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Where I’d seen a stuffed fox with a monocle and top hat, there’s now just a moth-eaten stuffed fox. Rusting beer signs hang on the wall. An old dartboard. A broken bottle of Jack Daniel’s, coated in dust.

I push to my feet and keep looking around. It’s like I’ve stepped into the ruins of an actual rural bar. But everyone’s here. Frozen. Except …

“What’s happening?” I say, but the bartender just keeps polishing.

He can’t see me.

Where am I?

Pocket universe.

I shake that off. I don’t even know what that is.

As I turn slowly, I realize it’s not as quiet as it seemed. The bartender’s cloth squeaks softly over the glass. There’s the rustle of wind in the leaves above the broken roof. And then another sound, one that has me perking up, eyes widening as I run for the door.

There is no door anymore. It’s just an opening, and I step through as the sound solidifies into the rumble of a car engine. Lights appear, and I race across the tiny porch just as a car whooshes past.

I scramble down the stairs and take three running steps for the road. Then I stop, remembering the others. I hesitate there. I want to run, just run, get as much distance from this place as I can. But then I think of the others. Of Henry. Of Noemi and Caleb. Trapped in that dive bar, frozen, unable to flee.

I turn away from the road and force myself back to the bar, through the opening where the door once hung. Everything is as I left it. Everyone frozen except for the bartender, who just keeps polishing that glass as if nothing is happening.

Then she moves. The woman. The one at the bar. It’s the barest of motions, as if she’d been trying to hold still, to trick me, but one finger twitches, betraying her.

I march over and plant myself beside her. “This is all you. Your doing.”

I expect she’ll ignore me. But after a moment’s hesitation, she slowly turns and says one word.

“Yes.”

“You’re responsible for all this? For what’s out there? For that old man dying?”

She meets my eyes. “Yes.”

Rage bubbles up in me, and my hands fist at my sides. “What the hell is this? What did we do to you?”

“Nothing,” she says, and her eyes fill with such overwhelming pain that I step back.

“Nothing,” she repeats. “You did nothing to me. Nothing to anyone.”

“You want answers, Ellie?” the bartender says, looking up from his polishing. “I’ll give you a choice. I can answer your questions. Or I can let you go home.”

“W-what?”

“Home,” he says. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You were driving there when all this happened. You can have answers or you can go home. But you can’t do both.”

“What about—?” I turn and blink. The others are gone. It’s just me and the bartender and the woman in this ruin of a bar.

“Nobody here but us,” the bartender says. One brow rises. “Did you think there was someone else?”

I glance back to the woman … and see an empty chair.

“Answers?” the bartender says. “Or home?”

I move toward the door, taking each step with care, waiting for the trick.

“No trick,” he says as if reading my thoughts. “You can go home, and I promise everything will be exactly as it was always meant to be. The past undone. The wrongs righted.”

I keep moving. Through the open doorway, I see the road.