Only one question remains. Will my mom and dad be able to accept each other?
I walk into the apartment. Preston has emerged from his sleeping area, and he sits on the couch, twisting his necktie. I cover my mouth to hide a giggle. Twenty years ago, the height of fashion was to dress like our pre-Boom ancestors, including this unfortunate accessory. Most of the men eliminated ties from their wardrobe years ago—but not Preston. He’s so cute. And if he twists the tie any harder, he’ll rip it in two.
His head snaps up as we enter the room. On his face, I see hope and yearning, anticipation and fear. But the instant he glimpses my mom, every other emotion drops away, and sheer joy radiates from his every feature, his every movement.
“Phoebe,” he whispers, and I’m no longer uncertain about what her name means to him. It is a prayer, pure and simple. My mother is his every dream come true.
He crosses the room in four large steps. He stops in front of her, and the air shivers with indecision. But then he grins, as if to say: Forget that. I’ve been waiting too long for this moment. Picking her up, he spins her around, in what is clearly one of their patented moves.
My mom is crying now, tears rolling freely down her face. He sits down and arranges her carefully on his lap, kissing her cheeks, right at the spot where the tears drip, as if he is ingesting her very essence.
“I’ve missed you so much.” She lays a hand on his cheek. “You’re the same, the exact same.”
“As are you.” He turns his head, so that her fingers are against his lips.
She opens her mouth like she’s about to argue. I could tell you stories with the lines on my face, her parted lips seem to say. In fact, I did. For the daughter you never knew was born.
Instead, she closes her mouth and leans her forehead against his, enjoying the present in the way only a person who has been ravaged by time can.
My heart full, I back out of the room, slowly, silently. In the future, they will have problems to work out, insecurities to smooth over, misunderstandings to unravel. But for now, in this moment, love is timeless.
41
When I return to Tanner’s apartment, it’s been transformed into mission headquarters. Baby Remi naps in a portable cradle that inflates with the touch of a button, and Mikey stands in front of the wall screen, circling and crossing out equations while he rocks the cradle with his foot. After a couple of days of being barricaded in their house, the Russells got fed up and snuck out the same way Tanner and I did. It must not have been easy to haul Remi through the tunnel, but they managed.
He nods at me as if nothing’s wrong. From his perspective, nothing is. He’s the same as he always has been. I just never knew exactly who he was until now.
I move farther into the living area. In the center, Tanner and Angela are studying blueprints of the TechRA building from ten years ago. My heart flips. This is really happening. We’re really going back to the past.
Angela looks up from the holo-doc, blowing a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Glad you’re here, Jessa. We have a lot to discuss with you.”
“We can’t transport nonessentials back through time,” Tanner pipes up. “Which means we can’t travel with our clothes.”
“Wait—what?” My voice rises in a high-pitched squeak. He can’t possibly have said what I thought he said. “Did you say we have to go back to the past…naked?”
“Yep,” he says, his tone way too cheerful. “Just be glad we don’t have to shave our heads. Your father did that when he traveled here—and when he arrived, he realized the hair on his body had passed through time unscathed. From Mikey’s research with the prosthetic limbs, we’ve learned that so long as an item is sufficiently bonded to your body, it will remain intact through time travel.”
I barely hear the rest of his explanation. I’m still stuck on the naked part. That means he’ll see me…I’ll see him… Damn the Fates. Can a wormhole open up and swallow me now?
“Don’t worry, dear heart,” Angela says. She taps a section of the blueprint, and it zooms in on a hallway. “I’m sure Tanner will be a gentleman and promise not to look. Won’t you, Tanner?”
“Nope.” If possible, his tone gets even brighter. “We’re traveling through time—a journey very few scientists have taken. I need to pay attention. I’m not going to close my eyes over a false sense of modesty. Besides, I’ll be naked, too. Jessa has my full permission to look.”
He smiles at me, an obnoxious grin that makes me feel like I’m holding onto a live wire. No. I clamp down on the feeling. My skin might tingle, and my core might heat up—but that’s my body. That’s a chemical-based reaction. It has nothing to do with how I really feel.
“My parents are going to be in the room,” I say evenly.
“And they remember what it’s like to be young and in love.”
“We’re not in love.” Outraged, I move forward, even though I know he’s just trying to get a reaction out of me. Bad move. The step brings me within a few feet of his chest, and the memory of my cheek pressed against him sears through me. “We don’t even like each other.”
His eyes flash. “You’re entitled to your feelings. But don’t presume you know how I feel.”
“Why? Because I’m too stupid to understand the mind of the great Tanner Callahan?”
“No,” he says quietly. “Because you matter too much for me to pretend what we had was nothing.”
For a moment, all we hear is the squeak of the baby’s cradle. And then even Mikey stops rocking. Silence blooms. So thick it nearly chokes me. So loud I’m certain Remi will wake. It winds into my heart and infiltrates my lungs, and damn the Fates, it hurts.
There’s nothing I can do about the silence. Because nothing will take back Tanner’s betrayal. Nothing will return our relationship to what it was shaping up to be. Instead, I drop to my knees by the cradle and place a soft kiss on Remi’s cheek. The baby stirs, stretching her arms in a tiny, impossibly cute imitation of an adult, and continues sleeping.
“You may disagree on your feelings for each other,” Mikey says, his mild tone indicating he’s staying far from the topic, “so long as you are in agreement about one thing. Leave the past alone.”
Huh? I sneak a glance at Tanner, and his raised eyebrows mirror mine.
“What do you mean?” he asks. “We have to travel to the past. That’s the entire mission.”
“You have to complete the mission, true.” Mikey taps on the wall screen, and the equations disappear. “But it is vitally important that you leave as little a trail as possible. One flap of a butterfly’s wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. The killing of a single moth in the prehistoric era can set the world on an entirely different trajectory. A single action, no matter how small, may cause ripples that extend far into the future.”
He takes a deep breath. “Our world developed the way it did because of the events in our past. Change one of those events, and you’ll change our present. Now, most of these ripples are minor. They’ll fade away long before they reach our time. But certain events are so big, so determinative of our world now, that changing them could alter everything.”
His gaze pierces me, and my heart flutters. Clearly, he’s trying to tell me something with life-or-death importance.
“Let me be perfectly clear,” he continues, when neither Tanner nor I respond. “Do not try to save Callie. Do not try to prevent her from injecting herself. It happened. And because it happened, this is the world we live in. These are the children that populate that world.”