Talia
Here she was again, before she went for a run, before Erin hit her with her car.
But her brain was so scrambled from going back and forth she couldn’t get a grasp on the answer. With all the redos for Sam, she felt lost in time, although ironically, she hadn’t made any forward progress.
A fog of pain closed in on her mind.
She blinked. She’d rewound because…
Oh, right. She’d come back to sign up for the poker tournament.
And yet, with that clarified, Talia still hesitated.
On the morality spectrum, where did this fall between buying BiomeLabs stock before a market surge and sneaking winning lotto tickets into the past?
One had seemed acceptable to her (maybe not virtuous, but acceptable), while the other had felt obviously unethical, even though she couldn’t put a finger on exactly why they were different.
Talia’s breathing sped up.
Had her moral compass broken and been replaced by the watch?
Ideal Life Queen Elizabeth: It appears that you’re experiencing stress. Would you like suggestions to calm your mind? How about exercise?
“What? How did you get turned back on?” Oh, wait—Talia had rewound again past the moment she’d shut her Ideal Life app off. She dismissed it again now, and Queen Elizabeth flew away.
Before Talia could change her mind, she created an account on the Summer Million website and registered.
She should probably tell Sam she was going to be there.
No, then he might suspect she was rewinding, since she hadn’t shown any interest in playing poker herself during the intervening years between undergrad and now.
And Talia didn’t have any extra emotional bandwidth at the moment to deal with his concern about her overusing the watch. She had a company to save.
Besides, Sam’s phone will be off, she rationalized, so I couldn’t tell him even if I wanted to. By now, he’d already be in his pretournament meditative-immersion stage. Or, more likely, asleep since it was near midnight.
Speaking of which, she also needed to get some rest, to sleep off the migraine and time sickness.
Tomorrow, there would be a game to play.