Valentine’s Day was ten days away.
That was the deadline I’d given myself before, back when I’d written the letter. Time to decide whether Maggie was worth the risk or whether I needed to mail that goodbye and move on.
The parameters had changed, but the deadline still made sense.
I’d give her those ten days to prove she meant what she said. To show me that “I’m not running” was more than just words, that something had actually shifted, that the woman I’d talked to at lunch was the real Maggie and not just another mask she’d eventually drop.
But I wasn’t going to chase her. Not this time.
If Maggie wanted another chance, she was going to have to fight for it. She was going to have to show up, without me making it easy. She was going to have to prove that she could stay.
And if she couldn’t, if she disappeared again, pulled away again, let fear win again, then at least I’d know. At least I wouldn’t spend another year wondering what if.
I turned up my collar and started walking home, the cold biting at my ears, the city lights blurring in the dark.
One way or another, I’d have my answer.
7
Maggie
Day 4 — February 5th, 1987
“I’m going to pass out.”
Diane lay flat on her back on her bed, sucking in her stomach while she wrestled with the zipper of her Jordache jeans. She had a pair of pliers in one hand, a trick we’d both learned for getting that last half-inch of zipper up, and her face was turning red with the effort.
“Almost... got it...” The pliers gripped the zipper tab, she yanked, and the zipper finally surrendered with a metallic shriek. She lay there for a moment, breathing shallowly, the denim so tight it might as well have been painted on.
“Okay. I’m good. I just can’t sit down for the rest of the day. Or eat. Or breathe deeply.”
I laughed from the doorway of her room, still in my robe, coffee mug warming my hands. Diane’s room was a chaos of clothes and makeup and the general debris of someone who lived at full volume—posters of Duran Duran and Don Johnson on the walls, a vanity covered in enough cosmetics to stock a small drugstore, and shoes scattered across the floor like they’dbeen flung there by a small tornado. Her boom box sat on the dresser, Robert Smith’s mournful voice drifting out as The Cure played “Close to Me”—Diane’s taste ran darker than the pop that dominated the radio, all Depeche Mode and Echo and the Bunnymen and The Smiths.
She sat up carefully, keeping her spine rigid, and reached for the banana clip on her nightstand. Her hair was already teased to impressive heights, stiff with Aqua Net, and she gathered it into the clip fluffing out the curls. Then came the makeup. Blue eyeshadow swept dramatically toward her brows, hot pink blush, lips lined darker than the fuchsia lipstick she filled them with.
“You’re staring,” she said, catching my eye in the vanity mirror.
“Just thinking.”
“Dangerous habit.” She uncapped her mascara and leaned close to the mirror, mouth falling open in that universal mascara-application expression. “What about?”
I couldn’t tell her the truth, that I was trying to remember why we’d drifted apart in the original timeline. We’d been so close in these years, sharing everything from clothes to secrets to the last of the ice cream at 2 AM. But somewhere along the way, we’d stopped calling. Stopped making time. I’d been maid of honor at her wedding, whenever that happened, and then... what? Christmas cards? Occasional emails that got shorter every year?
The details wouldn’t come. Like so many things about my future, they slipped away when I tried to grasp them. I’d tried to remember events, stocks, other things that would have been fun to bet on, make money to put in my nest egg, but the details kept slipping away, no matter how hard I tried to hold onto them.
“Earth to Maggie.” Diane was watching me in the mirror, mascara wand paused mid-stroke. “You okay? You’ve been weird all week.”
“I’m fine. Just... adjusting.”
“To what?”
To being twenty-three again. To having a second chance at everything I screwed up the first time. To knowing that I have less than two weeks to convince Jack I’m worth the risk.
“New year, new me,” I said instead, which was ridiculous because it was February, but Diane just snorted and went back to her mascara.
I tried again, this time to remember who won the Stanley Cup this year. The knowledge was there for a moment, a flash of something, a team name on the tip of my tongue, and then it whipped away like a flag in a high wind. Gone. The magic, or whatever it was, didn’t want me knowing things I could profit from. Apparently that extended to sports betting.
“So.” Diane capped her mascara and reached for the blush. “Any word from Mystery Man?”
