes—universes of all different types, similar to ours and vastly different. Apparently I had traveled to one of these. It was a profound discovery, and we took some days to process and to speculate on some persistent questions. We couldn’t help but wonder what else in that universe was different.

“Did everything else look the same?” Sara asked. “Did I look the same?”

“Well I didn’t get much of a look but from what I could see everything was identical. Well, almost.” I laughed.

“I wonder who the father is? I wonder if it’s a boy or a girl? I bet it’s Pete’s! You should tell him!” 

“Don’t be daft!”

“Do you think it’s possible,” Sara said, “that my dad is alive in that universe?” My cousin had been killed two years earlier in an auto accident. The death had been hard on Sara, and had caused a damaging rift between her and her mother.

“Of course it’s possible,” I said. “Just as it’s possible my family is alive, if not in that universe then certainly in another. In fact it’s quite probable, I should think.” We were both silent for some long minutes.

“This feels like dangerous thinking,” Sara said. I agreed and we left it alone.

#

“That’s impossible!”

It was probably the twentieth—no, thirtieth time he’d said it. 

“I don’t know what else I can say, Pete.” I spread the soiled travel suit before him. “Look.” The suit was much like a fencing costume, lightweight and comfortable, the fiber optics incorporated into the thin lining. Although Pete had built the suit himself, he didn’t know how it worked so I explained to him how the transference waves engulfed the occupant in quantum energy to enable teleportation to another time, another place. 

“I can prove it to you, Pete. Sara and I built a small prototype for testing. It’s in the lab. Let me get it and I can show you how I can teleport—”

“Sure. You’ll put something in it, make it disappear, then make it reappear. A magic trick.”

“Oh Pete.” I was too distracted by more important matters to be insulted. “Come on. You know me. Am I crazy? Would I waste my time on a hoax? Give me a chance to prove to you that this is real. When Sara wakes up you can talk to her.”

I tried to be patient, but I was struggling. I’d just found out that my beloved young cousin, my friend and research partner, was responsible for killing my family. I understood now exactly what had happened to them and it was a horrible thing to know.

Pete and I managed to get a couple hours of sleep on the couch. When Sara woke up she cried again but was lucid so I began to question her. 

“Tell me what happened.” She hesitated, looked at Pete then back to me with her dark, tragic eyes. “It’s okay, Sara. He knows—or at least, I told him. He doesn’t believe yet but he will. So go on, tell us. I already know what you did. I know where you went and I know what happened.” As I said it I could feel myself growing hot. 

“You… How do you know? Did I say something?”

“The stench. The stench was all over you.”

A week after my family was killed a fire inspector had taken me onto the site to explain why the old brick house, although mostly still intact, had to be demolished. It was a ghastly sight—windows broken, ivy still clinging to the brick but shriveled and blackened like burnt skin—and there was a foul odor of soot and smoke, things melted, and an especially nasty stink from the basement. I knew I’d never forget that smell.

 “I didn’t go back to change anything. I wasn’t going to interfere. I promise, I would never break the rule.”

“I know, Sara. But still, you have to tell me what you saw.” The heat grew in my chest and spread to my face. I was getting angry but I tried to keep control, tried to be calm and fair to her.

“I just wanted to see what caused the fire. I wanted you to know that there was nothing you could have done, that it wasn’t your fault. And—” crying again, “— it wasn’t! It wasn’t your fault! It was mine!”

I felt no sympathy for her. I was done with the crying. “What did you see? What did you hear? Start from the beginning and tell me everything.” 

 “I miscalculated,” she said. “I meant to jump to the ground floor then sneak downstairs for a peek but I had the wrong elevation. I looked at pictures and estimated but I—I fucked up, Hil! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I fucked up! I caused the explosion! I killed them!”

“Tell me exactly what you saw.”

Her voice trembled. “As soon as I materialized, before I could pull back the hood, I heard loud cracking, like electrical arcing, and… someone was shouting. I whipped off the hood and saw an old man—it must have been Poppy—he was shouting and waving his arms but I couldn’t hear what he was saying, there was a loud noise and white light coming from—oh my god! I jumped in right next to the oscillator! I didn’t think! I fucking didn’t think! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” 

She was beginning to get hysterical again but I was done with the drama. “Stop it, Sara! Focus!”

