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She turned her eyes to the world outside. The road that passed the diner was so familiar to her. She had traveled it thousands of times over her childhood. A few miles farther east was the house Cassie has grown up in. As she stared and remembered, lost in her thoughts, the first drops of rain spattered against the window, fat and round. The rain would fall all afternoon, Cassie knew. She remembered this day.
A crash of crockery pulled her attention back into the diner, someone dropping a cup, and then Cassie looked back across the table to Drummond, who was staring at the menu with a grimace.
“What’s wrong with your face?”
Drummond gestured at the menu. “I’ve been traveling around this country for the last decade, and I am so tired of the food here,” he said.“Is it possible, at all, to find something to eat that isn’t just meat between two bits of bread? Burgers... hot dogs... sliders... sandwiches? France is very good at cooking things. I wish I’d spent the last ten years in France.”
He gazed out the window, lost in his thoughts.
Cassie watched him for a moment, unsure if she was annoyed or amused by his words, then she asked, “What will happen if I speak to him?” It had been one of the questions playing on her mind all afternoon and into the evening in Scotland, as she had lain awake in Drummond’s luxurious bedroom, thinking about what he had revealed. “Will I change history? Or... I don’t know, will something bad happen?”
“We talked about that once, my friends and I,” Drummond said. “In the library. I remember a discussion about time travel.” He shook his head. “In truth I have no idea. I studied literature at university, not advanced physics, and rather disappointingly the metaphysical poets don’t have much to say about time travel.”
He smiled, and she found herself smiling back at him, despite her nerves. When he was happy it cheered her, she realized.
“But my friend Wagner, he was a physicist,” Drummond continued. “And he was certain that time travel couldn’t change history. If we do anything here, now, then it creates the future as we know it, the future we exist in. It doesn’t change our reality. Because it has already happened.”
Cassie frowned. “So... if I speak to my grandpa here, now, then it always happened this way? I was always here in this time speaking to him?”
Drummond nodded. “I think so, I think that’s what Wagner meant.”
“Do you believe that?” Cassie asked.
Drummond shrugged loosely. “I don’t know if I even really understood it, never mind believed it. But Wagner was a very clever man, and he would know better than most.” His eyes dropped to the table for a moment, and Cassie thought that maybe he was thinking about his friend.
The server approached in the silence and placed their drinks before them. Cassie ordered whole-wheat toast and scrambled eggs eventhough she didn’t think she could eat. Drummond ordered a slice of red velvet cake.
“When exactly are we?” Drummond asked, after the server left them.
“If I’m right, this is just over ten years ago,” Cassie said. “August twenty-second in 2012, the very end of summer break.”
Stepping through a doorway into the past had not been difficult for Cassie. It had been easier, in fact, than opening the door to the Fox Library in the shadows. She wondered if it was because the doorway to Matt’s was a place she had known so well for so long.
“Why did you pick this day?” Drummond asked.
“I remember it clearly,” she said. “I was out of town for a few days, camping with a friend and her parents.” She pointed at the window, at the rain streaking the glass and the heavy clouds beyond. “This is the start of a three-day downpour. It’s not something you forget when you’re out camping. Everything was so wet. It was miserable. I’ve never been camping since.”
“That doesn’t answer the question,” he pressed. “Why come today?”
“I’m out of town, so I’m not going to bump into myself, am I? And nobody I knew back here is going to see two of me around.”
Drummond nodded, appreciating her train of thought. “I don’t know what would happen if you met yourself,” he said. He seemed distracted by that idea briefly.
“I can think of nothing worse,” Cassie murmured. “I don’t know who’d be the most horrified, the younger me seeing me dressed in all these thrift store clothes”—she gestured at her sweater—“or the me now being reminded of what I used to be like before...”
“Before what?” Drummond pressed.
“Just before,” she replied, after a moment.
They sat in silence until their food arrived and then the silence kept them company as they ate, Cassie playing with her eggs more than eating them. The diner grew busy. Groups of men crashed in from the rain, chatting and laughing noisily; teenage girls giggled and whispered; and a young boy arrived with water-soaked comics and misery on his face. All around them cutlery clinked, and mugs and glasses thumped on tabletops. For a few minutes Cassie was distracted, happy even, imaginingthat the last ten years hadn’t happened, that she could be back in the diner with her life spread out before her, a land of opportunity waiting to be discovered.
“Tell me more about how you got the book,” Drummond said, dragging her reluctantly out of her own thoughts. She watched him dissect some of the red velvet cake and then spoon it into his mouth.
“Is that good?” she asked.
“Not bad,” he admitted. “It’ll keep me going. The book, who was the man who gave it to you?”
She thought about what to say, wondering why he was so interested in where the book came from. But then the door opened again and when Cassie turned her head, she saw her grandfather striding in from the storm, brushing a hand through his hair and shaking the rain off as he greeted the server with a smile that made Cassie’s throat suddenly thick and sore.
