Chapter One
Elizabeth
The first image isn’t dreamlike as many say it will be.
My sister, Debra, is talking with me. Her words are soft and low, as if we’ve been in conversation for a while. She wears her signature star necklace, and her thick brown hair is tied back in a braid.
The details take my breath away.
We’re at a wooden table in a courtyard. Mounds of red and purple bougainvillea spill over its stone walls. Rose-fingered sunlight drifts through the leaves of a guava tree, which fashions a canopy over our table. I draw in a slow, soothing breath of salty air. The ocean is nearby.
It feels so damn real.
My sister’s voice, which started out thin and muted, sharpens into focus. She’s talking about a young girl’s attention problems, and I realize she’s telling me about one of her students. Disappointment surges through me. I didn’t come all the way here to listen to my sister talk about a student.
But no promises were made. No guarantees. Aeon Expeditions promises a journey into our past but does not guarantee that what happens will be meaningful.
My sixty minutes here will race by, so I turn my attention back to Debra. I can’t help but marvel at the things that I once took for granted. Her familiar smile is softer, gentler. A delicate laugh lights up her face. There’s an elegance about her—high cheekbones, strong jawline—that I didn’t notice in real life.
Yet this is real life.
I ask my sister how old she’ll be on her next birthday and her eyes cloud with confusion. I should know how old she is.
“Thirty-eight,” she says.
I’ve come twenty-two years into the past. Twenty-two years. The thought is so mind-bending that I cover my eyes with my fingers and fight back tears.
Even though I’ve already lived this once before, I’m filled with awe. I bring to this ordinary moment the experience of living twenty-two years beyond it. Of knowing all the joy and love and loss and brokenness that will come after.
I notice everything.
Breakfast is laid out on the table. Orange juice in tall glasses. A bowl of cut fruit. Bright yellow napkins.
I reach for the white porcelain teapot before me, its warmth radiating deep into my hands. The liquid flows into my cup and its lemon aroma hovers in the air. Everything is more vibrant the second time around.
I wonder if this feeling will go on forever. Every item. Every moment. Everything I’d once taken for granted taking on new meaning.
I don’t remember this conversation with my sister, but I recall being here in Santa Barbara, California, at a family reunion with her, our two sisters, and all our kids.
Our kids.
“Mommy,” I hear a little voice behind me say.
I turn in my chair and before I can even make sense of what I’m seeing, I feel the tears well up. My heart is dancing and crying all at once.
“Can you help me with my Transformer?” he asks.
I can’t speak. My lips are trembling, and my mouth won’t form any words.
My son Sam is barely four here. Strawberry blond with a little boy haircut and big brown eyes. I reach out to touch his freckled cheeks. Smooth and round.
He turns to me, a surprised look in his eyes. Why don’t I answer?
I take in every bit of him. The navy-blue cotton shorts and white T-shirt. The scuffed Converse. His chubby fingers grasp a plastic action figure.
“I need help,” he says, then takes my hand in his and gently pulls.
My voice is thick with tears. “You want help with this one?” I say, pointing to his toy.
He shakes his head. All serious. “The other one. Optimus Prime. Over there.” He points to a blanket under a sprawling oak tree where his toys are laid out.
“Are you crying?” my sister asks. “And your face is really red.”
“I’m fine,” I say, wiping my eyes. A flushed face is a common result of the time travel, but this feels like more than a side effect.
Sam takes my hand in his and walks me to the blanket. He drops to his knees, grabs one of the toy robots and gives it to me. “This one. I can’t make him transform.”
I sit beside him, feeling a sense of wonder about my body, which bends and stretches in ways that I’d long forgotten. It’s strange how I don’t remember ever marveling at my body when it was this age. I’d always been disappointed in its penchant for having curves where I wanted it to be flat.
I don’t remember how to transform this robot into a truck—what this toy is supposed to do—but I try.
“Bad guy or good guy?” I ask.
“Good.”
I steal a look at the toy to make sure I look like I’m trying to figure it out, but my eyes can’t and won’t leave his face. There’s a pink stain on his cheeks from the heat and the sun. I lean in and kiss his hair, breathe in the familiar little-boy scent, and tears prick my eyes once more.
