Chapter 3
Maggie
“You can’t wear that.” Diane stood in the doorway of my bedroom, hands on her hips, surveying my outfit with the kind of horror usually reserved for natural disasters.
I looked down at myself at my black slacks, a nice blouse, sensible flats, and failed to see the problem.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Everything. What is up with you? You look like you’re going to a job interview.”
She pushed past me and started rifling through my closet, hangers screeching against the rod. “We’re going to a club. A nightclub. Where there will be music and dancing and men who are not your boss.”
“I like this blouse.”
“I’m sure your grandmother does too.” She emerged triumphant, holding a dress I’d forgotten I owned. Electric blue, fitted, and short enough I doubted I could bend over.
“This. With those silver earrings. And actual heels.”
I took the dress, knowing better than to argue. Diane had been dressing me for nights out since freshman year of college, when I’d shown up to a party in what she’d called “sad librarian chic” then she’d taken me under her wing as her own personal project.
She disappeared back to her own room.
“I need at least forty-five minutes for my hair, don’t rush me.”
While she worked on her hair, I changed clothes, catching my reflection in the mirror as I went.
Still impossibly young. I’d forgotten how amazing I’d felt and sometimes looked.
I reached for my perfume, a small bottle on the dresser that I’d walked past a hundred times without really seeing. Scoundrel. My signature scent back then, spicy and a little dangerous, nothing like the subtle florals I wore in 2014.
I sprayed it on my wrists, and memory hit me like a wave.
Jack burying his face in my neck, breathing me in. You always smell like trouble, he’d said once, laughing against my skin. Good trouble.
I set the bottle down harder than I meant to.
The diner played back in my head for the thousandth time.
Jack looking up, our eyes meeting, that flicker of something before his expression went carefully blank.
And what had I done? Given a little wave, a little wave, like we were casual acquaintances who’d bumped into each other at the post office, and practically fled the restaurant, leaving Diane sputtering over her pancakes about what the hell was that about.
Coward. I was such a coward.
Which was stupid, really, since he was the entire reason I was here.
The whole point of falling through time, of potentially giving up my promotion and my condo and Emma starting Harvard.
I’d wanted a second chance with him, to do things over, and at the first opportunity, I’d run away like a scared rabbit.
But seeing him with another woman had done something to me. Made the whole thing feel real in a way it hadn’t before.
He’d moved on. Found someone who didn’t push him away. Someone who laughed easily at things he said and touched his arm without overthinking it.
What if she was the woman he was meant to be with? What if, in the original timeline, they’d gotten married and had kids and built a life together?
If I intervened now, if I inserted myself back into Jack’s life, would I be saving something, or destroying it?
And what if he wasn’t even what I remembered? Almost three decades was a long time. Memory had a way of filing down the rough edges, smoothing over the fights and the frustrations until all that remained was a highlight reel of perfect moments.
What if the real Jack, 1987 Jack, was nothing like the man I’d built up in my head?
“Maggie!” Diane’s voice echoed down the hall. “Stop overthinking and start accessorizing! We’re leaving in twenty minutes!”
I admired how the dress fit. Found the silver earrings. Teased my hair into something approximating the style Diane had demonstrated earlier, though mine never achieved quite the same gravity-defying heights.
When I emerged, Diane wolf-whistled. “See? Was that so hard?”
“My feet are already hurting and we haven’t even left yet.”
“Beauty is pain. Let’s go find you a rebound.”
I didn’t want a rebound. I wanted answers. But I followed her out the door into the night.
The club was called Narcissus, which should have been a warning sign, but in 1987 self-awareness wasn’t really the vibe.
It occupied the basement of a converted warehouse in the Leather District, all exposed brick and industrial pipes and a dance floor that vibrated with bass so heavy I could feel it in my teeth.
And the music—
Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” gave way to Madonna’s “Open Your Heart” which gave way to something by New Order that made me want to move in ways I’d forgotten my body could move. The DJ was good, mixing tracks together seamlessly, building energy that crested and fell and crested again.
I’d always loved to dance. When had that changed? When had I become the woman who stood at the edge of parties, clutching a drink, watching other people have fun?
