Adeline couldn’t get the image of herself standing in the street in the midst of the Battle of Stalingrad out of her mind.
Nora must have seen the stress on her face when she opened the door that night.
“What’s wrong?”
“Just… a lot on my mind.”
Nora nodded, probably assuming the anguish was associated with the Absolom decision Adeline had made.
Nora’s surprise, as it turned out, was an escape room—one that she had built in her garage from a plan she had found online (and items delivered to her home). It was a grand gesture, one that Adeline knew had taken a lot of time and effort. Nora had done it all for Adeline, to help take her mind off of the Absolom decision and the stress they were all going through.
It was such a Nora thing to do: kind and thoughtful and warm as a crackling fire on a fall night.
The escape room centered around a closed-door murder mystery with a ticking clock. The parallels to Adeline’s own life couldn’t have been more striking: the murder in her future was Nora’s, and Adeline, despite her investigations in the future and the past, could only see one possible killer: herself.
Worst of all, she didn’t know why in the world she would ever kill Nora Thomas. But no one else fit.
Unlike the escape room in Nora’s garage, the clues weren’t clear. Try as she might, Adeline couldn’t see any of the others as the killer. And she knew her father would have to be framed for it—if the future was to be preserved. Breaking causality would end the universe.
When they had escaped back into Nora’s home from the garage, Nora said, “You hated it.”
“I didn’t. It was a great idea. I’m just… distracted.”
“Too distracted to be distracted?”
Adeline laughed. “I guess so. That’s bad, isn’t it?”
“It is. You need a vacation.”
“Maybe.”
“They’re lifting the lockdowns. We’ll be able to travel soon.”
But Adeline couldn’t take a vacation. She needed to be in Palo Alto for what was going to happen next. She had lived through it once. She dreading it happening again.
*
A week later, Adeline got the first responses to her requests for virtual meetings with government officials in the US, China, and India. They were interested in Absolom, as she knew they would be.
*
That night, Adeline sensed a change in the air at her childhood home. Her younger counterpart didn’t look annoyed. She looked scared.
Her father moved through the house almost in a daze, as if in denial. Or maybe the stress of it had exhausted him that much.
Adeline reached out and pulled him into a hug. His arms felt lifeless hanging on her back.
In the sewing room, Adeline found her mother in the plush rocking chair, eyes half open.
In the weeks before, Adeline had clung to this time with her mother. What she saw now made her wish for the opposite: an end to her mother’s suffering. That was an inflection point she couldn’t appreciate in her younger years. But it hit her now like the force of a train.
Slowly, her arm shaking, her mother reached down and moved the rocker to a sitting position. Her voice came like a sheet of construction paper being crumpled up.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” Adeline whispered.
“Are you all right?”
Adeline’s chest heaved, and she wasn’t sure if she was going to laugh or cry. “No. I’m not.”
With great effort, her mother rose from the chair, the motion making Adeline ache even more for her, and she put her arms around her, and Adeline hugged as hard as she dared and held on for what felt like an eternity. When she eased her mother back into the chair, she looked up at her, studying her eyes with an intensity Adeline didn’t know was left in the woman.
“You know… you remind me of someone,” she whispered.
A bolt of fear ran through Adeline. And then a thought—a risky thought: I’ll tell her, right now, while I still can.
Before she could speak, her mother shook her head. “Probably just the meds playing with my mind.”
*
When Adeline left, the second quilt was done, and her mother was sleeping in the chair under the first.
Try as she might, Adeline couldn’t get to sleep that night. Her mind was filled with thoughts of her mother, and Charlie, and Nora.
She didn’t go to work the next day. She paced in her living room, teetering on the verge of doing something that would end the world: calling Elliott. Saving Charlie.
But there was no saving Charlie. The moment she changed the past, she threw it all away.
She tried to distract herself. First with books, then with TV; she reached for the wine bottle, but then put it back. She needed a clear head for what would happen tonight.
Finally, fatigue, and stress, and worry chased her down like a cheetah on the Serengeti, trampling her as she lay on the couch.
She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, it was dark.
A bolt of fear ran through her. Had she missed it?
She sat up, checked the time, and dashed out of the house. She drove the half-mile to Charlie’s neighborhood but didn’t park in front of the apartment building. She parked two blocks away and walked the dark streets with her head held high, knowing cameras were recording her journey, knowing those videos would one day play on the screens in the basement of Elliott’s home in Absolom City.
Outside his building, she paused and looked directly at one of the cameras, creating the still image that would hang prominently in that room in Elliott’s basement.
She climbed the wooden outdoor stairs to the second-floor apartment. She knocked on the door and waited, but no one came. She leaned closer and listened. The only sound was that of music playing inside.
She turned the handle, and the door swung in. It was a tiny apartment with a shared living and dining space that opened to a small kitchen.
Charlie was lying on the couch, unmoving, skin ashen.
Adeline closed the door.
The moment it clicked, the bedroom door opened.
Elliott stepped out.
He didn’t look at his dead son lying on the couch. He stared directly at Adeline.
What he said, Adeline could have never expected.
And it changed everything.