“Justin!”
“What?” I turn to face her. “Don’t you get it? Nothing matters,” I shout. “Not me, not you, not this ridiculous quest we’ve been on all week. It’s all meaningless bullshit! Everything is pointless!”
“Stop it!” she yells at me. “Seriously, Justin, get out of the road. Then we can talk about this.”
“Or what, I could die?” Another burst of wild laughter. “Can I die? Am I invincible? I mean, Stan lived, so I live, right? Maybe I could get hit by a car and walk away!”
“You can barely walk now,” Rose points out.
I look at her over my shoulder, through blurry eyes. “Touché.” That sends me into another fit of giggles.
Rose gives up on persuasion and marches onto the pavement, taking my arm. I let her lead me back off the road, where I collapse onto the grass, drained of all energy. “So,” she says, “you don’t get back.”
“Nope.”
“So the question is, what are you going to do now?”
I fight down another burst of laughter. “Do? I guess I’m going to turn into an angry, obsessive old man with no friends who never does anything with his life.”
She shakes her head. “You’re telling me what he did. I’m asking what you are going to do.”
“Have you not been paying attention? He is me.”
“No—he’s Stan. He’s the result of some other Justin who went into the past and never made it back. But that doesn’t make him you. You can still do things differently than he did.”
“Some other . . . Are you high? There’s only one me.”
“There are two of you in 2023.”
“Yeah, but they’re still both me. One’s just older than the other.”
“You don’t know that they’re you you. Maybe this keeps happening, and you keep going back into the past, but each time you do things a little differently. Maybe there are a bunch of alternate universes where you make different choices. Maybe in some of them, you do make it back. Maybe every version of you is a little bit different.”
“So now, instead of two of me, you’re saying there are, like, hundreds?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, that’s terrifying.”
“Or it means you have free will, and your choices do matter, because this version of you has never existed before.”
“But what if that’s not how it works? What if this is just a loop, and there’s just me and Stan, doing the same things over and over for infinity?”
Rose shrugs. “Then you have nothing to lose.”
I frown. Much as I would like to believe that there’s a way out of this, I just don’t see it. I mean, look at the scar. I made all my choices leading up to that believing that I could change things, that I could make a difference, and I still did everything exactly the same way that Stan did, down to getting hit with a rock and falling at the precise angle and moment that would give me the exact same scar.
“I just don’t see the point,” I say wearily. “I’ve watched him try to solve this case my whole life. The fire happens tomorrow, and we still have no idea who does it. How am I going to do in twenty-four hours what he couldn’t do in almost thirty-eight years?”
“Maybe he never got back because when he got to the point where you are now, where he realized that he is you, he gave up.”
“But he didn’t give up. I’ve seen the murder wall. It took over his whole life.”
“Yeah, but he tried to solve it after the fire. I’m saying, what if he gave up trying to solve it before?”
“It doesn’t matter. If there was anything else to do, I’m sure he would’ve thought of it.”
“I’m not saying it’s going to be easy or obvious. I’m just saying, you don’t know for sure what he did once he reached this point. You only know what he did later. These next twenty-four hours are a big question mark. Maybe—”
“Just stop,” I say, unable to stomach another second of her relentless optimism. “Isn’t it obvious by now? You were wrong. I don’t matter; you don’t matter; none of this matters. There isn’t meaning in everything, there isn’t some grand master plan, and the universe does not give a shit about either one of us. Maybe I’m not dead, but this is hell, and it’s time we both just admitted it.”
“Justin, you don’t mean—”
“Shut up.” My face is hot, my eyes burning. “Don’t tell me what I mean; don’t tell me what to do; don’t tell me anything. I should never have listened to you. I wish I’d never even met you.”
Rose’s mouth drops open, her face crumpling.
The instant the words leave my mouth, part of me wishes I could take them back. I’m stuck in this nightmare for the rest of my life, and I just torpedoed the one good thing about it.
But frustration and anger keep my lips pressed together, my eyes narrow. Maybe it’s not fair, but I just need her to feel what I’m feeling for once. I need to not be alone in this fear and rage and despair. I need someone to share this absolutely shitty, hopeless feeling with me, because it’s too much for me to handle by myself.
No wonder Stan was alone his whole life. We truly are the world’s worst human.
“You know what?” she growls through gritted teeth. Her jaw works furiously as she straightens her shoulders. “I wish I’d never met you either. You’ve made it clear that caring about what happens to you is a waste of my time.”
She starts toward her car, and abruptly, my need to push her away dissipates, replaced by a desperate need for her to stay. I wish I could wind back the last twenty seconds. Doesn’t seem like a huge ask after accidentally winding back thirty-eight years, but time continues to march stubbornly forward. “Rose, wait—”
“No, you wait,” she says, spinning so fast she sends me stumbling backward. “I don’t matter? If it weren’t for me, you’d probably have been in jail all week, or do you not recall how you nearly managed to get yourself arrested thirty seconds after arriving here? I’m the one who found you a place to stay. And I’m the one who’s been here with you every single day trying to save your grandparents. Maybe it can’t be done, but I’d rather try and fail than be like you.”
I blink, stunned. I’ve never seen this version of Rose before. I didn’t even know this version existed.
“You know what? Do what you want. I’m done with this.” Rose throws up her hands in frustration as she stomps back to her car.
“Rose, I’m sorry.” I trail behind her, giving her plenty of space in case she starts breathing fire again. Panic is beginning to bubble up inside me at the realization that I’m about to be abandoned to a life stuck in the past, all alone. And it’s all my fault. “I didn’t mean it,” I plead. “I was just really upset.”
Unbidden, Alyssa’s voice pipes up in my head. Sometimes even the most justifiable of excuses is still not an actual excuse.
Oh god. Alyssa. I’d thought the worst thing about all this was the possibility of never seeing her again, but it turns out I was wrong. The worst thing is going to be seeing her again as Stan.