CHAPTER 8 #2
Could this be the Collector’s work? He used different tools. But the blueprint was the same. Manipulation.
She went to the kitchen.
She needed to see Jenna. Needed to confirm—thirteen, present, the right age, the right time, here.
Jenna sat at the counter. Cereal bowl half-empty. Phone propped against the fruit bowl, playing a video with the sound low. Sawyer watched from the corner chair, his tail still, his green eyes tracking Lainie as she entered the room.
Lainie stood in the doorway. Watched her daughter for ten seconds. Fifteen. The same way she'd watched her kids from the hallway on the night of the grand opening—the way you watch something you are about to fight to protect.
She sat down across from Jenna.
"Hey. What did you think of the pizza at the grand opening?"
Jenna looked up from her phone. Her brows pinched. "The margherita was good. The pepperoni was too greasy." She picked up her spoon. "Why?"
The right answer. The right details. Lainie breathed. The watch cooled one degree against her chest.
"Just thinking about the menu for the next event."
Jenna shrugged and went back to her phone. Normal. Present. Thirteen.
Then the light changed.
Not outside—the sun stayed where it was, midmorning February, the angle through the kitchen windows the same as it had been for the last hour.
Inside the kitchen, the quality of the light shifted.
The shadow from the fruit bowl moved three inches to the left.
The angle on the counter was wrong for ten a.m.—it was the light from earlier in the morning, or later in the afternoon, or neither.
The light of a room seemed to be running at the wrong speed.
Jenna's phone disappeared from her hand. She held a juice box. Purple. Grape. Her fingers wrapped around it with both hands, the way small children hold things—all grip, no finesse.
Her feet didn't reach the floor.
Her hair was shorter. Her face was rounder. The pajama pants were gone. She wore a pink T-shirt with a cartoon dinosaur on the front, the neck stretched out, the kind of shirt that gets washed a hundred times and goes soft as tissue.
She was five years old.
She sat at the counter, swinging her legs, drinking from the juice box with a concentration that belonged to a child who hadn't yet learned to do two things at once. The straw made a squeaking sound as she worked it between her teeth.
Lainie couldn't breathe. The timepiece burned—not beating, not warming, burning, the metal searing through her shirt into the skin above her heart. The watch screamed against her. Wrong. This is wrong. This is a violation.
She reached across the counter. Her hand touched Jenna's arm. The skin was flushed pink, alive. Small. Real. The arm of a five-year-old girl, the fine hairs on her forearm catching the wrong-angled light. Her daughter. Here. Five.
"Mommy?"
Jenna looked up. Round brown eyes. The face Lainie had photographed a thousand times—the face from the Christmas photos at Lainie's parents' house, the face from the Halloween when she was a ladybug, the face from the morning she'd lost her first tooth and come running into the bedroom with blood on her smile.
"Can I get more juice?"
Lainie's vision blurred. Her throat closed. She gripped the edge of the counter with her free hand. The metal against her chest flared so hot she jerked her palm away—the skin underneath throbbed.
"Jenna." Her voice came out raw and harsh. "What year is it?"
The five-year-old tilted her head. The juice box crinkled in her grip. "What?"
"What year is it, baby?"
Jenna giggled. The giggle of a kindergartener who doesn't understand the question but finds the asking funny. "It's Sunday."
The answer a five-year-old would give. It wasn’t a date, or year, but a day of the week, because that was how five-year-olds tracked time—by whether it was a school day or not.
The light shifted back. The shadows corrected.
The juice box was gone. Jenna's phone was in her hand, the video still playing, the cereal bowl half-empty in front of her.
Her feet touched the floor. Her hair was long again.
Her face was the face of a thirteen-year-old who needed to brush her teeth and was putting it off.
She looked up at Lainie.
"Mom? What's wrong? You look weird."
Thirteen. Phone. Cereal. The right age. The right time. The timepiece cooled against Lainie's chest—not cool, not cold, but the searing receding, the heat dropping back to warm. The protest fading.
Jenna didn't experience it. To her, nothing happened. She was never five. She was never holding a juice box.
Damn it. The Collector was toying with her. He showed it only to Lainie.
He wasn’t after the vineyard or the wards or even the relic itself, she realized—he was after her, with a precision that made her skin crawl. He could have caused chaos in the house, could have dropped the whole family into temporal disarray, but, instead, he chose to make her doubt herself.
He picked at her memories, at the little seams of her life, not even with the brute force of some supernatural battering ram, but with the cold, surgical exactness of someone who knew her too well.
He made her watch her child disappear and reappear in versions that only she could see, made her question whether the moment of joy in a juice box could ever have been real, or if she’d simply conjured it as a self-indulgent fantasy.
He rewrote the email she’d poured her heart into and then gaslit her about its existence, as if her own words might slip away from her and she’d have no evidence they ever existed at all.
This wasn't just time magic—it was psychological warfare.
For a moment, Lainie tasted bile at the back of her throat. Her vision tunneled, and her hands shook so visibly she tucked them beneath the table, not wanting Jenna to see.
It was exactly what John would have done. Not break you with violence, but with the persistent, low-grade erosion of your own certainty. The Collector’s method was just more …elegant. More inescapable.
