“About Jack?”
“About all the things he showed me.” Tortured me with. “I think my realities are bleeding into each other, Michael. Half the time I don’t know which one is real.”
“Give me details.”
“Sometimes I dream about things that I’m sure happened, but that I don’t exactly remember. They’re so real—I can smell things. Feel them. They have to be from the reality he showed me.” As if he left traces of them to spread like slow poison.
“Do the memories ever come back when you’re awake?”
“No.”
“Good.” Michael nodded, but the worry in his eyes didn’t fade.
“Except for one—from a recurring nightmare. It’s about Jack, and in it he whispers over and over that … that I owe him.”
“You don’t owe him anything.”
“Don’t I?” I pushed away from him and sat up. “As sick and wrong as Jack is, if he hadn’t interfered in my life, I wouldn’t have a life.”
“That’s not—”
“What if he can find another way to manipulate our circumstances? He’s got Liam’s files—what if he finds a traveler who has no idea what he or she can do? Someone he and Cat can manipulate.” I tried to control my anxiety, but now that I was voicing all the things that had haunted me silently, I couldn’t stop. “We don’t know what he’s done to the continuum. We don’t know what he’s changed, or who he’s changed. We’re all balloons balanced on the point of a needle. There will be consequences for what I did—giving him the wrong formula. He’ll be back.”
“You saw what kind of shape he was in physically. He could be dead by now,” Michael argued. “He can’t hurt you anymore.”
“You know that’s not true. He’s already done so much damage. Ava, Grace …” I finally confessed the thing that had been pressing down on me. “Michael, what if he finds a way to give those terrible memories back to me—and not just in my dreams—and then doesn’t take them away?”
“Em—”
“And you … us. I know you’d stay with someone you were committed to no matter what the cost. Even if that person was—”
I stopped before the word came out.
Michael’s face, so full of compassion, hardened. “Why won’t you say it?”
“You don’t like it when I refer to myself as crazy.” I closed my eyes.
“Because you aren’t crazy. After everything you’ve learned about yourself, I can’t believe you almost said that.”
I slumped back against the passenger-side door. “But you don’t know what it was like, even after Jack changed my true reality into one that was slightly better. How bad things were … how sick I was. What if I end up with memories of both?”
“It wouldn’t change how I feel. Damn it, look at me.” He wrapped his hands around my upper arms and pulled me toward him. My eyes flew open. “I love you—broken in pieces, whole, however. No matter what the future brings. No matter what was in the past.”
“I’m scared. I don’t want to be, but I am.”
“That’s okay.”
“Is it? Aren’t I supposed to be brave, fearless? Isn’t that what the world expects?” I didn’t feel like a superhero or the star of an action movie. I felt out of balance and terrified.
“Screw what the world expects. Think about all the things you’ve faced. You cracked, but you didn’t break. You’re still standing. I’d call that fearless. You’ve already conquered so much.”
“That all depends on which reality you’re referencing. The original or the Jack Landers version?” I asked wryly. “Because there’s a difference that involves lucidity and basic human functioning.”
“Pick one.” Michael dropped his forehead to touch mine and lowered his voice. “No matter what your reality looks like, you’re the girl I’m in love with today, and the same girl I’ll be in love with tomorrow and all the days after that. Not just because of who you are, but because of who you were.”
The tears I’d been holding back finally escaped.
ost laughed when I realized the needle for the parking meter at the curb was spinning around like a rotary fan set on high. “I missed you, too. But my reprieve is only for two hours.”