Chapter Twenty-Nine

THE SCREAM WAS just inside her head, but her jaw dropped so quickly she was pretty sure she had dislocated it.

“What the hell?” she said, looking at her mom.

“Honey, we’ll explain later,” her mom said. “You said you’re here for your sister. Put that face away and go say congratulations.”

Joey told her feet to move, but they stayed firmly planted on the metal beneath her. She told her jaw to come back up to its normal position and felt it move a fraction of an inch. It was a start.

“But seriously, what the hell is going on?” Joey said, finally willing her feet to move. She could no longer see Dan and Betty because they were surrounded by other people, which seemed to signal to Joey that Betty had said yes.

She said yes. Dan proposed and she said yes. Joey tried to make these words make sense, but with the whole trying to walk thing, her brain was overloaded. Her Dan had just proposed marriage to her little sister, just like he was supposed to do for her last year. The whole thing looked exactly how she remembered it, except for the tiny detail that she had been the one experiencing it at the time.

“I can’t breathe,” she said, grabbing her dad’s arms as they walked onto the grass.

“You can,” he said. “You have no idea how sad they both were when you left last year, sweetie. The fact they got through it together is…”

Whatever it was, it was lost in the cacophony of voices as they got closer to Dan and Betty. Joey had never been one to hide her emotions and realized her safest course of action would be to run again, just like she had last year. She looked to her left and tried to see a path to the parking lot.

“Jo!”

It was too late. Betty had appeared from the sea of people and was now hugging her. Tears ran down her cheek. She wasn’t sure which sister was crying, but she put her arms around Betty and tried to make words come out of her mouth.

“Betty!” she whispered, stroking her sister’s hair. “I’m so happy for you.”

“Did you see?” Betty pulled back and thrust her left hand into Joey’s face. “I’m getting married!”

“I can’t believe it!” Joey said, hoping saying something true would come across as sincere.

Joey looked for Dan and saw him hugging her parents, who once again must have been in on it. And why wouldn’t they be? Dan was a perfect son-in-law and now they at least still got to have him in that capacity.

Before Joey could ask one of the millions of questions that had just floated to the front of her brain, Betty was swept away by friends who had heard the news and wanted to see the ring. The same exact ring Joey knew had been meant for her. She’d gotten a good look at it and her heart sank. That ring was sacred, and now it sat on her sister’s finger.

Her sister who had kept a letter from her. Wasn’t this whole thing Betty’s fault? If not for Betty, Joey would have come back to this timeline a year ago and…what, exactly? If coming back in time was her chance to see what her life could have been like with someone else, hadn’t this all worked out as it was supposed to? Was this the answer to all her problems?

Dan and Betty would be happy together. Probably. Joey couldn’t picture it, but she also didn’t know how much the two of them had changed in her absence. Original timeline Dan and Betty were always meant to be siblings, of that she was sure. Betty was too unpredictable for sensible, steady Dan. If anything, Dan seemed even less suited for Betty in this world.

But was Betty somehow more suited for Dan now? She had seemed a bit more mature in their phone chats. But even a more mature Betty still seemed so very wrong with her Dan. She realized with a pang in her chest she’d better stop thinking of him that way.

Joey reached her hands to her face to check that she was, in fact, smiling. She knew anyone who knew her would be able to tell it was a fake smile, but it felt better than the shocked looked she was wearing on the inside. And the tears on her cheeks could easily be explained because she was happy for her sister. And her friend, Dan.

She reached into her purse and felt the paper with Mary Fate’s address on it and wondered if it was time to undo everything, assuming that was still an option. But as she looked at Betty and Dan, reunited after accepting dozens of well wishes, she let the paper go and vowed to give this new situation a chance. She loved Dan enough to step aside if he was happy.

Now she just had to see for herself if that was really true.