Page 48 of This Time Tomorrow

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Any story could be a comedy or a tragedy, depending on where you ended it. That was the magic, how the same story could be told an infinite number of ways.

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Time Brothers, the novel, ended with a scene of Scott and Jeff at the breakfast table, the boys lightheartedly arguing over who had the most maple syrup, after they had successfully saved the world several times. There was no doubt that they would do it all again.

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Dawn of Timeended with Dawn standing at the center of the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. It was daybreak, with a pale sky over a silent city. Leonard spent half a page describing her face, and the way the pink sunlight reflected off the buildings. The year was purposefully ambiguous—Dawn, unlike the brothers, did not want to spend the rest of her life rocketing back and forth through decades and centuries. The reader hoped that Dawn had finally found her way home. Happy endings were too much for some people, false and cheap, but hope—hope was honest. Hope was good.

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Alice walked over to her front window, which now was fully aboveground. She could see the brownstones across the street, and the sky overhead. The traffic on the BQE hummed away. She pressed her nose and forehead lightly against the glass.Forward, that was the idea. Until the future, whatever it was going tobe.