by Jill Cooper
I nod with relief. “That’d be perfect. Thank you.”
“Is Miranda in some sort of trouble?” John asks with genuine concern.
I want to make sure he doesn’t worry or do anything before we get a chance to talk. “No, of course not. It’s not like that. I’ll explain everything tomorrow. Text me where you’ll be and the time.” I glance up as I hear Don unlocking the door. I end the call and place my phone on the mantel under the newspaper.
Pouring two glasses of wine, I sit down on the sofa with my legs curled up under me, across the way the gas fireplace roars warm ambers. I finish a glass of wine and pour another, settling against the white fur throw on the sofa when the front door opens.
I’m almost afraid to look at Don when he enters the room. He stops short of the sofa and undoes the tie around his neck.
“I thought you might be hungry.” It’s a poor apology and an even worse explanation.
Don stares me down, his hands shoved in his pocket, and his eyes simmer with anger. “You want to tell me what the hell happened today?”
So much for the understanding and compassion I was hoping for.
****
I sip my wine and stare off at the wall as Donovan sits across from me in his favorite gray striped chair. His legs spread wide as he leans forward, studying my face. “You’re shutting down again and I need answers. You take a long lunch to meet this friend from college, or so you said. You didn’t make the meeting this afternoon. You attack Rex Montgomery of all people.” His eyebrows arch in disbelief.
“He’s been creeping on me for months.”
“He’s in business with my mother and never been anything but good to me and my family. Soon to be your family. But you assaulted him. If you think my mother is just going to let this go—.”
“Maybe I don’t want her to. Maybe I need her to answer a few questions.”
“What kind of questions?” Don’s question is reserved and the defensive wall he has about his mother goes up as he pulls away from me.
“Experimenting on kids?”
“She’s an exceptional case.”
I cast him a dirty look. “There’s no excuse for keeping her against her will. Sedating her. Where are her parents? Why is she so important?”
“Her brain could change everything. If you saw the scans…” Don sighs. “She can change time travel. Revolutionize what we’re doing. Give us the power to…cure the ill. Wipe crime off the map. Isn’t that worth something to you? Worth one kid’s pain?”
“No and the fact you think it is, horrifies me.” Not hungry anymore, I push the Chinese food away and I stand up. I pace in front of the mantel of the fireplace.
“I don’t know why suddenly I’m on trial here when you’re the one who got suspended today. You have any idea how I had to defend you to my mother?”
Maybe he wants me to apologize, but I can’t bring myself to do it.
I pick up my cell phone and slide it inside my purse.
Don stands and steps beside me. “Where do you think you’re going? We can work through this.”
He says it, but it doesn’t diminish the anger in his eyes. The words he says, he doesn’t even mean. Don’s trying to keep me from something, but what? Does he know the truth that he’s protecting?
I head for the door and he blocks my exit with his smoky, romantic eyes. “Don’t do this, Cass. If you leave, if you keep pushing like this, you’re drawing a line in the sand you can’t undo. If you leave here, I can’t help you.”
With surprise, I sigh. “How long have you been protecting your mother? How much do you really know?”
Donovan shrugs. “Family is family.”
I thought back of the memory of Lara in the wedding dress and how I stood with her, Molly. It didn’t make any sense, but they felt like my family, and they were what I had to protect. They were what I needed to get back to.
“And now it’s time for me to protect mine.” I push him out of the way, but Don grabs my arm and spins me around.
“I can’t let you go. I’m sorry.” There’s real grief to his words. “This isn’t how I wanted any of this to go down, but Cass…”
“Let me go.” I reef on my arm until my skin pinches and pull some more.
Don yanks me closer. “You know I can’t do that. If you go out there…”
I push on him. “I said let me go!” A welling of pain and energy wells in my chest. In that moment, time slows down and I feel like I can’t breathe. A moment later, it pushes out of me like a golden beam of light. Donovan goes flying backwards, but he freezes in mid-air. His body twisted in time standing still, a look of horror on his face.
My mouth falls open as I stare at him. I froze him. A look at the clock on the wall shows I didn’t just freeze him, I froze time.
I can manipulate time? Since when?
Then I remember how special Molly is. If we’re family, if everything Rex says is true, then she’s not the only special one. I am too.
I yank the door open and run out of there before time resets itself. When I get down to the street, the cars are paused into place, even those walking down the sidewalk. There’s a brown and white cab waiting for a passenger, so I slide in. I struggle to breath and my chest feels like it’s resisting me. All of this is too much and I’m not even sure I haven’t lost my mind. Time unpauses. “Drive,” I order the taxi driver.
He jumps. “Holy shit, where did you come from?”
“Just drive,” I grit my teeth and gaze up at the penthouse suit where Don must be coming awake. He’d be coming for me right now if I didn’t miss my guess.
“Where to?” The driver asks as he pulls away from the curb.
“I don’t know. Anywhere.” I pull my phone out and bring up a white pages search. “I’ll find an address.”
I type in the name of Miranda Crane. If she was right about me, she might have been right about everything else. It was time to hear the rest of her story.
