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I take a breath because his gaze is on me. My voice collapses. “I came home and terrible things have happened to my family. My daughter was murdered. And my wife…” I clench my jaw and force the words. “She’s divorcing me.”
“Oh, Rembrandt,” he says, and gives me a look I want to interpret as sympathy.
But I’m not done, so I clear my throat and keep dishing out the horror. “There’s a serial killer on the loose, which is new. I mean, there were kids disappearing before I left—” And even as I say that, I realize that yes, the day I went back to 1997, my wife returned from work with the horrific news of a young man who’d gone missing. Which doesn’t match the M.O. on the board, but maybe in this timeline, Booker—and I?—have discovered a connection to the killings.
The Jackson killer.
Or, did I do something in the past to unleash these murders? The idea turns me cold.
I look back at Art. “I don’t understand. I mean, how can I do something that causes so many deaths. All I did was solve a cold case.”
Art nods.
“You could have rewritten your timeline,” says a voice from the door and I realize Meggie has been listening. She’s holding a lemonade and now brings it into the room and hands it to me. “Right, Dad?”
“Maybe,” Art says.
“What are you talking about?” I say as Meggie comes in and sits down.
“Have you ever heard of Chronothesia?”
“No.”
Art pipes up. “It’s the idea that we can ‘travel’ in our minds to a previous time, and in that moment, re-evaluate our actions. It’s a way for psychologists to help trauma sufferers re-enact their trauma for a better outcome.”
And now he’s lost me. “I thought you were a watch repair man.”
“I am.” But for the first time, ever, I get the tiniest smile from Art.
“Mom and Dad were time travel theorists,” Meggie says, warmth in her voice.
“I still am … maybe,” Art mutters.
Meggie glances at my lemonade. I wonder if she’s laced it with something stronger. I take a drink and it’s tart and bracing and exactly what I need when she adds, “Think mental time travel.”
I raise an eyebrow. Because, well, that makes a little sense. “Like… Quantum Leap?”
Art chuckles. “No. That was fiction.”
Right. “You’re saying when I was back in time, I was in my younger body, but my, um, self, stayed here.”
Meggie looks at me with something of a bingo in her eyes. “It’s the theory that a person could connect with himself, in the past, through chronothesia and create different choices, which would, then affect his current situation.”
“Like that movie, Back to the Future.”
“Again, that’s fiction, but yes you’re getting closer.”
“You’re saying that if I travel back in time in my mind, and relive my life, only with a different outcome, I’m really rewriting my life?”
I look at Art, who is nodding.
“But then I’ve overwritten all the events of everyone’s lives,” I say to Meggie.
Now it’s her turn to nod.
I steal a furtive glance at Art. How can I reveal what I did to him?
His mouth tightens, however, because he knows that I know something.
