Page 39 of I Know You

Dinner with Mrs. Allen is exciting too, though, as she tells us everything she remembers about the Granvilles of that summer so long ago. Mrs. Allen recalls how Quint and the little girl played together whenever possible, and she and the mother spent countless hours in conversation as they watched the children rove over the gardens.

“I remember I found it surprising that she didn’t reprimand the little girl for being so boisterous.” Mrs. Allen smiles over the memory with a fond gaze at Quint, obviously remembering his childhood days.

I’ve been fighting against the notion that the family is mine, that I am the little girl Quint remembers, but evidence otherwise keeps wiggling into my brain. If that was my mother sitting on the lawn at The Villa and watching her young daughter run around with a boy with golden waves, she wouldn’t worry over it—not if she came from a society that didn’t care if girls ran around and didn’t behave like proper little ladies.

“Do you remember Mrs. Granville’s name?” I ask.

Mrs. Allen pinches her lips together as she thinks. “We wrote to each other for a few months after we left California. Not much, mind you, but then her letters stopped … what was her name?”

Her letters stopped. Because she returned to the future? “They must be relatives,” I say in a weak voice.

Quint reaches over to pat my hand. His serious expression scares me more than anything. More than the memory of playing with Quint that I discovered when I tumbled into 1901 with Ben—a memory that grows sharper every time I gaze at Quint. I long for a joke from him to ease the heaviness of the moment. I possibly spent at least two months in 1911 at The Villa with my parents…

My fingers curl around Quint’s as I share a gaze full of implication. Another memory flashes in my mind’s eye—running, laughing, looking over my shoulder, the lake at The Villa twinkling behind me. But those aren’t foreign to me—I’ve spent so much of my childhood at The Villa.

“It’s impossible,” I murmur, a repetition of the thoughts that have been tumbling through my mind all day.

Noise in the hallway outside makes me pull my hand from Quint’s and turn to see Ben and William coming into the room. “Forgive us for interrupting dinner, my dear,” William says, bending over to kiss his wife.

“Sit down,” she says, indicating the two places that have been set for them opposite Quint and me. The three of us have been eating at one end of the dining room table to enjoy a more comfortable proximity for talking.

“Did you find anything?” I ask Ben as he takes his seat.

“Not really.” He blows out a frustrated breath. “We were able to trace him a block or two around the neighborhood, but no more. It’s hard to tell if he left the area or not.” Ben massages the bridge of his nose. “At what point do we return and admit to Burke and Dr. Cooper there was nothing we could do? Especially when Gibbons isn’t looking for help.” I can tell by his expression that his opinion is growing more and more sure that Gibbons is here on purpose and doesn’t want extraction.

I stare at him for several seconds before my mouth forms an answer. I’m so distracted by Quint’s revelations today, I barely care anymore how little Ben has involved me in our mission. “I don’t know,” I finally say.

Ben furrows his eyebrows further. “Is everything okay?” he asks. “Listen, about today. Can we talk about it later?” He side-eyes the rest of the table, indicating he’d rather discuss it alone than repeat the scene at the Plaza earlier that day. My shoulders stiffen, but he’s right. No one here will understand my insistence at being involved.

I nod. The sting of his rejecting my abilities is still there, but it’s in the background now. And yet I hesitate to tell him about my parents possibly staying at The Villa in the past. There’s no reason not to discuss it. He’ll only care if it means there’s some kind of long-standing connection between me and Quint.

So, I force out the words. “We have discovered that the Allens knew a family by the name of Granville when they visited The Villa in 1911.”

Ben’s eyebrows abandon their furrow and shoot up. “That’s quite a coincidence.” He turns to William. “I realize it was ten years after our time there, but did you make the connection?”

“Of course,” William says, shrugging. “But only knowing what I did then, I asked about you and mentioned you had a ward with the last name of Granville. They knew nothing of the Mitchells. I assumed it was a different family.”

Ben nods. “Which is likely.”

“I think it may have been my parents,” I press.

“Really?” Ben sits back as a maid brings in two plates and places one in front of him. “Why is that?”

I shake my head, flustered. “I’m not sure—it’s as though I remember it, even though I would have been very young.”

“Four,” Quint breaks in, his voice full of confidence on the subject. “Their little girl was four years old.” He glances at me with a spark of teasing, referring, I assume, to our discussion on our ages. He would have been two years older than me, then. “And Clara bears a striking resemblance to the girl and the mother.”

Mrs. Allen nods with him. “Yes. Yes, you’re right. They had to have been family of some kind, Clara. How extraordinary!”

Ben mulls this over while staring at me for several seconds. To his credit, his gaze never wavers to Quint or shows any wonder at why he holds such an adamant view of it.

“It would explain a great deal about your ability to travel through the passages if it’s hereditary,” he says.

“Yes,” I agree. And what if, when we return to the future—a thought that strikes me with an ache in my chest that I don’t want to analyze—I could master when I stepped off the path, as Dr. Cooper had suggested? What if I could use The Villa’s mirror to step into a time before my parents’ deaths?

“You never know what we could change.” Ben’s soft and oh-so-gentle voice breaks into my thoughts. Of course, he must have seen it in my expression. And of course, the task force would never allow that mission. Their rules are strict, and I can’t imagine them allowing me to alter history so profoundly.

“I know.” I swallow back emotion. “But even just to see them…”