Camille threw her arms around me and we rocked sideways as we hugged. Her soft hair bracketed my right cheek, overwhelming me with her floral scent. Against my temple she whispered, “I couldn’t have made it through any of this without you, little sister.”
After speaking briefly over the phone with Dad, I called for a plane ticket and scheduled a flight for late the next morning, March twentieth. Camille would drive me to the airport in Minneapolis.
“Don’t look for him here,” I insisted as I settled my purse strap over my shoulder at the gate, leaning back into the car to address her. Stupid, inconsequential things flitted across my mind, like a wardrobe and accessories I did not remember purchasing, as if to allay the tension in my head. She didn’t at once respond and I infused my tone with severity, fixing her with my best lawyer look. “Promise me, Milla. Don’t do that to yourself. He won’t be the man you remember.”
At last she nodded, hands hanging lax from the steering wheel, eyes steady on mine. “Have a safe trip and call when you get there. Say hi to Dad.” Her gaze sharpened, becoming all at once exacting. “Be safe, Tish, I mean it. Don’t take any chances. Please. I can’t lose you, too.”
“I’ll be careful.” And then, more softly, “Don’t do it.”
“I won’t,” she whispered. “I promise.”
I didn’t believe her for an instant.
Chapter Fifteen
Landon, MN -March, 2014
I WATCHED UNTIL TISH DISAPPEARED INTO THE SWIRLING crowd of fellow travelers, then lowered my forehead to my knuckles, momentarily overwhelmed. I battled the urge to fish from my jeans pocket the notes I’d scribbled on the back of an order pad at Shore Leave, those of Mathias’s current work and home addresses. It had been easy – a quick search through an online phone directory revealed Mathias and Suzanne Carter, of Minnetonka, a suburb no more than twenty-five minutes west of the airport. My best guess was that this Suzanne was the person I remembered as ‘Suzy,’ someone he’d dated in college, a girl Bull had often referred to as a high-maintenance poodle; Mathias had later laughed over the description, agreeing that it was apt, if impolite.
Memories clustered, demanding attention, so thick I could have used both hands to bat them away. I recalled the first winter I met Mathias James Carter, when he was fresh home from Minneapolis, having reached the conclusion that he was not cut out for long-term life in the city; he missed his family and the north woods. In the alternate timeline in which I now existed, Landon had never been my permanent home until the last few weeks. Apparently I’d earned an education degree and had been recently hired to replace an elderly, ailing teacher. Noah Utley, Millie’s father, had no obvious connections to me in this life. Because we hadn’t stuck around Landon back in the summer of 2003, I’d never dated Noah, which meant no Millie Jo. And no Millie Jo meant I’d never lived with Grandma and Aunt Ellen, and had never worked at White Oaks Lodge and met the Carters.
An irritated driver laid on his horn in the car behind mine, startling me to attention.
There was little choice but to drive forward. I stared once more in the direction Tish had vanished, willing her to stay safe, gripping the steering wheel so tightly its pattern was imprinted on my palms. I hated to let her go but Tish would not be moved from her decision to search for information in Chicago. She was rabid with the desire to confront Franklin Yancy and I understood this conviction, I truly did, but right now the thought of such a confrontation proved too excruciating; I couldn’t bear to consider what could go wrong and so I aimed my thoughts toward something I could accomplish in the next few days – collecting information about the past.
And I intended to seek out Bull and Diana Carter for help.
I loved my in-laws dearly. I’d been acquainted with them long before I met Mathias and it was my interest in history, my deep desire to find answers about Malcolm Carter’s photograph, which led me to White Oaks in the first place. Fate, I’d believed ever since. At least, until now. Was fate a fixed entity? Or something malleable, a river flowing without stopping, the way Quinn Rawley had described time? It had to be the latter, something pliable enough that a single action retained the power to alter countless future events. What had Franklin done? How had he known where to strike? And what sort of unhinged mind took such a chance? Had he even considered the ways his own future could be rendered different?
Mathias, my heart wept. I swallowed a sob, exhausted from too many bouts of brutal weeping. Furthermore, it seemed unproductive. I was a mother, despite my missing children, and a mother did whatever was required to make things right for her offspring. I had never taken them for granted – had I? Fear and sleeplessness punctured holes in my conviction. The life Mathias and I had created together was a gift, a blessing beyond comprehension. I would have argued until out of breath that I had never taken it for granted; the sweet, dear, unhurried life in our cabin a few hundred yards beyond White Oaks Lodge. The beautiful homesteader’s cabin in which Malcolm Carter once lived and my husband and his father had since refurbished, creating a home for our family of seven.
No matter how many times I’ve watched our babies nurse, I still love it more than about anything, Mathias whispered in my memory, shifting closer to trace a gentle fingertip over James’s plump cheek.
I shuddered, pain clogging the dark hollow behind my breastbone, but refusing to allow that particular evening to play out in my mind was beyond my
