“She passed away when I was fifteen.”
“I’m sorry.” I had to tread lightly. Any time I spoke to Sam about Bess’s time-crossing he became upset. But I wasn’t any closer to understanding what had happened to her. “What about Bess’s family?”
“Her mother had passed away by the time she married Alfred. Her father was still alive when Alfred died, and he was the one who paid for her to go to New York. But when I joined her two and a half years later, she told me he had died and she no longer had a source of income. She had taken in washing at that point, but it wasn’t nearly enough.”
“I wonder if either of her parents were time-crossers in this path,” I mused.
His mood, which was already dark from retelling his past, seemed to slip even more.
“How does it work?” he asked.
“What?”
“Time-crossing. How did it start?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think any of us do.”
“How does choosing a path work?”
“On my twenty-fifth birthday, I stay awake past midnight in whichever path I want to keep. It’s that simple—and that complicated.”
“What if you don’t want to stay in 1849, but you can’t fall asleep here?”
I smiled. “Part of the time-crossing gift is that we can fall asleep the moment we choose. We don’t get insomnia.”
“One benefit to your existence, I suppose.”
I shrugged. “There are other benefits, but sometimes I think the burdens of time-crossing far outweigh the benefits.”
“You have a better attitude about it than Bess did.”
“Oh?” I wanted him to tell me more about her. I’d only known her for a couple days, but her shadow extended over my life.
“From what I could tell, she hated being a time-crosser. Here, her father was a member of Parliament, and in her other life, she said she was poor and destitute.”
“You don’t know where she lived in her other path?”
“I think she was in New York. She didn’t talk about her other life often, but the night Alfred died, she made one comment that has stuck with me since then.”
I wanted to lean forward, to draw the statement out of him, but I waited. Quietly.
“I told her it would be best if she went to New York, to get away from the scandal. And she said, ‘I’ve been trying to escape New York my whole life, but it seems to be pulling me there in both my paths.’ And since she’d never been to New York in this path, it made me assume she lived there in the other.”
The only three clues I had about Bess’s other life were that she lived in New York, she was destitute, and it was in the future. She could be one of millions of people.
“Tell me about your other life,” Sam said. “From what you’ve mentioned already, it sounds like a good one.”
Warmth filled me at the request.
As the stars began to shine, Sam not only listened with curiosity, but he also wanted to know everything about my family, my work, my home—me.
September 25, 1849
North Yuba River, California
The morning was overcast as we rode our mules just north of the fork in the Yuba River where we had camped. Everything was serene. Untouched. Promising.
“This is as good a place as any to start panning for gold,” Sam said, surveying the area. “Are you ready?”
