by Jill Cooper
When the door opens, I jump. My doctor, the fair-haired and handsome Donovan James enters the room. He wears a white lab coat and round spectacles on his face, but beneath them, his eyes are passionate and his jaw is strong. As he walks by me, he smells of a spicy cologne.
I want to destroy him as he goes through the file in his hand, barely looking up at me. “I don’t know if I should apologize or not, but I’ve been through the records at the hospital. There’s no record here of anyone by the name of Molly or Montgomery. I’m sorry, Cassidy.”
My fingers interlock and twist together, just like the festering anxiety in my stomach. I’m both relieved and sad at the same time. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” He offers me the folder. “I shouldn’t let you look, but I know how you are. You’ll sneak into the office tonight to make sure. You’ve never been able to shake that you are a police detective deep down, even if you won’t admit it. This way, you can see there isn’t a Montgomery here without getting put into lockdown.”
I scan the list and then I scan it again, flipping the pages back and forth. Finally, I sigh and feel so stupid. “Just a drug hallucination? Really?”
Donovan pulls my hair off my neck and his hot breath blows onto my skin. I peer down at him over the frame of his glasses and his glance is all passion. “I’ll adjust your prescription. We’ll find the right balance, I promise you.” His hand sweeps under my hoodie, grabs my ass and pulls me closer to him.
It’s all I need to feel like I’m his and it’s all I want to feel. “Someone might catch us…” My open mouth searches for his and they meet hurriedly as he lifts me onto the edge of his desk.
I lock my wrists around his neck as he removes his glasses and comes back on top of me. “Let them find us. I’m ready for us to be free. Are you ready to be free, Cassidy?” I nod, impatient even as he unzips my hoodie with his teeth.
“He’s mine!” a woman’s voice screams at me. Donovan doesn’t flinch so I write her off as not real, a figment of my imagination. The woman with the curly brown hair wears a wedding dress and in frustration she throws her bouquet at me.
“He’s mine!”
I close my eyes and block her out. I evade my feelings and my thoughts as I watch the arms on the clock spin backward instead of forward. The imaginary woman grabs my hair and it hurts—it actually hurts. I grab her hand and wince. “Donovan!”
She drags me off of the desk and the setting fades. I’m in a dark room—a cage of some sort—with this woman with short brown hair. There’s a scar running down one side of her face and she comes at me with an angry snarl. Her eyes unhinged. I’ve never seen a look like that in my life, and I’ve seen some pretty bad ones.
“Stop!” I scream and lift my hands to block her punches, her unrelenting attack on me.
“Cassidy. Stop!”
Everything snaps back into place. I’m back in Dr. James’s office and he’s on the floor, cowering away from me. His hands are up in the air to protect himself and there’s blood trickling out of his nose.
I gaze at my fists and see his blood on my knuckles. There wasn’t some angry woman attacking me. I was the angry woman and I had attacked him.
Meanwhile, behind me the clock ticks backwards. Tick-tick. Tick-tock. What does it mean?
Chapter Thirty-One: Cassidy Winters
I’m cleaned up and placed in solitary confinement. I’m in white pajamas, leaning against a white wall with my hands bandaged up. I don’t have a bed and there’s nothing for me to do but think about my poor life choices and stare up at the ceiling. I gaze into the light longer than is comfortable. Blinking, I gaze away and see something that’s not really there. I know it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see it.
A girl. No, a teenager sitting on a bed. She’s in a different room, but I can see her and when she turns her head, she sees me. It’s Molly, the girl who’d beaten me at chess earlier in the day. The same girl everyone had told me doesn’t exist.
I walk over to her as she walks toward me. “Do you still have it?” she asks. “Your power? Do you still have it?”
I raise my hand, unsure of the answer. When I cup my fingers toward each other, I feel a crackling—like electricity bouncing from fingertip to fingertip.
