Her hand was on my wrist, and she said, “I can always make time where it’s needed, Tallulah.”
Chapter Forty-One
I staggered back from the table, recoiling from her touch, and she looked at me with a sad sort of understanding.
“Wh-what is this?” I stammered.
“You were somewhere else just now?” She didn’t seem all that surprised. “With me, I assume?”
I looked down at myself, wearing the same jeans and T-shirt I’d been in the day before. I touched my forehead, and the stitches were gone. I stared at her, and even though I understood logically what had happened, it still seemed too impossible to believe.
“What did you do to me?”
“Chronos is the god of time, my dear.” Imelda gave me an apologetic smile. “Those with his power can manipulate time. Though I must confess it’s only very rare situations that would make one of us send you back. That’s what happened, right?” Her head cocked to the side as she observed me. Her hair was perfect. She was unblemished.
“You don’t remember?” I settled into the seat across from her again, hoping my heart might stop pounding soon.
“No. And you can’t say a word about it either.” She raised a hand like she could tell I was about to start babbling information at any moment. She wasn’t wrong. “You can’t change my path. You can only alter your own reality. Whatever happened in the future that made me send you back to now, I must have believed it was worth it. It’s a rare thing indeed. Upsets the cosmic balance.”
I stared at her. “I can’t tell you anything?”
She shook her head. “I must do everything the exact same.”
So, no talking her into canceling the convention, then. No changing her decisions on any of the stubborn, pigheaded things she was going to do. Of course we couldn’t have made things that easy. At this point in our original conversation she had already drawn a line in the sand telling me the show would go on.
That meant if it was going to end differently, it was all up to me.
“You can’t tell anyone else what the future holds either,” she warned me. “This isn’t a game, Tallulah. If you’re back here, you are the only one who can change things. You bring the future back with you. If the path is going to change, you are the only one who can know how it was. Everything will be different if you do what you were sent here to do.”
I nodded, barely understanding. I could tell Sunny not to come, but she would insist on it, just like she had that morning. Without telling them why I wanted them to stay away, I wouldn’t be able to keep them from the Luxor.
All I could do was find the son of a bitch who did this and stop him before he set the wheels into motion.
I moved to stand up, and said, “Future you…I mean the other you, she told me something. She said the cost would be high?”
Imelda looked up at me.
“You have to give up whatever future you left behind. That path is gone now.”
At first I didn’t understand why that would be so bad.
Then it sank in slowly.
If I stopped this before it truly started, my night with Cade would never happen. He wouldn’t sleep at my side. I wouldn’t tell him I loved him. The only reason we got to that point was because of the car bomb, and I had to stop this before those wheels were set in motion.
I had said I would sacrifice anything.
Turned out I had to give up my only moment of pure happiness.
I thought of Sawyer and Sunny. I thought of everything that hadn’t happened yet, and I nodded tightly. “That’s fine.”
It gutted me. But if sacrificing my happiness would keep Sunny and Sawyer alive, I would resign myself to an entire lifetime of being miserable and alone. I’d cut off my own arms if it meant I didn’t need to relive the tomorrow I had left behind.
Imelda smiled, a sympathetic sadness still in her features. “I wouldn’t have sent you back unless it was for a good reason. I know whatever happens I must have believed you could change it, Tallulah.”
“I will.”
“I’m sorry I can’t help more.”