Chapter Twenty: Cassidy Winters
Miranda Crane lives in a high rise overlooking the Charles River in the Back Bay of Boston. The water twinkles with lights from the skyscrapers as if there are stars beneath it’s cool surface.
She lives up high on the twenty-fifth floor. It’s one of the nicer apartments I’ve ever stood in and it’s clear that being lead scientist for Rewind makes her a comfortable living. Contemporary in style, the light gray interior is pleasing on the eye, soft to the touch, and almost romantic in nature.
A rectangular fountain against the long wall in the living room trickles with water. It should be soothing, but Miranda is anything but calm when she opens the door to let me in.
Her eyes are tired and there’s a sadness in them that always lingers in the background. She’s in a blue bathrobe and she heads over to the bar. There she pours me a whiskey over ice.
“With how you ran out of the diner, I was nervous about what you might do.”
I take the drink as she offers it and down it in one gulp. Closing my eyes, I cringe at how warm it is, setting my throat on fire. Placing the empty glass down on the bar I find my voice. “I did something all right.”
She nods and her soft steps patter across the hardwood floor toward the leather sofas. I follow her even though she doesn’t sit. Miranda paces nervously and waits for me to say something. Her eyes practically beg it.
“What can you tell me about who I am? Where I come from? I remember flashes of the past, but nothing concrete, like you say. When I looked up my parents, I found nothing.”
Miranda sighs and her eyes shift. “How can I be sure you’re not working for Patricia?”
My eyes bulge with disbelief. “If I was, you’d be in enough trouble as it is. I need to know who I am. If I was ripped from time like you say I was, something about who I was before was left behind.”
“Left behind? Like what?”
I bit my lip and consider not telling her, but I might be running out of time before Don realized where I was and what I was up t
o. Hell, I wasn’t even sure what I was up to. “I can freeze time. I can manipulate it.”
Miranda’s eyes widen. “You’re sure?”
“Trust me, I’m sure.”
“That’s…incredible. You’ve given no inclination of having a power or being able to access it. Does anyone know that you can do that?”
I thought back to Don and what he’d think about being in an empty penthouse when I had been there a second earlier. “Don, maybe, but I don’t think he’s suspect that I can manipulate time. I mean, how would he?”
“Cassidy,” Miranda says softly, compassion rich in her voice, “because he knows. Everyone at Rewind does.”
I back up from her. “You’re saying that Donovan James, what, knows that Rewind went into the future and kidnapped me? Brought me back here?”
“He’s Patricia’s right-hand man. Always has been. That’s why…he’s been grooming you to follow Patricia from the first day you woke up in the lab. The mind alterations are hard to fight against, but your mind has been fighting to remember since day one. If you can do what you say you can, you’re stronger than most. The memory splicing will only hold for so long.”
I blink my eyes and take a deep breath. “That can’t be true. He…loves me. We were to be married. I’m even wearing a…” I gaze down at my hand and realize I’m not wearing an engagement ring, but I had been. Just a few short hours ago. Hadn’t I?
“Nothing of the last few years you remember is real. You were stolen from a timeline that mirrors this one in almost every way. In that time line….” Miranda gazes at the floor with tears in her eyes. “Don opposes his mother and he’s not in love with you. He’s in love with…Lara.”
Miranda’s daughter and my what? Distant cousin?
“That’s why you went along with all this. A timeline where your daughter is alive? Happy?”
“They were supposed to go back and get her. Bring her to me, but something happened. Something went wrong because of Rex. Nothing is what we think. Even what I just told you might be a lie built on top of another lie. Rex creates confusion, it’s how he’s able to keep us separate. It’s how—.” A bullet tears through the back of her head and she falls on her knees beside me.
I scream as I catch her before her face hits the floor. “Miranda!” I cry out and lay her on my lap. My purse is out of reach and I stretch for it to grab my phone.
Miranda peers up at me with fading eyes, I watch life run out of time as if liquid through a broken glass. “Run.”
The front door breaks open. “Freeze! Put your hands up, Ms. Winters!”
I gasp with fright at the sight of the police officers coming at me. I lift one hand to them, feeling that energy growing in my chest and I freeze them. They’re moving forward, but slow as if moving through molasses. I peer back to Miranda and see she’s still with me. In her hand she clutches to her all access security pass at Rewind.
I snatch it from her and a moment later, I’m running toward the window where the shot came from. A second later, I’m outside downstairs on the pavement. Not only can I freeze time, but I can move through it, almost like transporting from place to place. Location to location.
Moving through the seconds, skipping between the minutes.
Across the street on another high rise, there’s someone dressed all in black running along the balcony.
Miranda’s killer.
I grit my teeth and run toward them. I run through the air, using time as my cushion and jump onto the balcony before he has a chance to get away. He’s wearing a ski mask and beneath it, his eyes widen with surprise.
Ripping the mask off, I reveal it’s none other than Donovan James. The look on his face is one of sheer horror and it’s the same in the pit of my stomach. I shake my head. “How could you? How!”
“You can’t say no to my mother. You know it’s true.” His words are more than just heartbreaking. They’re soul crushing and I doubt I’ll ever feel okay again.
“You killed her!”
