Chapter 16

Aday is not enough to learn everything there is to know about time travel, but I'm doing my best. I tell Ezekiel I'm taking another day off work. He looks worried, but I promise I'll be ready for the presentation, and he doesn't argue.

I think about going back to Jasper's, about making up some story as to why I need to get into his apartment so I can try to get a copy of those plans we took from Wolfe, but wasting the whole day trying to guess passwords that will open Jasper's computer doesn't seem like a good use of my time. Also, I can't bring myself to face Jasper's family. They must be devastated, and as the mysterious friend they met only hours before he was killed, my reappearance will only prompt questions, most of which I can't answer.

I think about going to work, even if I already told them I wasn't coming in. I could close my office door and no one would know I was there. But someone would figure out eventually. Clarissa, probably. I still haven't called her back. There's no time for reassurances and chitchat. I can't have any distractions. The longer Jasper stays dead, the further away he feels.

In the end, though, I wind up at Wench. The basics of the scientific method state that all variables should be kept the same as much as possible. I don't have Jasper with me, but somehow, staking out a booth at the diner feels as close to recreating the conditions as I can get.

"Second time in three days," Vee says as she comes to take my order. "To what do I owe the honor?"

I bite my lip because my instinct is to say something blunt or to ignore her friendly smile and place my order, but somehow it doesn't feel the same now that I know Jasper has seen through the armor. If he has, Vee must have ages ago too.

"Call it nostalgia," I say.

She grins, flicking her long braid over one shoulder. "You know you're welcome here any time you want."

That's probably always been true, but the awkward silence that follows fills in all the answers as to why I couldn't do it.

"So," Vee says, pulling her notepad out of her apron. "What can I get you? Peppermint tea?"

"Coffee," I say. "Black. And a tuna salad sandwich. You know what I can't have."

"Sure do. I'll look after you." She straightens proudly. The fact that even this little interaction can make her happy only leaves me feeling worse, but I don't have time for my daily dose of self-loathing.

I spend hours online. Credit to Vee, the diner has all the ambiance of an abandoned theme park, but she's got an awesome Wi-Fi signal. I start with the scientific journals, but nothing reputable publishes articles about time travel theories. So I start going through the disreputable ones because as wild as some of the theories are—they range from brain tumors to parallel dimensions—the fact remains that I lived the same day more than sixty times, and there has to be an explanation for all of it.

I read articles about alien abductions, government experiments, and homemade basement time machines that accidentally sent the inventor back to the moment of his birth and caused a paradox that meant both he and his infant self simultaneously ceased to be. It's unclear how anyone could have known about that sequence of events, given he had nullified his existence, but somehow I don't think that's the important part when the author's name links to another article about how snowflakes feel emotions. I find another article that asserts the 1980s are a myth and that's why we all feel some kind of collective nostalgia, regardless of what year we were born, for a moment in time that never actually happened.

"Oh my god." I bury my face in my hands. "This is impossible."

"Pie?" Vee asks. She's been popping by all day, sometimes with coffee refills, sometimes with small plates of allergen-friendly snacks I can munch on between paragraphs. It's a kind of caretaking I haven't felt in a long time. "Everything is better with pie. It's peach. Cooked. You can still eat those, right?"

"Will the pie replenish itself at the moment I finish it? Bring itself forward in time to help nourish me as I bang my head against the wall over this conspiracy theory bullshit?"

"I don't think peaches have any significant quantum properties, though now you're making me think that a bottomless pie special might be a hit around here." Vee cocks her head. "I'll bring you a piece. With ice cream too."

I go back to my laptop, scrolling through more articles, trying to find the logic and science behind what's happening. I'm developing a headache. At least it's just stress and probably caffeine overdose, as opposed to the remnants of a concussion from a day that never stops.

I startle when the plate is set in front of me. Then a second plate lands at the seat across from mine, and Vee sits down. Along with the two empty plates, she's brought an entire pie in a pan. It only takes a few seconds before the scent of warm pastry and peaches hits my nose, and my mouth waters immediately.

"What are you doing?" I ask.

"We're having pie," she says. She cuts through the top crust and lifts slices out of the pan, setting them down on each plate. I watch, practically drooling, as she digs into hers with the side of her fork, squeezing yellow-orange goo out the sides. It glistens in the light and wow, that looks good. My stomach growls as she slides the fork between her lips and I cut a bite for myself, lifting it to my mouth with shaking hands.

"Oh my god," I say as the peaches hit my tongue. Vee is watching me, eyes crinkling at the corner in silent laughter. Her face has lines I don't remember. It's only been two years, but she's aged.

"See?" she says as she takes another bite. "Pie makes everything better."

I don't want to admit she's right, but the way I demolish my slice like it's the first thing I've eaten in a week says otherwise. Vee watches me with satisfaction as I help myself to a second slice before she's even halfway through her first.

"Good?" she asks.

"Best thing I've had since—" But the statement dies on my tongue, because they're the best thing since brownies with Jasper's family in their kitchen, and while this pie is tasty, those brownies were special. As was the company.

"What?" Vee says.

"Nothing." I shake my head.

"You got sad again."

"It's nothing." Nothing I can talk about, anyway.

"Nothing makes you sad?"

