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“Which do youwantit to be?” Quinn asked before she swallowed.

Abby watched her like a hawk before she answered, “I haven’t decided that yet, either. Is that okay?”

“Yeah, of course, it is,” Quinn replied.

“So, I should hit enter now and find out our answer on Paul?”

When Quinn nodded, Abby tapped the key, and themicrosecond it took for the results to appear still took too long. Abby had clicked back into the newspaper’s site, and she saw it probably before Quinn did, but by Quinn’s gasp, she guessed that she’d seen it, too.

“I caught the end of the link,” Quinn said, confirming Abby’s thought. “The slug. That’s what they taught us to call it in one of my online business classes. I took a few when I first took over the shop. Not at a university for actual credit or anything, but that one term that I’d forgotten just came back to me.”

Abby checked the obituary for John Paul Stevens.

“He died in 2003,” she read, feeling that news hit her like a ton of very heavy bricks. “Oh.”

Abby saw the little boy sitting in front of the radio. She saw him as she tucked him into bed and ran a hand through his hair. She remembered Harriet telling her how much she thought he looked like his mother. Abby saw something else then, too. It was a teenage girl wearing a hoop skirt. That was what Abby would call it anyway. She wasn’t exactly up on fashion of any time period. The girl had blonde hair and a blue ribbon holding up a ponytail. She was smiling, had a pearl necklace around her neck, and her button-down shirt was tucked into that full skirt. She was standing outside of a building with other kids around who appeared to be her age, which meant that it was probably a school.

“Are you all right?” Quinn asked.

Suddenly, Quinn’s hand was no longer in hers but on Abby’s back, rubbing slow, comforting circles, which Abby loved because it felt so familiar to her.

“I know you’ve done that before, but you haven’t. Not as Quinn.”

“Harriet used to do this to Deb.”

“And another time, too. Maybe more than one,” Abby replied.

“How did he die?” Quinn asked.

“Heart attack. Survived by two daughters and a grandson.”

“We have–” Quinn stopped.

“What?” Abby looked at her, trying to read Quinn’s face.

“I just meant thattheyhave grandchildren and a great-grandchild.”

“Right,” she replied, knowing what Quinn had actually meant. “This is…”

“Too much?” Quinn asked.

“Yes.”

“What do we do about it?”

“Given when Harriet and Deb died, the granddaughters never would have met them, so I don’t know what we’d find out by tracking them down. Obviously, their great-grandson never met them, either. And with Paul gone now, I’m not sure there’s anything here.”

“You’re still talking about investigating?” Quinn asked.

“Well, yeah. What wereyoutalking about?”

“Us, Abby,” Quinn replied and pulled her hand away.

Abby felt the loss immediately. She wanted to ask Quinn to put it back, sit down next to her, wrap her arm around her shoulders, pull Abby in against her, and just sit there quietly together. She also had a very intense need to go sit down by a river on a blanket, and for Quinn to be there with her on that blanket. Not being an outdoorsy person, she knew that one wasn’t her; that had to be Deb or maybe someone else from the past whom she didn’t know about yet.

“Whataboutus?” she asked.

“Um… Apparently, we’re either high on some test drug and imagining all of this, or we’ve been reincarnated at least a few times, and every one of those times, we’ve somehow found one another and ended up together however we could. What do you mean, what about us?”