He lifts one of the figures with a purple emblem on its chest. “This one is bad,” he growls.
I bring him close and squeeze him tightly. In this moment, he is still mine. I have the power to soothe and comfort him. To protect him from what’s to come.
“I’m having trouble transforming him,” I say. “Maybe you want to try again?”
He nods and takes it back. I watch as he thinks his way through this puzzle, as if my closeness has somehow made it easier for him. Seconds later, he’s morphed the robot into a truck. He holds it up to me, proudly. “Transform!”
I watch him play, and, in this moment, I’m the one transformed. I’m free from all the worry that I wasn’t the best mother when he was little; that I was always too tired or not paying enough attention or never enough fun. I bring into this moment that this stage in his life will end all too quickly. That I won’t be forever worn and weary and wondering what I did wrong or if I could’ve done better. And that’s when I see the beauty of it all. The joy of his giggles and his love for me that knows no bounds. The littleness of his body that once exhausted me, but now I desperately cling to.
In the future, I no longer get to buy sippy cups or crayons or children’s toothpaste. We won’t go to the library or playground or buy ice cream cakes. I don’t get to run to the shoe store with him because his feet have grown seemingly overnight or get to take him shopping at the toy store to find a birthday gift for one of his friends. I no longer have drawers filled with birthday cards and wrapping paper for impromptu invitations, nor do I have stashes of colored markers and stickers in case he can’t find anything to do.
“Can we play hide and seek?” he asks.
“You want to hide?”
He nods because he always loves hiding more than seeking. He drops his truck onto the blanket. “Close your eyes! No peeking.”
I cover my eyes but cheat and peek through my fingers. I have so little time with him.
“Ready or not, here I come!” I shout, then start looking around the courtyard, pretending I don’t know that he’s hiding behind a tree in the corner. “Where did you go?” I call out.
The tears fall. Where did he go?
This beautiful little boy will grow and go to school. He will gaze at the stars and want to be an astronaut someday, get his driver’s license, meet his first love and take her to prom, go to college and earn his teaching certificate, then begin his dream job teaching astronomy to high school students. Then he will be forever gone, his future erased in a senseless accident.
Yet here he is, standing beneath the tree, his body trembling with excitement, a huge smile on his face, delighted that he’s found a hiding spot he thinks I can’t find. Bursting with life. Years and years of joy
and laughter and love still ahead of him.
The future with all that it brings is held at bay as I scurry around the courtyard twice and then pretend to spot him for the first time. “There you are!”
He laughs and races from behind the tree, then plants a baby powder-soft kiss on my cheek. “You couldn’t find me for a long time.”
“I know,” I say. I hold him close to my heart. “It’s been a very long time.”
If you could spend an hour in your past, what would you do?
This is the first question on the Aeon Expeditions application, and the most common answer is surprising. The hour we want to relive is not our wedding day or the day our children were born. It’s not even the joyous moments of a Sunday dinner with family or a Christmas with presents under the tree. And despite how altruistic we think we might be, very few people admit they’d spend that hour giving justice to Hitler or Stalin or any other evil icon. No, the most common answer is that we want to spend a few more moments with someone we lost.
I’m just one of millions who gave this answer. I’m also more broken than I admitted in the application. I still have hours, sometimes days, where I don’t believe Sam’s gone, as if his death is a story I’ve been told or a movie I’ve seen. Each day brings the agony of knowing that for the rest of my life I’ll live with arms outstretched for a son who’s no longer there.
I read somewhere that a baby’s cells remain a part of their mom long after they are born, take their first steps, learn to speak, go to school, get a job, and become a parent themselves. Maybe that’s why I can’t let go of him. Why Sam still feels like he’s always with me.
Live long enough and you accumulate losses.
My dad used to say that a lot when I was in my twenties and back then I thought: Why does he say such depressing things?
