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looked almost fa miliar, but the space inside appeared small, and she already felt closed in by strangeness. She could feel the humid air pressing against her, squeezing the breath from her lungs. “I’d rather wait outside.”
    He looked exasperated. “Will you stay right here? Not go anywhere?”
    “ Where would I go? Where would I dare go in this strange place?”
    Though he scowled disbelievingly, he turned and strode toward Rachel ’s house. He was big, his steps determined and heavy. In that respect he reminded her of Blake.
    No, she corrected herself. He was big like Blake, yet it wasn ’t Blake he reminded her of. But it was someone. In spite of his obvious hostility, in spite of the fact that he knew her but didn’t seem to be a close friend, in spite of the fact that she’d never seen him before this morning, she knew him. She was somehow tied to him. He scared her, but somewhere outside that feeling, he evoked memories of happiness and laughter.
    The front door closed behind him, cutting off the flow of those evanescent memories.
    She took an automatic step forward, started to follow him, to go inside the house and find Rachel, see her, talk to her, tell her about this insanity. But even before logic had a chance to halt her, the changes in the once-immaculate house pulled her up short. The porch had loose boards, a couple of rotten ones. Roots from the oak tree in the front yard pushed their way through cracks in the sidewalk. That oak tree should be only a sapling, planted by Rachel’s father to replace the one struck by lightning. But it was massive, a hundred years old.
    Elizabeth— or was she Analise? —turned slowly, fearfully, to look back at her own house, the house she’d just walked out of. In her mind’s eye, she saw it light blue with trim of darker blue and brick red. But even as she turned, she knew it wouldn’t be so.
    And she was right. It was gray now with white trim.
    The colors she’d always wanted it to be.
    “ Analise?”
    Dylan had returned. In hopeless resignation, she faced him, the only person she knew, the only person who could possibly help her, the person who had frightened her with his dark, distrustful gaze then drew her to him in a comforting way she didn’t understand.
    “ It’s true, then,” she said, her voice coming to her own ears as alien and disconnected. “It’s the future, and I’m not me…I’m her…I’m in somebody else’s body.”
    He gripped her shoulders, his touch amazingly gentle for someone so big.
    No, he didn’t remind her of Blake. Blake wasn’t gentle. But this man’s touch was familiar.
    “ You’re in your own body and your own time. You were in this body yesterday and the day before—two months before that I personally know of.” He spoke sternly, almost harshly, his words a contradiction to his touch. He opened his mouth as if to say more, but shook his head and turned away to open the car door again.
    This time she slid inside.
    As they drove at a dizzying rate of speed along smooth ribbons of road, she clutched the dash so tightly her knuckles turned white. At first she worried that they would run over a carriage or a traveler on horseback or afoot, but they only encountered more of the strange automobiles, all speeding along as fast or faster than they were.
    When she finally accepted the fact that they weren ’t going to crash into something, the ride became quite fascinating and astonishingly normal, as though she’d experienced it all before. Releasing her grip on the dash, she leaned back and stared out the window at the scenery flashing by.
    Trees and grassy fields she ’d passed while riding in a wagon with Papa had been replaced by hundreds of houses—maybe thousands. Too many to count. She gaped in awe at images she’d never seen, never even dreamed of. Yet those images, after her first shock wore off, began to look right in an inexplicable way. Each new spectacle, startling at first glimpse, seemed to slip into