“Careful,” Molly says, “they’re trying to steal it from you. From me. They want to give it to him. You have to hurry.”
“Him? Him who?”
Molly’s eyes widen. “Mike.”
Mike. The name sets alarm bells off in my head as Molly starts to fade. “Don’t go!” I slam my hand repeatedly onto the padded wall that I think separates us. She’s completely gone and something comes back to me. I remember a hall and I was standing with the man who calls himself Rex.
“And that’s how a villain is born,” Rex smirks. “With your help, we’ll make him stronger than ever.”
No, that can’t happen. I gasp and my head lurches back as I remember. My search for Molly, learning someone had changed the timelines and snatched Lara, putting Patricia back in power, and the multiple Rexes all with the plan for revenge on our family.
Our family. I’m a Montgomery too. All of this is fake. A dream of the worst kind because it’s artificial and someone else is pulling the strings.
I remember.
I snort, wake up and tug on the cable tethered to the back of my head. When I sit up, I see I’m not in a padded room, but a locked plexi-glass cage. Rex had me plugged into a virtual reality world, just like he’d done to Lara.
I have to find a way out of here.
I grit my teeth and I scream, thrusting my hand against the glass wall. It reverberates around me; the wall shakes and ebbs out like an elastic only to be snapped back in place. This isn’t real, it’s virtual which means the walls can’t hold me. Rex, Donovan, the things I’ve seen here have been fake. A lie.
Which means I can control it. I can destroy it to get to the other side and find Molly, so together we can bring Lara home and restore the timeline to how it’s supposed to be.
Bending my knees, I ram the wall again, this time using the full weight of my body behind my two hands. I hit the wall with a thundering power and pixel by pixel, as if they are the building blocks to this world, explode outward. For an all-too-brief moment, I’m staring across at a dark lab.
Molly is behind a glass cage and her hand presses against the clear wall. Her mouth opens in horror as she calls out. “Hurry, Cassidy! He’s coming! They’re all coming.”
Donovan reaches the cage and opens the door. “We need to talk. You need to stop this and lay back down.” In this timeline, everything’s been corrupted. He’s supposed to be Lara’s and he doesn’t even know. He doesn’t even remember.
Looking at him is painful as the love of the altered timeline swells in my chest even if it shouldn’t be there.
“Stop this, Cassidy,” Don says as he pulls a gun from his waist, “you’re only hurting yourself if you keep this up. I don’t want to hurt you but I need you to get back in that bed.”
I pull back before he can touch me. “Like you did to Marcus O’Reily?”
He comes toward me but I don’t have time for games. I have to get Molly out before she suffers too much and before escape is impossible. I grab the gun from his hand and turn it back on him.
Don’s eyes widen and he raises his arms. “How did you do that? How—.”
“It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I have an itchy trigger finger, one I’ve used more than I should have. I’ll use it on you if you don’t get me out of this room.” I cock the trigger and aim the gun.
“All right, all right, but first, let’s talk things through. If we go out there like this, everything between us is over. The drugs too. You won’t get any more.”
The simulation tries to convince me to stay but it can’t beat me anymore. I’m more powerful than it. I’m more powerful than him, than them. All of them.
“Move it or you’ll feel what it’s like to die. Even if all of
this is make believe.”
Donovan opens the door but he doesn’t leave. I press the gun against the flesh of his neck and his breath shakes with fear. It smells just like the real Don and it frightens me how real all of this is.
“Don’t think I won’t do it.” Nothing is more important than Molly. I won’t leave her to rot in a virtual world any more than I’d let Lara suffer in a forgotten timeline. “I’m angry. I guess this world made me realize that. I tried to pretend I wasn’t but I won’t make that mistake again. I won’t take it out on Lara though. I’ll take it out on you.”
Don gives a slight nod and then moves out into the hallway. He turns his head so I can see his profile and he leads me over to Molly’s room. She’s so close, I can taste my anticipation. I raise my hands to open the door and Donovan swats them away.