That’s because I hadn’t lost anything back then. Or perhaps it was also because other than my singular life, I hadn’t gained anything either. I hadn’t met my future-husband Mark at a friend’s wedding and tumbled head over heels in love. I hadn’t lost my first pregnancy, a baby we’d hoped to name after my grandmother Violet, in a miscarriage at sixteen weeks. I hadn’t given birth to beautiful Sam, who wouldn’t exist if my pregnancy had worked the first time.
I had no idea back then that once you love something—anything—all you can ever be sure is that you’re going to lose it someday.
Now I’m crying. After my hour was up, I was extracted to the present and even though I’ve stepped outside of Aeon Expeditions into bright sunlight, I still can’t escape the shadows.
From the outside, Aeon could be any industrial building—a fortress of reinforced steel with a curved hangar-like roof. Its walls, painted in muted sage and desert sand, blend seamlessly into the Southern California landscape. No casual observer would guess at the extraordinary
things that happen within.
Minutes later, a staff psychologist joins me outside. She has a soft, forgiving face that looks like she’s accustomed to seeing people at their worst. “I’m Dr. Kim. How’re you feeling?”
The silence expands between us as I find my words. My body trembles and I feel the pulse of grief return. “It’s not a broken bone I can show you. But it’s real. This pain.”
This experience has destroyed my sense of reality. Grief had taught me that I won’t hear Sam’s voice or see his beautiful smile or experience the light of his silly giggle. He won’t run to me or wrap his little arms around me and squeeze. Grief had shown me that living means he is no longer here.
Then, a jump in time and none of that’s true.
I spent an hour with Sam, holding his hands, watching him run and play and laugh. I held and tickled his body, kissed his soft cheeks a thousand times, sang ridiculous songs, then cuddled and snuggled him. My heart was full. Nothing else in the world mattered. And in my next breath, it seemed, the sixty minutes evaporated, and my entire world collapsed.
“I’ll never stop missing him,” I whisper.
“It’s common to feel profound grief after a visit with someone we have loved and lost,” she says softly. “Give yourself time to recover and get back to normal.”
I don’t want to recover. I want to recapture the feeling of being with him and hold on to it, like perfume in a bottle, so I can always come back to it. I don’t want to go back to a “normal” world where Sam isn’t in it.
In the months after Sam’s death, I’d fallen apart, acting like a madwoman, exhausting everyone in my life who cared about me until I came to the point where I began to nurse the idea that I was ready to embrace death. To cling to life seemed a betrayal of Sam, who I could only connect with in death. I dulled the pain with wine. And pills. Then both. When I hit rock bottom, I was kneeling on the cold bathroom tile, my head flung over the toilet basin, my hair dragging in the foul water, and my body rocked with spasms as I vomited the cocktail of pills and cabernet I’d consumed an hour earlier. I was sobbing, the kind of uncontrollable tears that made me gasp for air. It felt like my grief had no end. And in that moment, I had a kind of epiphany. Not a religious one, I don’t think. A clear, calm thought that seemed as though it had winged itself into the room and lighted on my shoulder.
This wasn’t only about losing Sam. It was also about me.
It was only when I allowed the truth to squeeze in that I began to see what I’d kept hidden from myself all this time.
It’s my fault that Sam died.
It was my birthday, the milestone fifty, and my husband Mark was in what he called a “technology monastery”—he and a team of twenty-two
engineers holed up day and night on a ranch in Ojai, California, working on plans for the technology that would later become Aeon Expeditions. A group of friends had taken me out for a birthday lunch, then Sam and I made plans to grill some steaks together later that night. Ten minutes into the meal, he glanced at his phone and said hurriedly, “Sorry, Mom, I have to go.”
“Where’re you going?”
He stood. “I’ve got to meet someone.”
“Come on. Stay a while. Talk to me.”
He was silent for a long moment. I thought this meant he was finally going to tell me why he’d been so distant, leaving the house at all hours of the night, often not returning until hours later. “Just because Dad ignores us doesn’t mean I have to be here with you every second.”
His words felt like a punch to the gut. “What’re you saying?”
I should have kept quiet then. Instead, my anger flared. After all the things I’d done for him as a mother, after being there for him when his father couldn’t, how could he talk to me with such contempt? “You’re just like your father. You do whatever you want.”
