It was Ziya who finally spoke.
“Are we breaking up?” she asked in a small voice.
No, Amie thought.
“I don’t know,” Amie said. “Maybe we should.”
“Why?”
You’re right, bad idea, Amie thought.
“I don’t know,” Amie repeated.
“Should we try to figure it out?”
Yes, Amie thought.
“I don’t know,” Amie said for a third time. “I don’t … I don’t want to waste any more of your time.”
Ziya took a deep, shaky breath. “Right.”
Wrong, Amie thought.
Amie stayed silent.
They exchanged a few more words after that, but nothing of value. Soon after, they agreed to end things. Then, about three months later, Ziya reached out, asking if Amie wanted to get together for dinner, as friends. Amie instantly accepted, and on multiple occasions caught herself counting down the days until their first official “friend date.”
Monday couldn’t come fast enough.
Chapter FifteenHow to Save This
Day 4 A.L.
Amie was writing (and pretending not to notice that Ziya still hadn’t texted her).
The writing had begun with Amie putting all her notes about Savannah’s murder into one document, and typing out anything she hadn’t already recorded. This effort to combat her weakened memory led her to searching for memory tests online, and ended up occupying a full two hours with cognitive training. By lunchtime, her mind was swimming with strings of letters and grids of symbols. She was glad she’d written down all of her Savannah notes before taking the tests, worried that she might have somehow managed to make her brain worse in the process of attempting to strengthen it.
After lunch, she returned to her laptop, scrolling through everything she’d typed out. Savannah, Benny, Madeline, Andrew, Raina, Jonathan Oakland. The bookstore, the grocery store, the coffee shop. Money and blackmail and cheating and murder. Savannah wasmurdered. Why? Who would do that?
Amie rolled backward in her desk chair, as if staring at her laptop from a distance would somehow reveal a crucial piece she’d been missing. She closed her eyes, taking herself back to the time loop, trying to think of anything she might have missed, anything that was different or stood out. Unfortunately, there was very little from Amie’s experience in the time loop that could be described as “different” or “standing out,” as far as she could remember (which, if the multiple memory tests she’d taken earlier were any indication, wasn’t very far).
Deciding she needed a step back to give her brain a rest from the murder investigation, she turned her attention to a more calming task—brainstorming article ideas for her job that was probably going to lay her off before the end of the month.
If she was being honest with herself, Ziya’s gentle suggestion the other day about applying to journalism school had stuck with her more than it had any of the previous times the suggestion had been made. Going back to school, to Amie, always seemed like a step backward. She preferred to grind at these low-paying writing gigs in hopes that one of them would one day lead to something better.
“You make things so hard for yourself sometimes. It doesn’t always have to be so hard, Ames. It can just be easy.”
Amie glanced at her phone, caught herself, then flipped it over to hide the screen. She opened a new window and typedjournalism programsinto the search bar.
An email notification was waiting for Amie once she finally flipped her phone back over that evening. She’d gone down the rabbit hole of tertiary education research and only noticed how much time had passed once her head started hurting from staring at the laptop screen for so long.
Rubbing her exhausted eyes, Amie picked up her phone and swiped on the email notification. Her breath hitched when she saw the sender’s name:
Dear Ms. T.,
I am emailing in response to the message you submitted through my website regarding Savannah Harlow. While I don’t tend to respond to vague meeting requests from people who only go by their first name and last initial, I have to admit, my curiosity is piqued.
My address is below. Come by tomorrow at 6PM. I will give your name to the doorman.
