I looked down at myself at my black slacks, a nice blouse, sensible flats, and failed to see the problem.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Everything. What is up with you? You look like you’re going to a job interview.”
She pushed past me and started rifling through my closet, hangers screeching against the rod. “We’re going to a club. A nightclub. Where there will be music and dancing and men who are not your boss.”
“I like this blouse.”
“I’m sure your grandmother does too.” She emerged triumphant, holding a dress I’d forgotten I owned. Electric blue, fitted, and short enough I doubted I could bend over.
“This. With those silver earrings. And actual heels.”
I took the dress, knowing better than to argue. Diane had been dressing me for nights out since freshman year of college, when I’d shown up to a party in what she’d called “sad librarianchic” then she’d taken me under her wing as her own personal project.
She disappeared back to her own room.
“I need at least forty-five minutes for my hair, don’t rush me.”
While she worked on her hair, I changed clothes, catching my reflection in the mirror as I went.
Still impossibly young. I’d forgotten how amazing I’d felt and sometimes looked.
I reached for my perfume, a small bottle on the dresser that I’d walked past a hundred times without really seeing.Scoundrel.My signature scent back then, spicy and a little dangerous, nothing like the subtle florals I wore in 2014.
I sprayed it on my wrists, and memory hit me like a wave.
Jack burying his face in my neck, breathing me in.You always smell like trouble, he’d said once, laughing against my skin.Good trouble.
I set the bottle down harder than I meant to.
The diner played back in my head for the thousandth time. Jack looking up, our eyes meeting, that flicker of something before his expression went carefully blank. And what had I done? Given a little wave, a littlewave, like we were casual acquaintances who’d bumped into each other at the post office, and practically fled the restaurant, leaving Diane sputtering over her pancakes about what the hell was that about.
Coward. I was such a coward.
Which was stupid, really, since he was the entire reason I was here. The whole point of falling through time, of potentially giving up my promotion and my condo and Emma starting Harvard. I’d wanted a second chance with him, to do things over, and at the first opportunity, I’d run away like a scared rabbit.
But seeing him with another woman had done something to me. Made the whole thing feel real in a way it hadn’t before.
He’d moved on. Found someone who didn’t push him away. Someone who laughed easily at things he said and touched his arm without overthinking it.
What if she was the woman he was meant to be with? What if, in the original timeline, they’d gotten married and had kids and built a life together?
If I intervened now, if I inserted myself back into Jack’s life, would I be saving something, or destroying it?
And what if he wasn’t even what I remembered? Almost three decades was a long time. Memory had a way of filing down the rough edges, smoothing over the fights and the frustrations until all that remained was a highlight reel of perfect moments.
What if the real Jack, 1987 Jack, was nothing like the man I’d built up in my head?
“Maggie!” Diane’s voice echoed down the hall. “Stop overthinking and start accessorizing! We’re leaving in twenty minutes!”
I admired how the dress fit. Found the silver earrings. Teased my hair into something approximating the style Diane had demonstrated earlier, though mine never achieved quite the same gravity-defying heights.
When I emerged, Diane wolf-whistled. “See? Was that so hard?”
“My feet are already hurting and we haven’t even left yet.”
“Beauty is pain. Let’s go find you a rebound.”
