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The jasmine scent shifts to lavender, and from the kitchen there’s an insistent beeping.
Aaron drags a finger across my mouth. “I’m falling for you,” he whispers, his voice ragged. “I didn’t know I could fall so hard.”
“Aaron.” I reach up, touching the pads of my fingers to his lips.
The beeping grows louder, more insistent.
He grasps my hand. “This falling—it could wreck me. Tell me you feel it too. Please tell me you?—”
Bright light flashes and I’m wrenched from the garden, out of Aaron’s arms, back into my bedroom in Geneva.
I blink into the morning sunlight at my ringing alarm clock. The pocket watch is heavy and warm in my hand, the second hand frozen in time.
I’m still floating, trying to fall back into reality.
Tell me you feel it, he’d asked.
And I’d left him.
I don’t know what will happen now. I imagine if I don’t land back in the same moment that the Becca in the dream will leave him. She won’t tell him she feels the same. She’ll run.
She’ll leave him in the garden. Alone.
He said he’s falling, that it could wreck him.
In the dream I would’ve told him I feel the same.
But here in Geneva? In the light of my bedroom, the lavender-scented sheets crumpled around me and a day of work and Mila’s camp ahead? It’s reality. It’s real life.
In the harsh line of morning light falling across the bed, I wonder, if I fall, will it wreck me too?
But then I shake my head.
It can’t.
It’s just a dream.
A dream to help me live my life.
That’s all.
And if Aaron is left alone in the garden? It’s not any different than him being left behind when I close the watch back in its wooden box.
When time stops, so does the dream.
With that dispiriting thought, I place the gold watch in its antique box and close the lid.
33
All day,from the minute I climb out of bed to rush Mila to camp and then on to a full day at work, I’m consumed by thoughts of Aaron. Of the island.
I make excuses to slip out of meetings and check on the progress of the McCormick wristwatch. I stand outside production, mooning like a little girl with her first crush. When Daniel brings takeout into my office for lunch—fish—I smile so wide that he asks if I’m feeling okay.
I startle the woman at the coffee shop when I laugh at a bit of the latte catching on my upper lip, just like Amy. I smile at three white-haired women knitting and chatting while waiting for a bus.
I turn to give double-takes to tall men with black hair and wide shoulders. None of them are Aaron, but somehow I keep seeing him. The tall man on the street corner has the same color eyes as him. The business man jogging toward the taxi has his jet-black hair. The studious man with glasses has his laugh. I see evidence of him everywhere.
He’s invaded my world.