Pete stepped forward. “Hil, don’t…”

“Stay out of this!”

“I pulled the hood back on and hit the panic button. I could feel heat from the explosion, I could hear them—” she stopped, and this time I didn’t want to hear more details. “Oh god. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

So there it was. It was because of Sara that my family was dead. She had jumped into the laboratory right next to the proton oscillator, a dangerous machine that produced unstable energy that would have easily been detonated by the super-fired photon emissions from the travel suit. Sara had been caught in the explosion and was lucky the panic button had ripped her body away just in time. 

She began to sob again—“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”—again and again and wouldn’t stop so we gave her another pill and watched her fall back to sleep. 

Pete and I went to the kitchen to make coffee but didn’t speak, both lost in difficult thoughts. Our coffees went cold. I knew Pete would insist on getting some answers, but I was in my own turmoil and in no mood to dive with a novice into the muck and mire of energy transference and superposition. Pete hadn’t yet realized the metaphysical implications of what had happened. But he was smart and soon would. 

He stared at me, began to speak a few times, stopped, then: “Assuming I believe you actually invented a time machine—”

“Suit. Time travel suit.”

“Time travel suit—uh, how could Sara have killed your family? They died fifteen years ago.”

“Well, Pete, that is how time travel works.” His face fell and I immediately regretted being snarky, so I took a deep breath and explained how the travel suit, something he helped to create, had enabled Sara to shoot across spacetime to the year she was four years old in New York but also nineteen years old in London. That her specific actions had set off an explosion that destroyed my home and killed my family. 

“But…” I knew what was coming, “how could she have killed them last night? They were already dead.”

“She didn’t kill them last night. She killed them fifteen years ago.”

“But…” I let him try to work it out. He couldn’t. “When you first met her, when she was a little girl, your family was already dead.” 

“Because she’d already gone back and killed them.”

“But she hadn’t gone back yet. She was just a little girl.”

“She had gone back.”

“But she hadn’t. Not until last night.” He was having a hard enough time accepting the truth of time travel. I knew my explanation of the spacetime continuum would throttle his ordered mind. 

“Pete. Listen. Humans experience time as linear, as one dimension, one direction. Always forward. We experience space as three dimensions. The spacetime continuum brings all those dimensions together. In the continuum there is no yesterday or last year. There is no tomorrow. It’s all here now. Time isn’t a straight line, Pete. Even our idea of time travel, traveling back and forth through time, is wrong. Time is a plane—back, forth, and sideways. Sara has always killed my family. She traveled to my old house because she had already traveled to my old house. Philosophers, scientists, theologians, have been speculating about this for thousands of years. It’s a difficult concept but because Sara and I—and you—created this ability to time jump we’ve given ourselves a window into the continuum.” 

“So at the same time Sara was four, her nineteen year-old self traveled back in time and killed—accidentally killed—your family.”

“Yes.”

“When she made the decision last night to go back and see what had killed them, they were already dead because she’d already gone back.”

“You’re still being linear in your thinking but essentially you’re right.

“But what you’re saying,” and here it was, “is that our lives are predestined. What we do now or in the future has already been done.”

“Well, again, linear thinking but… essentially correct.”

“But that means we have no free will. That just isn’t rational.”

“It may not seem rational to us, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t rational. Humans know how to purposefully move around in three dimensions. We don’t know how to move around in four dimensions but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. You have to stop thinking about things in terms of what’s possible and not possible. If you told someone two hundred years ago that humans could fly up above the clouds and cross the ocean in five hours, or up into outer space and walk on the moon, they would have told you that was impossible. If you told someone just fifty years ago that you had a device you could use to take photos, listen to music and watch movies, talk to someone on the other side of the world face to face, access just about any information you want in a matter of seconds, then put that device in your back pocket, they’d have sent you to the looney bin. Impossible! Spacetime is real, Pete. We just proved it. And yes I suppose that does mean our lives are predestined, if you insist on thinking of it that way.”

