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He eyed my bunny slippers. “Just you. Can we talk? Please, Emerson?”
“Give me a few minutes,” I said, keeping my voice neutral. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”
The small lobby was deserted except for Michael when I found him there ten minutes later. I’d exchanged my robe for a sweat jacket, brushed my teeth, and at the last second sprayed on some perfume.
I left my bunny slippers on. Just to be cheeky.
I led Michael to the patio on the side of the building. It shared the same street view as the restaurant patio, as well as the same type of wrought-iron fence. Sitting down across from him at a glass-topped table, I waited for him to speak.
“I was wrong.”
Not exactly what I expected.
“Noble of you to apologize,” I said, inwardly cringing at the sarcasm in my voice, even though in my experience it was always best to run the defensive.
Michael leaned back heavily in the chair. “Listen, if you don’t want to work with me, I can try to find someone else to help—”
“No. No, I want you.” The words were out before I could stop myself. Michael’s smile was so wide, it exposed a dimple in his left cheek that I hadn’t noticed before. “To work with me.”
“Good. I promise from now on to keep any feelings I might have to myself.”
Feelings? What kind of feelings?
“There was another reason I wanted to talk to you.” He hesitated, drawing a deep breath. “You said you wanted the truth, and I want to tell you everything I can. Seeing time ripples from the past is only part of your gift.”
Gift was a really subjective term.
“There’s more?” I asked.
“This is going to sound impossible. Just hang with me. You’ve seen people from the past. Have you ever seen anyone … from the future?”
“I only see people who are dead. Dead people from the past. People from the future aren’t dead. How can a rip from the future show up in the present? Which would be their past, I guess.”
Wrinkles appeared on Michael’s forehead, I assumed from attempting to follow my logic. Understandable. I couldn’t follow it either.
“It’s not so much past, present, and future.” The creases grew deeper as he tried to explain. “It’s more fluid than that, almost parallel.”
“Then it’s inevitable?” I asked, defeated. “I’m going to have to deal with people from the future?”
He nodded. I felt like I’d been slapped across the face.
“Have you seen people from the future?” I asked.
“I started out seeing rips from the future, but now I see them from the past, too.”
Great. A whole other group of people to look out for at parties.
“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said, my voice edging closer to hysteria. “How did you know they were from the future? Did they show up in a hovercraft? With a trusty robot sidekick?”
“No.” He shook his head. His face grew more worried by the second. “At dinner you asked me about the first time I saw a rip from the past. I told you. But the very first rip I saw was from the future. We’d gone to Turner Field to watch the Braves play the Red Sox in an interleague game. The guy in line in front of me had on a World Series shirt. Something about the year—and the team that won—was off.”
Michael had been staring off in the distance as he relayed his experience. Now he focused on me.
“Two thousand four or two thousand seven?” I asked.
“Two thousand four.” He grinned. “When I reached up to touch his sleeve, my hand connected with his arm and he dissolved. I freaked, and my mom took me to the hospital. That’s how the Hourglass found me. They pay people to research that kind of thing.”
“People from the future. How strange. My rips show up in pilgrim bonnets or powdered wigs. But … people from the future. How strange,” I repeated. “Have you ever seen anyone you know?”