Somewhere in my thirties, probably. When moving your body started feeling like exercise instead of joy. When self-consciousness crept in and never quite left. When I’d decided, without really deciding, that some pleasures were for younger women and I should probably act my age.
But I wasn’t that woman anymore.
Diane dragged me onto the dance floor, and I let myself go. Let the music take over, let my body remember what it had known before I’d taught it to be still and small and appropriate. The bass pulsed through me like a second heartbeat.
This. This was what I’d missed. Not just the physical freedom, but the permission to feel purely happy, even if just for a song.
Robbie turned out to be exactly as cute as Diane had described.
Dark hair, great arms, a smile that suggested he found the world generally amusing.
He looked at Diane like she’d invented sunshine, which earned him significant points in my book.
His friends were nice enough. Kevin the banker, who was indeed boring but also genuinely kind, and Pete, who worked in advertising and kept making me laugh with increasingly absurd observations about the other club patrons.
“See that guy by the bar?” Pete leaned in, shouting over the music. “I give that hair another six months before it achieves sentience.”
I laughed, genuinely laughed, and for stretches of time I almost forgot why I was really here. Almost stopped scanning the crowd for a familiar tall frame, dark hair that needed a cut.
But Jack kept creeping back in. The way he’d looked at breakfast, relaxed in a way he’d never been with me. The careful blankness when our eyes met.
Why had we broken up, exactly?
I knew the broad strokes. I’d pushed him away, he’d gotten tired of being pushed, then I’d called, he asked me to dinner on Valentine’s Day, and I’d said I needed space and never came back.
But the details were fuzzy, smoothed by time and self-protective revisionism.
Had there been a specific fight? A final straw?
Or had we just eroded, slowly, until there was nothing left to hold?
The music shifted to something slower—Whitney Houston, “Saving All My Love for You”—and couples paired off around us. Diane and Robbie were already swaying together, her head on his shoulder, his hand splayed across her back.
“Want to dance?” Kevin appeared at my elbow, hopeful.
“Sure,” I said, because it was easier than explaining that I was preoccupied with a man I’d let go years ago. A man I’d traveled through time itself to find for a chance at a do-over.
Kevin was a good dancer, steady and respectful, and I tried to be present.
Tried to appreciate this moment for what it was, a night out, good music, and kind company.
But my mind kept drifting to a diner across town, to a woman with a camera bag, to the way Jack’s smile had changed his face when she’d laughed at his joke.
We stayed until two in the morning. I danced until my feet screamed and my voice went hoarse from shouting over the music.
Diane disappeared with Robbie around midnight—“Don’t wait up,” she’d whispered, grinning—and I’d shared a cab with Kevin and Pete, both gentlemen who made sure I got home safely without pressing for anything more.
In bed, I stared at the water-stained ceiling and wondered what Jack was doing right now. If he was alone. If he was thinking about seeing me at the diner.
If he was thinking about me at all.
I woke up at eight-thirty, sunlight streaming through the curtains I’d left open, and felt... fine.
Better than fine. I felt great.
No hangover. No dry mouth or pounding headache or lingering nausea, despite the multiple drinks I’d consumed. I bounced out of bed, actually bounced, like some kind of cartoon character, and padded to the kitchen with an energy that felt almost obscene.
Twenty-three. I’d forgotten what it was like to be twenty-three. To abuse your body with late nights and alcohol and still wake up ready to conquer the world. At fifty, a night like that would have cost me two or three days of recovery and a lot of Aleve.
I made coffee and stood at the window watching the street below wake up.
Sunday morning. Day two of thirteen.
I needed to do something. Sitting around the apartment waiting for time to pass felt like wasting the chance I’d been given. But what? I couldn’t exactly show up at Jack’s door and declare my intentions. That would be insane even by 1987 standards.
Groceries. I needed groceries. And more importantly, I needed to get out of my own head.
I left Diane a note on the kitchen table in case she came home while I was gone.
Gone to Andy’s, back soon.
I grabbed the keys to the Honda Civic we shared. The car was parked on the street three blocks away, because that was just how parking worked in Jamaica Plain.