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Rage and anguish bubble up in me. I don’t think. I barrel in the door, my mother flying back, hands raised as my father shouts, “Hey!”

I race inside. I can still hear the bartender’s low rumble of laughter, and I follow it as my dad tells my mom to call 911, not to get near me, just come back outside.

I race down the hall, so familiar that my feet know exactly where to turn. The back hall. The bedrooms. Three of them. As the youngest—and the one who comes home the most—I still have my room. It’s the last on the left, and that’s where the laughter came from.

The door is shut. I swing it open and—

I rock back. I don’t know what I expected to see. Maybe another guest room? A bedroom for my nieces and nephews? An art studio for Mom? Proof that I had never been here.

Instead, it’s my room. Only … not my room. Not the one I last slept in a couple of months ago.

It’s my childhood room. My princess bed with its menagerie of stuffed animals. My walls with their Pixar posters, only the posters are under glass now. My little desk is there, but another child’s books are on it, along with some electronic toys. There’s a child’s toy laptop, with MAISEY on the cover.

Maisey, my niece.

I turn slowly. It’s my old room, but it’s been repurposed for the grandkids, which would be fine except …

It’s my old room. The one we dismantled when I was twelve and declared myself too old for princess beds. Dad gave it to a friend, and we put in a bunk bed and—

“I am going to ask you to leave this room.” Behind me, my dad’s voice is low with warning, a tone in it I’ve never heard before.

“Whose room is it?” I say as I turn.

He fixes me with a glare, and I’m sure he didn’t hear anything, but then he says, “So you can speak, can you?”

“Whose room is this?” I repeat.

“Our daughter’s.”

“Ellie?”

He stiffens, as if slapped. Then he says, his voice even colder, “I don’t know who you are but—”

“Ellie,” I say, the word breaking. “I’m Ellie, Dad. Elizabeth Rose Chambers, named after your mother and Mom’s mother.”

He reels back now, and his face goes hard. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? One of those … those monsters.”

“Monsters?”

“The ones who say our girl didn’t die. That it was all some kind of conspiracy. Get out of our house. Now.”

“But—”

“Get the hell out or I will drag you out myself.”

“What’s the matter, Ellie?” a voice says behind me, and I glance over to see the bartender sitting on my old bed.

“You tricked—”

“I said everything would be back to the way it was supposed to be. The past corrected. Wrongs righted.” He grins, showing his teeth. “And that’s what I delivered. One mistake rectified. You’re welcome.”

I howl and fly at him, hands outstretched and—

And then I’m back in the bar, lying on the floor.

TWENTY-FOUR

I lie on the bar floor, heart racing. Then I push up and run for the door—