“I don’t accept that.” He was always so bloody logical, always had to dissect and question. “And what do you mean travel sideways? How do you travel sideways in time?”

“The multiverse.” 

“Multiple universes.”

I nodded; he’d heard of it of course but this wasn’t the time to elaborate, to tell him about the proof I’d seen that the multiverse was real.

When Sara woke she was better; deeply despondent but composed. The three of us were ragged and hungry, so we ordered Chinese take-away and ate it sloppily while we talked. I stopped telling Sara it wasn’t her fault; I wasn’t feeling it. We accepted that it was. However unintentional, it was because of Sara that my family was dead.

“I shouldn’t have gone back. If I hadn’t gone back…” 

 “Sara. You know it doesn’t work that way.”

 Pete tried to be helpful. 

“Why don’t you just go back earlier and get everyone out of house?” 

“Oh Pete.”

“No really. Why not?”

“Because,” Sara said, “that’s not what happened. Not in this timeline. If we tried it we might put ourselves on another timeline. We discovered—” 

I shook my head at her. No. Not yet.

“I’m sorry, I just don’t get it.” 

“Because it’s too dangerous,” I said. I didn’t want to hear Pete’s practical advice.

Actually, Sara and I had already discussed the idea and decided against it. It was her jump back in time that caused the tragedy. True, it had happened already but it was still a tragedy caused by her actions. If one of us jumped back to try to change things, what else might happen? What else might have already happened? We had promised each other we would never try to change history and we decided to stick to that promise. I had jumped timelines before and gotten back safely, but the multiverse was undiscovered country. There was too much of a risk of getting tangled.

Pete tried again. “Is it possible that when you first met Sara your family wasn’t dead? That her jump back killed them and then your memory changed and you thought they’d been dead all along?”

“If they weren’t already dead then why would she have jumped back? She jumped back to see what killed them. They were already dead because she’d already killed them. It’s the continuum, Pete. It’s how it is.”

Sara went back home that afternoon—she still lived with her mother—and didn’t come to the lab for several days. When she did come in we didn’t talk about anything important and spent time instead on letters and bills and grant applications. The mood was dreadful. Our actions were perfunctory. I could barely look at her. 

The following week Sara was scheduled to jump to 1963 to hear Dr. King at the Lincoln Memorial but the day came and went with no mention. Then she stopped coming to the loft completely. Pete spent a lot of time with me; he hovered and I started to get annoyed, but one day he found me weeping over the travel suit, trying to scrub off the filth, the foul debris—a task I had dreaded—and the nauseating smell brought it all back, put me back into the most painful moment of my life.  He helped me clean the suit, put his hands together with mine with infinite care and kindness, and we got it done and I forgave him for everything he’d ever done and would ever do.  He was beginning to accept, to understand, yet was still determined to make his own point.

“You need a change,” he told me one day. I’m taking time off work and we’re going on a road trip. Tomorrow. Pack a bag.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know where. It isn’t planned. See?”

That made me smile. I called Sara to tell her she could use the loft while we were away. I told her I didn’t know where we were going or how long we’d be gone, and for some reason that made me feel better. “It’s time to move on,” I said to her. I remember my words. “It’s time to move on.” I didn’t know exactly what I meant by it, but I remember that saying it gave me tremendous relief. 

 Pete and I drove through New England, up into the mountains then down and across the border into the Maritimes. The three dimensional movement relieved some of my anguish. We had a good time. When we got back, Sara was gone. She had moved on.

#

“I’m not going to do that.”

“Pete!”

“Haven’t you learned your lesson? What next? You could come back with two heads!”

I laughed, but Pete wasn’t kidding. I had asked him to build another travel suit because Sara had taken the first one.

She left me a note with explanations and excuses, expressions of gratitude for our years together, instructions on how to handle inquiries from various people (she’d told her mother she was “traveling”). She wrote that she was miserable, that she couldn’t stand to be who she was, that she couldn’t bear the wretchedness she saw in my eyes every time I looked at her. She apologized again for killing my family. She apologized for taking the travel suit. And she apologized for breaking a promise. 

