“I’m your caseworker. Are you interested in the offer or would you like to decline?”
“Let me get this straight. You’re giving me a chance to time travel. What’s the catch?”
Therehasto be a catch.
“There are a few rules. You can go back to any point in your life, but we recommend no younger than age five—people who go back earlier generally don’t adjust well. You can tell no one about this—if you do, your very existence will be erased from all record and memory. And, last, this is your only do-over. When you die again, there will be no third chance.”
I wait for her to continue, and when she doesn’t, I say, “That’s it?”
“You caught the part about a lack of discretion resulting in the erasure of your entire existence? It happens more often than you’d think.”
“Yeah, sure, but—there’s no other catch? I can just—” I snap my fingers. “Second chance at life, just like that?”
“Should I take your excitement to mean that you intend to accept the offer?”
“Yes. Definitely. Of course. I don’t want to be…dead.”
It’s the first time I’ve spoken it out loud, and I stumble on the word. Yeah, no death for me, please.
And then I have a rather heartbreaking thought.
“The person I hit—in the truck just now—did they—”
I can’t bring myself to say it. My caseworker says nothing, her expression unreadable. She’s not going to tell me.
Maybe I don’t want to know.
Bizarrely, the thought of this stranger sends my brain spiraling in another direction—
To Ruthie.
Ruthie, who is at home waiting for me to feed her. Probably meowing at the top of her lungs on the off chance I can hear her.
Oh God, what have I done?
Ruthie, who I adopted six years ago at the beginning of the pandemic, because everyone was adopting pets to make themselves feel a little less lonely and I thought,Hell, why not?Ruthie and her wide golden eyes with that beautiful ring of green in the middle. Eyes that hold that sense of otherworldly knowing that cat eyes do. Eyes that, when I first adopted her, made me feel like she’d sized me up and found me lacking.
I’ve proven her right.
Ruthie is waiting for me, and I’ll never get home. She’ll go back to an animal rescue, because I doubt anyone in my life will take her. Ruthie hates everyone who isn’t me.
I cry for the first time since I arrived in this strange place. Maybe it says something bad about me that it was the memory of my cat, not thethought of the stranger I might have killed, that did it, but I’m too upset to care. What have I done? I get to go back in time, sure, but somewhere out there, in this timeline or whatever, Ruthie will forever be waiting for me.
For six years, she’s been the one constant in my life, the sole presence I could rely on to always be there for me, to never make me feel like I needed to be anything other than exactly who I was—and I’ve failed her.
My caseworker waits for my tears to stop, staring at me with an unnervingly unemotional gaze as I struggle to compose myself, before she speaks again.
“When would you like to go back to? Please think carefully, because once you make your decision, it cannot be changed. What moment would you pinpoint as the moment you began to get it all wrong?”
“I didn’tget it all wrong.”
I bite this out. By most standards, I was successful. I graduated from college with a 4.0 GPA; got a 170 on my LSAT. Was at the top of my law school class. I got a cushy job in corporate law, and recently, my boss even started hinting that I might make partner soon. These are not the makings of a failure.
I bought my ownhouseinLos Angeles.
And I adopted Ruthie. Maybe it’s dumb, but she really is the best thing I ever did. She was so untrusting when I first adopted her. As a kitten, she’d narrowly missed being put down at the West Los Angeles Animal Shelter; after being saved by a no-kill rescue, she bounced around foster homes foreight yearsbefore I took her in.
Sure, I haven’t hit those milestones a lot of people want to hit by their thirties—I have no spouse, no children, yada yada—but I’ve been working toward other goals. Goals I admittedly prioritized under the romantic assumption that everything in my personal life would fall into place if it was meant to be. I’m only thirty-two. There’s still time for all that.