"Nothing makes me..." I glare at my pie like it's betrayed me.

"We both struggled after Farah died," she says after a moment, making the wrong assumption, though it's not her fault. As far as she knows, Jasper and I met once. Why would he be the one to consume my thoughts? "I should have been there for you more. But you had Ezekiel, and I could see how hard you were working, and I thought maybe it was for the best."

It had been. I was happy with my life. At least until I met Jasper. Until suddenly I was solving mysteries and tangling with criminals instead of following the steps of the neat life I'd built for myself these past few years. Now I'm grieving all over again, and it's like all that work meant nothing. It didn't protect me any more than I protected Jasper.

I can't do this alone. Not again. Ezekiel is locked away in the lab most of the time. He's as safe as anyone can be from things like time loops and Indigo. But Vee's right here, in this shrine of a diner, with people coming in and out all day. Indigo could walk through the front door, order a coffee, and zap her before she'd even finished writing his order down. Knowing she'd been out here without realizing the threat would hurt too much. I've ignored her for years and blamed her for something that was hardly her fault. I believed she failed my mother, but if the Legendary Flame couldn't stop Indigo, what hope did a mere mortal like Vee have? She didn't fail my mother, and I can't fail her now.

"If I tell you something that sounds impossible, do you promise not to laugh?" I certainly want to laugh, because the question sounds like a child asking if they can share a secret. But maybe that's what I am. Vee was always like a second mother to me. The grounded, earthly one while Mother went off on her missions and her jobs.

Vee's hand twitches, and she goes to reach across the table to touch me, but I drop my own hands to my lap because I'm not ready for that. We may be talking, but I still have two years of hurt and distance that I've been carrying around like a boulder. I can't shrug all that off in an instant because she gave me pie.

She says, "Of course. You can tell me anything."

So I tell her. Every detail. More than I told Ezekiel, because Vee was always the tactician. She listens quietly, the skin between her eyebrows pinched together in concentration. Sometimes she stops me and makes me go back, and I can sympathize with her "Wait. Was that the same day, or the day after?" because it's so hard to keep straight, especially when you're not living it.

Finally, she pushes back in her seat, arms crossed, bottom lip between her teeth. It's her thinking face. I've known it since I was a child, and watching her process everything I've told her, I realize how much I've missed that face, along with so much else.

"So now you're... what?" she says. "Going to build your own time machine so you can go back and rescue him before he dies?"

I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. I shouldn't have had so much coffee. My stomach burns and my headache is worse. "I don't know. It doesn't feel fair that I'm alive and he's not."

I expect her to tell me that's normal. That we all feel that way when we're grieving. And she'd be right. But instead, she chews on her bottom lip a moment longer before she says, "Can I show you something?"

And I can't really say no, can I? Because I just dumped all of my time travelling trauma on her, so if she wants to off-load too, I'm really not in a position to refuse.

She gets up and heads toward the kitchen, and I follow, throwing a silent promise to the rest of the pie that I'll be back soon. A cook in a greasy apron watches as we pass through, but she doesn't appear too concerned by our appearance. Vee holds open a door at the back that leads to a narrow staircase going down. The smell of damp basement is apparent, and the light is dim, but I make my way, trying not to touch the walls, which look like they're coated in about an inch's worth of dust.

"I don't think the health department would approve of this," I say.

Vee laughs as she descends behind me. "That's why I don't let them come down here."

At the foot of the stairs, the walls are lined with rows of shelves, holding mundane things like boxes of toilet paper, takeout containers, and napkins. But Vee leads me past them and then down a constricted hallway where the ceiling is so low I have to bend so I don't brush my head on the bare light bulbs strung above us.

"Have you been building a secret superhero hideout down here all this time?" I ask.

Vee grins over her shoulder at me. "Something like that."

At the end is another door. This one is made of heavy metal, with a large latch, like some kind of walk-in refrigerator.

"Is this where you stash the bodies?" I ask.

Vee taps to the side of her nose with a wink. She pulls the handle and the door swings open with a groan, puffing up new clouds of dust.

Inside, the air is warmer than I expect, which is to say it's the same temperature as the rest of the basement instead of the refrigerated chill I'd anticipated. Vee turns on the overhead light by tugging on a pull chain. I blink in the brightness, only to be completely distracted by the chaos in front of me.

"Whaaat?" Where there should be shelves of food, there are walls that are covered with paper. News clippings. Maps. Lists and lists. "What is this?" Maybe my joke about a secret hideout is more on the nose than I thought.

Vee goes to stand in front of the largest map, which takes up most of the farthest wall.

"I guess I've been playing a bit of detective these last few years," she says.

I move next to her. It's a map of the city. Pushpins mark certain locations, while others have wide circles drawn around them in red.

"What are you looking for?" I ask.

"Indigo."

I choke, her answer unexpected.

"I've always known he didn't die the night when F—" She has to clear her throat as well. "When Farah was killed. The fact that you've seen him proves it, but I've been looking for signs of him every day for the last two years."

I stare at the map. Familiar places, marked in blue and red.

"What are you going to do when you find him?" I ask. Not if. Vee and I are speaking again, and together, we're going to find him.

My heartbeat quickens when she says, in a flat, matter-of-fact voice. "I'm going to rip his heart out, like he ripped out mine."