“Sara and I promised each other two things,” I told Pete. “First, that we would never go back to change the past. The consequences of such an act could be minor, could be catastrophic. We don’t know and we don’t want to find out. The second promise was that we would never jump to the future.”

“Why not?” 

 “We can’t travel roundtrip to the future. We don’t know why, it just doesn’t work. We can send things to the future, but we can’t bring them back. But the objects are always there when our time catches up.”

I showed him our original time machine, a soccer ball.

“We cut the ball in half and redesigned the innards with the same basic lining that you used for the jumpsuit, then sewed it up leaving a small door, here, to insert various test pilots.”

“Test pilots?”

“That’s what we call the travel objects. Our first was an orange. We used various fruits, then frogs, birds, a rat… I even borrowed a marmoset from the Columbia bio lab. We had plenty of successful jumps but never roundtrip to the future. I can send the ball to yesterday, then bring it right back. But if I send it to tomorrow, say tomorrow at noon, I can’t get it back. But when tomorrow noon comes it’ll appear because our time has caught up with it. So we know we can successfully send to the future, but we can’t retrieve. And because we don’t know the reason, it means there is an unknown problem that we could never risk on a human. We promised we’d never to jump to the future—not to next week, not even to three hours from now.”

“Holy shit, Hil! That means…”

“Yes.”

Sara had broken the promise. She had jumped to the future. Self-exile, she called it in her note. She could never come back and she knew I couldn’t go to retrieve her, even with a new travel suit. Sara was gone.

I grew up in a family of quantum physicists. They didn’t just study the science, they were obsessed with it and I was drawn in. We had otherworldly conversations at family dinners. They taught me to study the universe inside-out and backwards, to explore it as infinitely vast as well as infinitely microscopic. Losing them had been the most painful thing imaginable. Learning that it happened because of Sara was devastating. Yes, they were already dead when she jumped, but only because she had already jumped and killed them. It was her fault. Could I blame her for killing them if the act was part of the continuum? Unlike Pete, I understood spacetime. What I didn’t understand was how to assign blame. If we all had no free will, who could I blame? 

I reflected on this for several weeks and decided that Sara—the Sara I knew from my universe—had no choice, that she had to jump to my family’s home because she had already done so. She’d banished herself to the future because it had already happened. And I realized what I had to do. I would solve the time travel problem of future retrieval. I would fix it. I would work it out then go find Sara and bring her back. And I knew this: that whatever was going to happen had already happened, but for me it was still an unknown and so anything was possible.

Once I made the decision, the melancholy that had gripped me so completely quickly lifted. I told Pete.

“And how,” said Pete, still contrary, “will you rescue Sara from the future when she didn’t tell you when or where she jumped?” That was an easy one.

To get any deep time coordinates we had to use the Hofmann-Lee chronolemma, a CERN device that could calculate the coordinates of any point on the planet as it was throughout Earth’s history. Our laboratory computer had remote access, and all activity was logged. I got online and saw where and when Sara had calculated for her jump: an off-trail coordinate on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, a hundred years into the future. 

I got back to work. I told Pete the complete history of my brilliant family. I brought him into the laboratory and explained everything. I told him about our discovery of the multiverse and that I’d seen myself pregnant. (He was quite amused.) We experimented with the soccer ball and together transported a mouse to the grassy knoll at Deeley Plaza. I carved Pete’s name into a Granny Smith and transported it to tomorrow, and we shared it when it reappeared. He had a hard time with quantum physics but he was a brilliant engineer and he was crazy about me. And yes, I about him. He sold his apartment on West 74th and moved into the loft, the shadowy hallways and murderous lift having finally grown on him. I worked hard. I was determined to figured out the future. I thought of the joy I would feel seeing Sara again.

One day Pete gave me a beautiful diamond ring and said that if I agreed to marry him he would build not one but two new travel suits.

He put the ring in the palm of my hand. “You believe everything we do is predestined. That means your decision has already been made.” 

I laughed. “I suppose that’s true,” I said, “but I don’t know what that decision is. So I guess I’ll have to think about it.”

---