DEDICATION
To my mother, Terry Gurdak-Carter,
for believing in me even when I don’t
CONTENTS
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
About the Author
Back Ads
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER 1
My eyes open. The room is dark and filled with shadows. I blink once, twice, and then sit up quickly, my gaze falling on the window near my bed. The early-morning light outside is gray. The tops of the trees sway back and forth in the slight wind. I see a bird fly past, a smudge of color that disappears almost as quickly as it comes. But the windowsill is bare. There’s nothing there. Just like yesterday, the day before, and the day before that.
I pull back the sheets that have tangled around my legs and automatically reach for the lamp on my nightstand. My hand falls out into nothing. Right. There’s no table there now. I keep forgetting.
I stand up. The floor is cool, and the house is silent, even though it’s Saturday morning. I wonder where my parents are, and I picture them standing in the kitchen near the stove, smiling as my father buries his face in my mother’s neck. But that’s a lost image now, and I push it away as I walk over to my desk. It is covered in papers and books, no longer neat and clean, though I have managed to carve out some space in the corner. The small surface has three items lined up in a row: a shell, a wilted dogwood flower, and a red oak leaf, the kind of color you only find on a tree in autumn.
I reach for the flower but stop before I touch the browning, crumbled petals, afraid it will break apart in my hands. Instead, I pick up the shell. It is pink and curved and hollow. I close my palm around it and feel the sharp edges dig into my skin.
It’s from him, I know it is.
Three different items. Three different times I’ve woken up to find something perched on my windowsill. The first one, the shell, came a few days after I arrived back in 2012. The flower was a week later, almost to the day. The leaf came during week three. By then I was expecting it, and I tried to stay awake all night, every night. But I was so tired and he still didn’t come and by Wednesday I couldn’t hold out anymore. I fell asleep in the late hours, and when I woke up the next morning it was there, bright and bold against the chipped white paint of the window.
The fourth week, I vowed to wait for him. I slept during the day, barely able to make it through my shifts at my father’s hardware store. At night I sat on my bed facing the window, a cup of coffee balanced on the blanket in front of me. If I fell asleep for even a second, I’d jerk awake, my hand pressed to the pocket watch that swung on its chain over my heart. But it was pointless. He never came.
This week, the fifth week, he still hasn’t come. And I’m starting to worry and wonder.
When I close my eyes, I see him on the beach leaning over me in the moonlight. I smell him sometimes, pine needles and the earth after it rains.
I have to believe that he’s the one leaving these things for me. I have to believe that he still cares. That someone who knows me, the real Lydia, still cares.
Here is what I tell myself: he left the shell as a reminder of that night by the ocean. The flower from the tree in my yard, to show he’s close. The leaf, to remind me of what he is—someone capable of finding autumn in the height of summer. And maybe that’s why there has been nothing since then. Maybe he has delivered his final message—that his life is too different, that we can’t ever work—and now he has left me here in this strange but familiar place.
I almost hope this is the reason. Even though it will break my heart, it’s better than the alternative. Because the other thoughts are too terrible to face, questions I only ask myself in moments like this, in the small hours of the morning when the world feels quiet and still and empty.
What if he’s lost somewhere in time? What if the Montauk Project has finally used him up and he’s gone forever?
Wes.
Where are you?
I have always loved mystery. It was what made me want to become a journalist. It was why I walked into that open bunker at Camp Hero, and why I kept walking through those endless white corridors. I had to find out what was down there, just like I had to solve the mystery of what happened to my great-grandfather, Dean Bentley, in 1944.
And I did solve it. My grandfather was right: There is a secret government conspiracy hiding under the ground at Camp Hero, a state park at the far eastern end of Long Island. The Montauk Project is real, they have been experimenting with time travel for years, and they’ll do almost anything to keep it a secret.
If the Project ever found out that I traveled back to the World War II era, I would be dead. I’m only alive now because of Wes. But by going back to 1944, I changed something—though I don’t know what—in the past, and in this time line my grandfather has been missing for more than twenty years.
Another mystery.
The mid-July sun streams in through my window, and I can already tell the day is going to be sticky and hot. I carefully set down Wes’s shell. It still smells a little like the ocean—salty and fresh. The scent mixes with the strong odor of onions wafting through my bedroom door. Someone must be cooking downstairs.
I get dressed