“That’s not the worst of it,” Don whispers. “Now you’ll have to go down for it. All of this has to go away, Cass. I’m sorry, but when I told you I loved you, it was true.”
“Then come with me. We’ll go to the police. We’ll—.” I’m reaching for straws. He’d go to jail if we went to the police and that’s not what he wants. He wants nothing more than to stand by his mother and help her get the power she’s so desperate for.
Don places his hand over my face and pushes me toward the balcony. I stumble, grab his wrist and then I scream as I flip over the railing. Slowly I descend toward the road and I scream as it rushes up to meet me.
My arms flail and a moment later, my fall slows. My body rotates toward the ground and I feel like I’m flying. My feet touch the ground and around me, the stop lights are frozen. I gaze back at the building and while it’s so far away, Don stands with his hands on the railing, a look of terror frozen on his face.
I need to get out of here fast. I need to help Molly and break her free so we can find a way to fix all this. We need to find Lara.
I try. I picture Rewind and Molly sitting in that bed when I first saw her. But it’s like ramming into a wall repeatedly, over and over. My brain aches and blood flows through my nose. I want to travel backward, but can’t. I can see the scene, but I can’t get there.
Like something is blocking me.
I have to find way to unblock it and that means visiting Rewind. If anyone can answer the lingering questions I have, it’s Molly. No matter how much I’m growing to hate that place, I have to return.
All the answers I seek are there.
****
This all started when I was in the room with Molly and I have to believe she’s the important key in all this. Getting to her room won’t be easy. The secret hospital wing of Rewind is well protected and security is tight. I should know, I put it all together.
Sneaking into Rewind’s man building is easy enough. I time shift through the glass doors while the guards on rounds. The glass warbles a bit like an ocean wave as I slip through the stream of light onto the other side. It sort of hums as I run away toward the elevator.
I slip inside before any guards see me. Using the key, I stole from Miranda, I send the elevator to the thirtieth floor. It has a special bridge that leads to the hidden lab beneath the city and that’s where I need to be.
Inside the security office, I jam the door shut and use the computer to bring up Molly’s location. The room she was in before is empty and there’s no record of where she might be in the building. I grab a white lab coat that’s left on the back of a chair and slip it on. When someone calls to check my credentials, I just keep going.
“Come back here! Miss!”
He chases me and I speed up, jumping through time to hop a few steps ahead, more than I should be able to, and enter Molly’s room.
Or what was once her room.
Inside, the bed is made. There are no flowers or get-well cards. The room is vacant, as if no one has been here in forever. It’s like Molly had just been erased from existence, like she had never been here—just like the records on the computer.
I tear the bed apart, I pull the pillows from their pillowcases, searching for some clue or hope that Molly had been here before. The bed has nothing. I go through the cabinets around her bed and I check every drawer. Not even a page from the stocked Bible is out of place. It’s as if I was crazy.
In the bathroom, I check inside the tissue box and the medicine cabinet. Someone’s knocking at the door now and I ignore it as I continue to search the bathroom for clues. The wastepaper basket is filled with tissues. I go through them and one of them isn’t empty.
It’s wrapped around something.
Hurriedly I unwrap it as I hear someone enter the room and call out. “Hello? Did you run in here?”
It’s a locket wrapped in tissue. When I open it, I’m surprised to see the picture is of me and Molly, with the infamous Lara Crane that everyone is so fixate
on. This was proof of the other timeline. Someone was going to a great deal of trouble to keep us separated from one another. I had to find Molly, had to find a way to put time back the way it was supposed to be.
I slip the locket in my pocket, tossing the tissues back into the waste paper basket when I realize there’s writing on one of the tissues. I spread it out thin and my eyes widen at the message.
He’s coming for you. Get out.
I don’t know if Molly left the note for me or someone else, but I spring into action. The security guard stands by the bed and the surprise on his face ranges to the comical. Pushing him out of the way, I sprint over the bed and slam through the door. Back in the hospital wing, I run for the elevator.
It dings before I get there and Rex gets out. He walks with calm precision toward me with a small smile on his face, like he’s not worried at all.
Backing up, I try to freeze time like I’ve done before and sound echoes in my ears. I cringe and turn the other way and head for the stairway. The door opens and another version of Rex steps out, this one in a slightly different suit than the other one.
I back up and draw my pistol, aiming it at the first Rex and then the next. “Stay back. The both of you.”
“Or what?” The first Rex says.
“You’ll shoot?” Adds the other. “We don’t think so.”
“We have a surprise for you dear, Cass. One that we’ve been waiting to give to you for some time.”
“Patience,” the other Rex scolds him. “Your impatience is what’s led you to this place. If…ahh, here he is.”
The stairway door opens and someone enters I’ve never seen before. I stare him down. “Who the hell are you?”
A piercing noise assaults my brain as this young man squeezes his finger tip together and the world around me starts to swirl. My knees tremble and I can’t take the noise anymore as my vision splits. I don’t see a hall anymore.
There’s a cage.
“Two places at once,” Rex says. “Impressive isn’t it? That you can be there yet here at the same time? His power might be stronger than all the girls put together. He can’t just time travel, he can change time. He can rewrite the timelines, merge them together, create new realities out of whatever he wishes.”