“Kill me if you want but if you do this, if you go in there and my mother sees you can’t be broken, she’ll kill you once she steals what it is you can do. She won’t need you anymore.” Donovan’s face mirrors heartbreak and my resolve to shoot him weakens.
“Don’t act so choked up about it. You know as well as I do that you were with me from the beginning to control me. You never loved me.”
“No, I mean yes, it’s true, but I fell in love with you, Cass.” Donovan grabs at my face and I back away. I can’t tell anymore if that’s really him or a virtual version of him, but damn it sounds like him. It feels like him too and I so badly want to give in to that illusion.
“None of this is real. This timeline isn’t real. We were never meant to be together.” His face just twists with further confusion. He doesn’t believe me and I don’t know if I can make him understand with the time we have left.
“Don’t you see, they altered the timeline. Rex used Mike’s power to manipulate this timeline to get us here, to rip Lara away so he can do whatever he wants. Controlling Molly was next and then they used me to get you out of the way so you wouldn’t look for Lara. Because you love her.”
My voice quivers as if I’ve lost something I never really had.
“You’re speaking nonsense. I don’t know Lara. She died years ago. Years!”
“You whisper her name in your sleep. You miss her and you know her when your subconscious takes over. If you think hard enough, you’ll remember. I’m sure of it. You just have to try, Don. None of this is real. Try!”
But he just shakes his head. “I don’t know what to believe.”
“Believe me. I can save everyone and all this will be is a bad memory. But once we fix it, it’ll fade. A timeline abnormality that we’ll soon forget, but I need to get into that room.” I reach for the door and Donovan yanks me back.
“We lose if we go back into that room.”
“Let me go!” I push the gun into his chest. “Don’t make me do this, Don. Don’t make me kill you to save them.”
“If you want to save them, you’re going to have to,” Don whispers with full commitment.
I take a deep breath, and my finger puts steady pressure on the trigger but I can’t do it. Tears spring to my eyes and I remember Lara and the fun we once had. I remember how she saved me from Rex and in that moment, I fire.
Don stumbles backward and his eyes lock with mine as blood pours from his chest. “Cass…” his voice trails off weak and he slumps to the ground.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper and turn to Molly’s room with heart-wrenching guilt. The pain overtaking me is so strong it nearly sends me crashing down to my knees. Just as I’m about to open the door to Molly’s room, a brilliant golden light fills my vision from up above. So bright, I have to hide my eyes from it.
It’s a portal opening up from the ceiling and inside it, the bridge and someone comes hurling down.
Lara James.
She rockets down onto the ground like a meteor. There’s a bright shining light all around her and an amount of energy like I’ve never seen before. It pulsates and the strands of time seem to dance all around her, but she’s in trouble. It’s almost as if bits of her are being pulled into the fabric of time, the pieces that keep us all held together.
Oh God, we’ll lose her. We’re losing her. I can’t let that happen. She’d destroy herself for us, I know she would.
“Lara!” I grab at her arm, but she burns like the sun. I scream and cradle my hand as Lara holds her hands out. She’s pushing against something and her hair floats away her curls resembling an ocean current.
I ignore the pain in my burn hand and take her outstretched hand. With all my might, I try to hold onto her.
It’s hot. It burns and sears my flesh but I fight the impulse to let go. I fight against my own will to hold onto her.
“Lara!”
A tear falls from her eye. “Keep them safe for me. I’m sorry. For all of it, I’m sorry.”
“No!” I grip her hand harder but it’s as if she’s dissolving around me. I’m losing her and I can’t fix it.
Her face focuses and becomes serene as she screams so loud that the sound throws me backward. It’s like a sonic boom, a cry of might and primal grit. It ripples through me and takes down the fake timeline around me. Brick by brick, pixel by pixel, the world is taken away and I stand in utter blacknessI . And stand alone. Lara’s gone and everything else with her.
