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At that, she glances up at us with sharp blue eyes. “Did Amy send you?” she asks, and now I can hear her British accent. “Because you can tell her I’m not teaching that class anymore. I’m not going back to that school.”
A chill runs along the back of my neck, and I hug my cardigan tighter around today’s yesterday’s bruise and broken skin. I assumed that someone had gone to great pains to remove her from UW. In my wildest daydreams, I wondered if she’d time-traveled her way out of here.
Until I saw that sticky note in the Washingtonian archives, it never occurred to me that maybe Dr. Devereux is the one who doesn’t want to be found.
“No, no.” I chance a few steps forward. Gold and silver, bronze and pewter rings adorn her fingers, at least a dozen of them. “We found some articles about you, and we came here on our own. We’re freshmen. It’s the first day of the quarter.”
“Well—kind of,” Miles adds, and we share a look that intensifies that chill, sends it skittering down my spine.
One of Dr. Devereux’s pale eyebrows climbs higher. This has clearly caught her attention. “Kind of?”
“For most people, it’s their first day,” I say, with a healthy amount of trepidation. “But we’ve been here a little longer than that.”
She’s silent for a while, folding her newspaper and placing it in her lap, thumbing a large opal ring. I’m convinced she’s going to yell at us to get off her property and never come back.
Instead she says, “I’m about to make some tea. Would you like to join me?”
Inside, the house looks like the love child of an antique shop and a junkyard, and I mean that in the kindest way possible. There’s barely any walking space; the hallway and living room are covered with artwork in ornate frames, metallic gadgets I couldn’t begin to name, and at least a dozen old clocks tick-tick-ticking away. Half-upholstered chairs and towering armoires and a fainting couch in the most gorgeous shade of plum. It becomes clear right away that the house can’t quite accommodate the amount of furniture in it, most of which is being used to hold tchotchkes on top of tchotchkes. Two cats, one completely black and one completely white, weave their way through the clutter like they could do it with their eyes closed. Hell, they probably can.
“Neighbors file a complaint with the city every few months or so,” Dr. Devereux says, dropping her newspaper on top of a table scattered with vintage mugs. “I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying, ‘You think the outside is bad? Wait until you see the inside.’?”
“I love it.” I’m not buttering her up—this house is genuinely fucking incredible.
On our way inside, Miles balanced a hand on my lower back, and that was genuinely fucking incredible too.
Dr. Devereux warms noticeably at the compliment. “I’ve become a bit of a collector over the years, I suppose. It’s been an amusing way to occupy my time.”
When the teakettle whistles on the stove, she pours water into three mismatched mugs. Everywhere looks both too lived-in and too delicate to sit, so I’m grateful when she waves a hand at two velvet armchairs across from a Victorian couch heaped with old books, which she nudges out of the way to make room for herself.
“That’s Ada Lovelace and that’s Schrödinger,” she says, gesturing to the cats. The black one, Schrödinger, leaps onto the chair next to me. “You’ll have to excuse them. They’re the rare kind of cat that loves people, and they don’t get visitors very often.”
Miles, animal whisperer that he is, pets Ada Lovelace under the chin as she purrs her appreciation. It’s as though he’s discovered exactly what turns me to goo and he’s determined to do it as much as possible.
“So.” Dr. Devereux crosses one leg over the other, fiddles with one of her rings. “You two are physics students?”
“I am,” Miles says. Our chairs are diagonally pointed at each other, and when the ankle of his jeans brushes mine, he doesn’t move it away. “I haven’t declared it yet, but I plan to.”
“And I’m journalism. Or I will be.”
“Fine work, journalists do,” Devereux says. “Most of them, anyway.” She stirs her tea with a spoon shaped like a tiny hand, and then her eyes meet mine, bright blue and inquisitive. “I have to admit, I’m surprised that you found me.”
“You wouldn’t believe how hard we’ve looked,” I say. “I thought that maybe you’d actually traveled through time.” A quarter smile tugs at her mouth as she taps her spoon against her cup. I can barely process the fact that we’re here with her in the flesh, this elusive person who seemed to have vanished. “We heard about your class, and we just thought—we thought you might be able to help us. With our… predicament.”
“Ah. And can you be a little more specific about what that predicament might be?”
My heart trips inside my chest. This is what we came here for. It’s too uncanny, the fact that she taught a time-travel class at UW and we’ve been trapped in our first day there. And she knows what it’s like to be called a phony, a liar. If anyone could help us—or at the very least, listen without judgment—it would be her. I’m certain of it.
“We’ve been stuck living this day for weeks,” I say quietly, allowing the warmth of Miles’s ankle against mine to give me courage. “Well—a few weeks for me. Much longer for him. No matter what we do the day before, we wake up in the same place, on the same day. September twenty-first.”
“We’ve tried to jump-start the timeline in numerous ways.” Miles sips his tea. “Retracing our steps, doing good deeds, living life to the fullest. And that was after spending hours upon hours conducting research, none of which turned up anything.”
“Basically, we’re desperate,” I say with an awkward laugh.
All the clocks strike three p.m. at once, startling me so much, I spill scalding tea all over my hands. Or—not quite at once. Some of them lag behind, creating a cacophony of chimes. There’s even a cuckoo clock that struggles its way out, the bird emitting a sad little cough.
“My apologies,” says Dr. Devereux, who’s been quiet this whole time. “A few of them need to be wound.” With trembling hands and clanking rings, she sets down her tea on the table in front of her, Schrödinger sniffing it once before turning up his nose. When she brings her hands back to her lap, they’re still shaking. “And you swear this isn’t some kind of prank?” she asks.
“Absolutely not,” Miles says.