“I’m not Dad.”
I waved my hand at him. “Just go then.”
He seemed so young as he hurried to the front door, his head bowed. But also, so very old. Like he was embarking on a doomed journey.
He shut the door behind him with a firm thunk, and I went about the business of cleaning up the celebration dinner that neither of us had eaten, hating myself for my harsh words. Wishing I’d handled it differently.
I never got the chance to say I was sorry.
When the police called me hours later, I couldn’t understand what they were saying. How could Sam be gone? I tumbled end over end. Nothing made sense.
Then the questions slithered in.
Why was the pistol we kept in the safe missing, along with three thousand dollars in cash? Police never recovered the gun or the cash. The same night that Sam was killed in the accident, someone stole our speedboat from the slip at the harbor. It never turned up. The police blamed it on an uptick of thefts that summer, but that didn’t explain other nagging questions.
Why had Sam been walking on that lone stretch of highway close to midnight? Why was his car parked miles away? Why were his last minutes spent with a drug dealer?
The coroner didn’t find any drugs in Sam’s body or in his possession, so maybe this late-night meeting wasn’t about drugs. I couldn’t find any other
connection between them. They hadn’t gone to school together. There were no emails or texts between them. It crossed my mind that maybe Sam had a burner phone where he kept those communications secret. I never found one.
My sister Debra brought up the possibility that the two had met on a dating app. Maybe Sam was gay, and I didn’t know it. And the reason he was on that secluded road was that he was hiding his relationship.
I cried. Not at the possibility that Sam was gay. I would’ve accepted it, even though admittedly I hadn’t seen signs of that. It broke my heart that Sam might have felt he had no choice but to keep it a secret.
Here’s what I know. If I hadn’t lashed out in anger, he would not have been on that stretch of highway when that car spun through the curve and took his life. He would be still alive.
The psychologist touches my shoulder reassuringly. “You okay?”
I have the sense that she thinks she knows about death. But she only knows it from a distance, from comforting people like me. She doesn’t know that when death takes away your son, the five stages of grief and everything she learned in college are blown to pieces.
Still, I must stop crying. Not just because my ex-husband, Mark Saunders, is the founder of Aeon Expeditions and it will get around the company that I was a mess after my jump. But I don’t want this psychologist to conclude that I’m not emotionally stable enough to embark on my second trip, scheduled for late this afternoon.
The waiting list for a jump is so long—sometimes years—that only a handful of people in the world have ever been granted a second one. It is far easier to get into Harvard than it is to get your first time travel slot. The odds of getting a second one, especially when you’re the founder’s ex-wife, are about the same as winning the Powerball.
When I heard the voicemail from Mark telling me he’d scheduled a free second jump for me, I was surprised. I hadn’t spoken to him much since our divorce nearly three years earlier, so it made no sense that he’d given me this exceptional gift.
I’d returned his call right away. “How’d you do this?” I asked. There is a limited supply of time travel slots, and the jumps themselves require so much energy and manpower that they aren’t cheap to produce. Then there’s the byzantine application and selection process that kicks out 98 percent of applicants in the first round. Millions try to circumvent or appeal the process each year and are still rejected. Giving me a second trip, even though Mark is the founder, is a Herculean feat.
“It was complicated,” he admitted.
“Why then? When we’re not together …”
“I was hoping you’d call me back,” he said slowly. “And you did.”
My voice was filled with disbelief. “You gave me a trip that’s impossible to get because you hoped I’d call you back?”
“I miss you, Elizabeth. And if you’re willing, I want us to get together when you return. You can tell me all about your trip.”
So, there is a catch.
“And … if I don’t want that?” I ask.
“Then the trip is still yours.”
“Are you okay?” the psychologist asks, bringing me back to the moment.
I speak calmly, disguising the pulsing ache. “I’m grateful that I got this time with him,” I say quietly, hoping that expressing gratitude instead of despair makes me appear more stable.
My softened tone seems to work. “Let’s get you ready for your next jump,” she says, then guides me back inside. ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
