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As she turned the corner, the scene before her made no sense. They lived in a quiet area, but the street ahead was crowded with police cars and vans. Everywhere she looked, she saw red and blue lights flashing around. The sight of it all stopped her in her tracks. Her gaze moved to the yellow cordon that had been set up across the street, with what seemed like crowds of police officers moving around behind. A part of her was aware there should have been a great deal of noise, but for a few seconds it was like being underwater, and all she could hear was her heartbeat thudding dully in her ears.

Something terrible has happened.

She would always remember the sickening, sinking feeling inside herself. And she would remember what came along with it: the desperate urge to go back in time and change things.

Please, she would remember thinking.

Oh God, please.

Because right then, she would have given up Sam for that chance.

She would have given up herself.

She would have given up anything.

Katie took a few faltering steps forward, unsure at first whether her body would work properly—and then she began to run. One of the police officers saw her coming and intercepted her at the tape. She didn’t know it at the time, but he had been expecting her. Her parents had called Sam’s house while she’d been on the bus and learned she was on her way.

“Hey,” the officer said gently. “Hey.”

Katie ignored him. He was tall and solid, and she had to step to one side in order to stare past him at the scene beyond the cordon.

She didn’t understand what she was seeing—not right then. But she took it in anyway, and even seventeen years later she could still see it all so clearly whenever she closed her eyes.

The old red car, abandoned at an angle across the pavement, where it had swerved in to block Chris’s path.

The blood spatters from where he had been stabbed repeatedly.

And the larger pool of blood, in the gutter, where Michael Hyde had begun his desperate attempt to cut off her brother’s face.

PART ONE

One

You can’t do this.

It’s not allowed.

Alan Hobbes looks up from the book on his desk. He listens carefully, but the only thing he can hear is the silence ringing in the room. There is nobody else here. He sent everyone home earlier and is alone in the house. Or, at least, he is for the moment.

And yet the voice of his brother, Edward, echoes in the air from across the years.

Hobbes stares at his bookshelves for a few seconds and then shakes his head. He is old now; that is all it is. Everything is swimming together as the end approaches. And really, that is fine. They say that people’s lives flash before their eyes as they die, and what else can that mean except that the nature of time changes as death approaches? Or rather—he corrects himself—that ourperceptionof it does, so that we finally begin to see time for what it was all along. A journey seems to take place step by step while you’re on it, but if you could look down from above you would see the whole route laid out below you. You would understand that the beginning, middle, and end all exist at once, and that they always had and always would.

It is not something to be afraid of.

Hobbes looks back down at the notebook on the desk. The time he hasleft is limited, and he needs to concentrate. Because death is coming for him. He can feel it approaching steadily and inexorably. It will be arriving at the house in just a few short hours, whereupon it will open the door downstairs and creep up one of the twinned staircases that lead to his rooms.

And then it will all be over.

Except that isn’t true. Hisownjourney will end tonight, but others will continue. Has he been careful enough? Is everything in place? It is difficult to be sure, especially as there are other drifts than the perception of time that come with old age. But he has done his best.

He thinks of those people he has never met and never will, but whom it feels he knows so well.

Right now, Katie Shaw is at home, making dinner. She is worrying about her daughter, her marriage, and one of the children she teaches. She is blissfully unaware of the turn her journey will take tomorrow and where it will lead her.

Detective Laurence Page is listening to classical music at home. He doesn’t know Hobbes’s name yet.

And Christopher Shaw, of course.