Page 43 of Parallel

He buries his face in his hands. “I didn’t want you to know. I was so fucking ashamed that I’d gotten played like that, and I just wanted you to be proud of me.”

My hands clutch my throat. He loved that farm. He loved owning a piece of it, and I never wanted him to give it up. I just didn’t want to be part of it with him. He brought all of this on himself and yet none of it would have happened if I hadn’t insisted on moving to D.C.

He still won’t look at me, so I sink to the floor and put my hand on his knee. This has been my role for a long time—soothing his wounds, holding him together. It comes naturally, but I’m a little tired of doing it. “We’ll figure it out, okay? But if you’re worried about your job, why are we out here looking at a house we can barely afford?”

“I just wanted us to have something,” he says. “I’ll get another job. Maybe not as good as where I am, but I figured if we had a home of our own, something solid and entirely ours, that it would be enough. We don’t have to get this place. I got a little carried away when I saw the yard, but really I just want to know when push comes to shove that we have a place to raise a family. A place where we can get our life underway.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to temper my response because the sheer stupidity of this plan is mind-boggling, and it’s on the tip of my tongue to say it aloud. There’s this canyon between me and Jeff, and I think it’s always been there. We operate by shouting to each other over it, and it works, the shouting. It’s been fine. But now I’m seeing what it’s like to feel so close to another person I can barely tell where I end and he begins. And my God I want that. I miss it. “Committing to a mortgage we might not be able to cover won’t make any house ours,” I finally tell him. Nick would know this, I think before I can silence it. Nick wouldn’t need to be reminded about my desire to go back to school. Nick wouldn’t discover I only have a few years to live and push me to give up a dream.

“I just need to know that when we say for better or worse in a few weeks, that you mean it. That we’re in this together,” he says, his voice hitching on the last words. “Are we?”

He is so despondent, this man I love and have made a commitment to. And maybe there are other things I want now, things I want badly enough to weep and beg for them. Somehow, I’m just going to have to learn to let those things go.

“Of course we are,” I reply.

On Monday afternoon, I return to Georgetown for the tests I need prior to my meeting with the oncologist at the end of the week. Nick walks into the waiting room with the sleeves of his Oxford rolled up, his tie loosened, the first hint of five o’clock shadow along his jaw. He draws eyes, and not just mine. The teenage girl and her mother sitting across from me nudge each other as they look him over. I’m tempted to tell them both to grow the fuck up, but I guess I’m no better.

I cross the room toward him and his smile is sudden, and stunning.

“Hi.” I sound as breathless as a tween meeting her favorite boy band.

He looks around. “I assume Jeff’s not coming?” I hear a hint of disdain in his voice.

“He left town this morning. He had a conference he really couldn’t miss, but he’ll be back for the meeting with Dr. Patel.”

His hand presses against the small of my back as we head toward imaging. “And you didn’t sign any contracts this weekend?”

I stiffen a little. “No.” Though it’s true, it’s also kind of a lie. Because all I did, really, is put off the inevitable.

When my test is complete, I head toward his office, with my brain flitting from Jeff to the house to Nick and back. I round a corner and collide with a teenage girl paying as little attention as I am. We look up at the same moment and for a millisecond she is a stranger. A breathtaking stranger with the most extraordinary gray eyes, going wide at the sight of me. It’s her astonishment that jars my memory: she’s the girl I saw as I floated back to consciousness during my last blackout, looking every bit as shocked to see me as I was to see her.

I stagger backward, still grasping her arm. “I saw you,” I breathe. “I saw you in my dream.” I know it sounds crazy, but I’m past caring about that right now, and something about the guilt in this girl’s face tells me she already knows anyway. And knows she shouldn’t have been there.

She swallows. “Yes, that happens sometimes.”

“How?” I ask. “You’re able to put yourself in someone’s dream?”

“No. We were both just—” She grows still, suddenly, her eyes flashing to mine in alarm. “You don’t know.”

“I don’t know what?”

She stares at her shoes, brown-and-white saddle shoes. The school uniform she’s wearing could come from any time, really, but shoes like that haven’t been popular for decades. It takes her a moment to reply. “You weren’t dreaming,” she says. “You were time traveling.”

A chill slides up my spine. Four days ago, I laughed at the suggestion, but there’s nothing about this girl that screams mad scientist. Her voice is matter-of-fact, reluctant even. And hearing the same information twice in four days is…unsettling. I lean back against the wall. “That can’t be true,” I whisper. “I’d know if I was doing it.”

“Yeah?” she asks. “So if you hurt yourself—maybe got a tattoo in one of those dreams—would you be hurt when you woke?”

I think back to the hickey on my neck that day, the one that couldn’t have come from Jeff. “That doesn’t prove anything. Maybe it happens when I’m asleep.”

Her mouth curves upward. “You’re getting tattoos in your sleep?”

I close my eyes, struggling to make sense of this, create some logical argument. “Of course I’m not, but I think I’d know if I was time traveling.”

“Apparently not,” she says softly. She’s probably 15 years younger than me, but right now she looks at me with sympathy, like a parent explaining death to a child. And as bizarre and difficult to believe as all of this is, I need answers and she might just have them.

“Can I ask you some questions?” I plead. “I’m trying to figure out why all this is happening, and—”

Her shoulders sag. “I need to go,” she whispers, as she turns to walk away.