I struggle to breathe at the thought I might be lost here in this place forever, but things are put back into place the way it’s supposed to be. I’m standing back in my bridesmaid dress and the wedding hall reforms around me.
First the tables appear out of nowhere and then people fill the seats around them. One by one, everyone appears on the dance floor in a conga line. Miranda’s face is frozen with a smile at John and it takes my breath away to see them together again. How their eyes sparkle as they gaze at once another. It’s almost like pure magic.
The musicians return to their instruments and then the wait staff. Molly materialises by the refreshment table, right where she’d been standing when Mike and Rex had first started this all by hurting her. Lara appears last in her wedding dress, slump against the floor. Breathless and winded.
She’s alive. She’s okay.
“Lara!”
I’m not the one who screams it. Instead, it’s Molly. She rushes toward her fallen sister and I hurry to them both. On my knees, we both reach for Lara’s hand at the same time and we squeeze her fingers. She raises her head off the floor with a fatigued smile, but it’s her smile. She’s back and I never would’ve realized how much I needed her, if not for her saving the day.
There’s a scar running down her face that she hadn’t had before and her brown curls are cut radically short. I crush her with a hug and Molly does the same. “You came back,” I nearly cry as I hear Molly, poor dear Molly, sob against Lara’s middle.
“I’ll always come back. Nothing will keep us apart, right?” Lara touches my cheek and then Molly’s. There’s something different about her. A slight edge to her voice that hadn’t been there before. Whatever she’s been through, it must’ve been absolute hell. I wish I could take all that pain away.
I feel the pain of my past every day. The heartache of being ripped from my family, forced to live in the past. I didn’t want to admit it before, but now I can. I’m almost ready to embrace it.
“I thought we were losing you,” I sob, burying my face against her short hair. Lara is everything, she holds us together. She makes us strong. Without her, there is no Montgomery family.
“There’s so much I need to tell you,” I swallow hard. “So much that I’m…I need to apologize for.” I can’t even look at her, and instead I gaze down at Molly who shakes her head at me quickly. Almost as if something is wrong.
“We can talk soon, I promise, but time won’t stay frozen forever. We need to get past this moment. It’s this moment that Rex used to smuggle in all the versions of himself to throw the timeline off balance. If we can save Molly from future Mike, we’ll be able to stop him. Maybe even save Mike in the process.”
“My Mike
?” Molly asks.
Lara nods. “You’re Mike.”
Molly sighs with relief. “Then we’d better get started.”
I help raise Lara to her feet as Molly hurries off to her spot. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” I can’t help but stare at the frozen Donovan. What will he remember and what will he forget?
“I’m sure. When this is all over,” Lara stands in front of Donovan, slowly lowering his hands to her hips, “you can tell me what you need to. I promise, I’ll listen.”
But would she like what I have to say? Only time will tell.
Chapter Thirty-Two: Cassidy Winters
The music starts up again and the wedding reception continues on as if it had never stopped. Lara smiles at the head of the conga line. If people notice her short hair, or her facial scar, no one says anything. Things seems normal except Donovan pats his chest and gazes down, and then back at me in horror.
He remembers. I feel his horror and I reel from it. I back up into a table and spill a bottle of wine. I’m thrown off balance and that’s not a good thing because any second now…
Molly’s talking to the adult version of Mike. Her posture is rigid and I’m afraid I’ve missed my chance to head over to her. A moment later, I use time, bouncing over every second to get to her. When I get there, I pull her backward so Mike can’t stab her with the needle. I pull a little harder than I need to, sending her to the ground.
Mike is about to stab me with the needle. I spin around, throwing my elbow back as Lara steps up and grabs his hand. “It’s over,” she says so harshly that it almost makes me cringe, but after what he’s done, who can blame her?
How can I feel anything in my heart but contempt?
“You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you?” He smiles at her and my heart fills with grief. How can this be what we’ve been reduced to.