Time of My Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

confusion and worry. “Okay, I have to get back to work, but get back into bed for a while . . . you look . . . not right.”
    He takes my arm and ushers me to the bedroom, pulling back the covers with a flourish and watching as I crawl inside. He leans down to kiss me. “Okay, see you tonight. I love you.”
    I gnaw again on the inside of my cheek. What was I supposed to say in response? I’d spent the past seven years squashing out any reminders of lingering emotional ties to Jackson, ensuring that his fingerprints weren’t still marked all over my body, that when I walked away, there were no regrets, no take-backs, and certainly no look-backs.
    And now here he was. With his love and his hope and, yes, his imperfections, that, in a few months if everything mirrored the events of my prior life, I’d soon trade in for the love and hope of another man who was equally imperfect, though in far different ways. So, rather than turn the moment into something that it was not, I simply respond as I would have seven years back, back when my younger self did love him, back before my older self stopped allowing myself to wonder if I still
did
love him, and before my masseuse liberated my chi, which seemed to have liberated something else entirely.
    And so, I say, “I love you, too,” as he makes his way out the door.
    It ain’t no lie.
* NSYNC echoes over and again in my mind.
Baby, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.

    A N HOUR LATER, I have handed the taxi driver a wad of bills—I always kept a stash in my sock drawer for emergencies and this, certainly, constitutes an emergency, though not the type that I ever saved for—and am holding my hand in front of my face to ward off the glare of the late-morning sun. I stare at my house. My future house. My current house. I don’t know.
    It looks different, indistinguishably different, but different all the same. Like one of those educational games that I’d do with Katie: All but one element of a picture remains the same, and the trick is pinpointing the teeny, tiny thing that’s been swapped out. Maybe a briefcase has been tilted or maybe the leaves on the trees are a different hue of green. Sometimes, she’d see the change before I did—my eighteen-month-old outsmarting me!—and we’d clap our hands and sing aloud and deem her just about the most brilliant creature known to humankind.
    I cock my head and search for what’s shifted. Maybe the paint on the shutters is fraying a bit more? Maybe the flower beds out front hold irises, not the daffodils I’d nurtured the past two years? I can’t tell. “Is this my house? Is it the house of my future?” I mutter to myself as I wind down the brick pathway and burrow into my purse for my keys. It seems futile, insane, to come back here, after what I’ve just encountered with Jack. But Katie! I can’t just leave Katie! What if she’s here? What if I’ve fallen down some mind-bending rabbit hole, and this is all an LSD trip gone bad? What if I didn’t try to come back for her?
    Katie!
My fingers shake as I push the key into the lock. I jigger it but the latch refuses to turn. I shake it and wrench it in a bit more, furiously pushing and noticeably starting to sweat, when I hear footsteps behind the door. I try to wiggle it out, losing all sense of composure, and realize that my keys are most definitely stuck in the front door to my potential home, when the giant black door swings open to an alarmed-looking late-thirtysomething who appears to be dressed for tennis. I recognize her almost immediately: Lydia Hewitt. And in five years, she and her husband, Donald, would sell us this house when Donald took a promotion in Nashville, and Lydia would blink back tears, urging us to enjoy the home, barely disguising her rancor at being uprooted for her husband’s mildly flourishing career in sales at a cell phone distributor.
    “Can I help you?” Lydia looks exactly how you’d expect someone to look when you open your door to find a