It’s not even six o’clock yet.
It shouldn’t matter as long as he’s away from Mallory, but something about how he’s now cooperating has me nervous.Will it be awkward? Will he treat me like a person or will he act like he’s miserable the entire time? If the last few days have been any indication of how he feels, I have a hard time believing he’ll be civil.
He takes the little gas can to the back of the car and puts it in the tank. Then he opens his door and looks up. His eyes fall on me, dark and soft. “Emma?”
“Yeah?”
“Get in the car,” he says.
I swallow and step forward. My legs are heavy as I drag myself to the passenger seat and sit down next to him.
He holds on to the steering wheel, but he doesn’t drive off. He tucks his lips in, thinking and staring off ahead, lost in his thoughts. He’s always been the quiet one, thinking about every detail in the world around him.
“How is this possible?” he whispers.
“I don’t know.”
He tilts his head, peering at me. His eyes roam over me from my head to my feet. “How far—I mean, are you—I don’t understand.” There’s a nervous edge in his voice as I can tell his brain is spiraling. He’s always had a need to understand how things work. He’d take apart his toys just to put them back together again.
“I went back in time a year,” I say, fiddling with my hands. “I don’t understand it either.”
“A whole year?”
I nod. “Exactly one year.”
He rests his head back against the seat and takes in a slow, deep breath before letting it go. “How did you end up here?”
I think back to what I can remember but it seems so far-fetched and foggy. “I don’t know if I can explain it.”
He turns his head to me again. “Could you try?”
His gaze is too heavy for me to keep eye contact. I chew on my lip, gaze darting away because I’m afraid to talk about it out loud. As if telling him what happened could somehow ruin things. Where do I start? What is the beginning? I don’t even know how to explain the last year without my eyes watering and my lungs burning. “I have this habit of going to the bridge where . . .” My words catch in my throat because I can’t say it out loud without reliving it in my mind.
“Where she died,” he whispers, finishing my sentence.
“I was sitting on the wall, staring down at the rocks—”
“You what?” His eyes widen, and he might as well have slapped my wrist with his expression. It’s the same concern he showed every time I’d had a bad idea and needed redirecting when we were younger.
I roll my eyes. “Be glad I did, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking right now.”
His chin dips as if he’s a scolded puppy and he gestures for me to continue.
“It was raining and I slipped and fell.” My eyebrows furrow and I scratch my cheek. “But I shouldn’t have lived. When I looked down there were so many jagged rocks and the water was shallow, but when I fell, it’s like the rocks disappeared and I sank deep into the water.”
“It changed?” he asks.
“Like I said, I don't understand it either. I figured it had to do with Mallory somehow since it happened at the same bridge, but I chose not to overthink it. I saw it as a second chance to save Mallory.”
“How are you going to get back? You’re not going to jump off the bridge?” There’s a trembling in his voice like he’s afraid.
Should he be afraid? He hates me, right? Why would he care about what I do?
“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” I say.
He rubs the bridge of his nose. “Okay, well, we’ll figure this out. Just don’t . . . don’t do that.”
For the boy who said he was done saving me, he hasn’t kept his word. Here he is again, trying to protect me.