Lainie forced herself to take three deep breaths, to focus on the present: the shine of the countertop, the way Jenna’s dark hair fell over her shoulder, the sound of cereal hitting enamel.
She wanted to reach out and touch her daughter's arm again, to confirm that this was, in fact, now, and that Jenna was thirteen, and that she was safe. But she couldn’t risk breaking the illusion—or whatever passed for reality in this moment.
She realized suddenly that the Collector was waiting for her to react. That every time she gave in to confusion or fear, it would become another lever he could pull. He watched, unseen, from whatever vantage point he haunted, and he was keeping a tally.
She needed to get out. She needed a minute to herself, to get her bearings, to decide what to do about this. But she couldn't let Jenna see her sweat, couldn't let the Collector know he’d scored a point.
"Nothing." Lainie heard her own voice from a distance. "Just remembered something I need to do."
She stood up. Her legs held. She walked out of the kitchen, down the hall, and stopped at the wall by the bathroom door.
She leaned her back against the plaster. Her hands shook. Her chest ached where the relic had burned—a raw, hot stripe across her sternum. She pressed both palms flat against the wall and breathed.
One. Two. Three.
This was what he did. Not threats. Not a man in a dry coat walking through a crowd.
He used magic tricks. He bent the world around her until she couldn't tell which version was real and which one he'd put there.
John used words. You're crazy. That didn't happen.
You're imagining things. The Collector used dark magic.
"Lainie."
Kalen. In the hallway. He'd come from the front of the house—she hadn't heard him, which meant she'd been standing here longer than she'd thought.
His golden eyes moved over her face. He didn't ask if she was okay.
He could read the answer in the way her hands pressed flat against the wall and her chest rose and fell too fast.
"What happened?"
She told him. The cereal box resetting. The email erasing.
Jenna—five years old, juice box, pink dinosaur shirt, Mommy?
Her voice broke on Mommy. She told him about the watch burning, about Frost's report, about the temporal field running at the wrong speed.
She watched his golden eyes go flat as she talked—the heat draining out of them, replaced by the register she'd come to recognize: tactical, processing, the dragon calculating the threat.
"Frost told me the temporal field around me is inconsistent."
His jaw tightened. A muscle moved in his neck. "He told me. We're working on it."
"Working on it how?" Her voice was louder than she intended. "He's inside my head, Kalen. He's making me see things that aren't real."
Kalen took her hands off the wall. Held them. His thumbs pressed against the insides of her wrists, against the pulse points, grounding her the way a person grounds someone whose body is running ahead of their brain.
"They're real." His voice was low. "The distortions are real. Frost confirmed it. You're not imagining this. He is manipulating time around you. That's different from imagining it."
Five words. You're not imagining this.
You're imagining things. You're crazy. That didn't happen.
Those were the words she'd carried in the back of her skull since the trailer, since the van, since the first night she slept in a hotel with her children and stared at the ceiling and wondered if he was right, if she was the problem, if what she remembered was what actually occurred.
Kalen was telling her the opposite. This is real. Someone is doing this to you. You are not the source. You are the target.
The timepiece heated between their joined hands. The relic responded to truth, and what Kalen had just said was true. She was not imagining this. She was under attack. There was a difference. She could fight an attack. Couldn’t she? She could never fight crazy.
She gripped his hands. Her knuckles went white against his skin.
"Frost is mapping the temporal pockets. Bruno and Ash are tracking the source and the perimeter.
Charlie's wards are holding against direct assault, but the time manipulation is coming through on a frequency the berserker runes don't cover.
" His golden eyes held hers. "We're adapting. We're not standing still."
She nodded. She straightened against the wall. Her hand went to her face—her cheeks were wet. She hadn't known she was crying.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Dropped Kalen's grip. Stood on her own.
"Okay."
"Okay."
She went back to the kitchen.
Jenna sat at the counter. Thirteen. Cereal bowl near-empty.
Phone propped against the fruit bowl. Sawyer watched from the corner chair.
His green eyes tracked Lainie as she came through the doorway.
He didn't speak. Didn't twitch. His tail lay flat.
The cat's job was the kids, and Sawyer's eyes said: I'm here. She didn't leave my sight.
Lainie sat down across from her daughter. She found herself counting Jenna's fingers on the cereal spoon. Five. The right number. The right size.
Jenna scraped the last of the cereal from the bowl. She stood up, carried it to the sink, ran water into it. Normal morning. Normal routine. She turned from the sink and headed for the doorway.
As she passed, Lainie reached out and caught her arm. The same arm. The one she'd touched ten minutes ago—or eight years ago, or in a version of the kitchen that existed only inside the Collector's manipulation. The skin was warm. The arm was thirteen-year-old-sized. Solid. Real. Here.
Jenna looked down at her mother's hand, then up at her face.
"You okay, Mom?"
Lainie let go.
"Yeah. Just—I love you."
Jenna rolled her eyes the way only a thirteen-year-old can—the full rotation, chin tucked, mouth pulling to one side, the gesture that contains both dismissal and affection in equal measure.
"Love you too, weirdo."
She went upstairs.
The watch ticked once against Lainie's chest. Steady. The same beat that closed every chapter of this new life—the relic's single, patient pulse. But this time the beat carried a different weight. The watch was still with her. Reality was still with her.
She just couldn't be sure for how long.