The words hit the room and just hung there a second, heavy as wet denim.
Mary Barton, who had been pretendin’ not to eavesdrop from the front desk, leaned in through my office door with her eyes wide behind them reading glasses. “Dallas Cooper, What on earth are you jabbin’ about?”
Lucas looked near grateful I’d said it first. Like maybe if I called it what it was, he wasn’t crazy.
Mari, on the other hand, looked at me the way a good deputy looks at a sheriff who has just announced he intends to pet a live rattlesnake.
“Sheriff,” she said carefully, “tell me you’re speakin’ dramatic and not literal.”
I looked down at the goggles in my hands. The black frame caught the late sun and threw back that same sick rainbow shimmer. Pretty in the way venomous things can be pretty.
“I’m serious as a heart attack.” I set them down gentle on the desk. “That thing ain’t playin’ back a video. It’s showin’ what already happened in the space you’re standin’ in. Exact as a scar.”
Lucas let out a breath through his nose. “I told ya.”
Mari took a step closer to the desk, eyes fixed on the device like she expected it to twitch. “Then how far back does it go?”
To this day, I am sorry she asked the question. But, that was the question, weren’t it. Maybe if she hadn’t asked it, things might not have ended up as they did.
My hands moved faster than my brain. I slid the goggles back on before either one of ’em could argue. The room dimmed under the smoked lenses. Blue lines woke up. Symbols glimmered at the edges of my sight like the thing was muttering to itself in a foreign language. I put my hand on the dial and turned it a little farther than before.
The office peeled backward again.
Mary straightened from the doorway and drifted back out front in reverse, fussin’ at papers she hadn’t sorted yet. Mari moved backward too, easing into the chair she’d just stood from. Lucas drew away from my desk with that black case tucked under his arm, then turned and backed through the doorway like the whole world had decided to walk wrong.
A little indicator appeared on the screen as I was dialing that gave the impression that you could push the dial in. It bounced on the right side of the screen. So, I pressed, lightly at first.
I kept turning. It went way faster now.
The light outside the blinds changed. Gold softened into a paler, flatter afternoon. Shadows pulled away from the corners. The coffee in my cup thickened with stillness, then steamed fresh again as the room rewound past the moment Mary had brought it in. Mari backed out of my office entirely. My own hand moved in reverse from the drawer, and the divorce papers disappeared beneath the citation book like they had never been touched.
My throat tightened.
That right there was me not ten minutes ago. Me with my grief laid open like a gut-shot deer.
I pulled the goggles off.
The office snapped back to present. Lucas stood where he’d been. Mari stood where she’d been. Mary vanished from the door so fast I knew she’d ducked her head back out when she saw me looking.
“Well?” Mari asked.
“It goes farther,” I said.
“How much farther?”
“Let’s find out.”
“Dallas—”
But I was already putting them back on.
This time I planted both palms on the desk to steady myself and turned the dial slow—one deliberate notch at a time. The machine gave no numbers that meant a hill of beans to me. Just tiny markings and that faint pulse near my temple. The office kept unwinding. Minute by minute, then hour by hour, though not in any way a man could track proper except by what changed.
Sunlight shifted. Then dropped lower. Then rose back higher as the day rolled itself open. Shadows moved across the courthouse lawn outside my window. The front office changed shape with use. Chairs emptied and filled in reverse. Reports un-wrote themselves. Coffee cups grew fuller. Dust in the sun did its lazy dance backward.
I caught glimpses of regular life in reverse—old man Tinsley backing out of the lobby with the drunk tank receipt he’d come in cussin’ about earlier. Mary un-answering the phone. A deputy carrying evidence boxes the wrong direction. All of it ordinary. All of it wrong.
Then I pressed in the dial harder. The quality of the light shifted more sudden. My office went from late afternoon to hard bright noon. Then to soft morning. Then further. It was disorienting in how real it was.
I stopped.
Pulled the goggles off.
The station around me was still exactly as it had been, but my hands had gone cold.
Lucas frowned. “What now?”
I looked at the device. “It ain’t just minutes.”
Mari folded her arms tighter. “Hours?”
I nodded once.
“Then quit crankin’ that thing like a slot machine,” she said. “We don’t know what it’s doin’ to you.”
I almost laughed, but there warn’t no humor in me. “Ain’t done a blessed thing yet but make me feel like the world’s drunk.”
Mary spoke up from the doorway despite herself. “That oughta concern everybody.”
I ignored her and moved toward the desk. I picked the goggles up again, studying the dial this time, the spacing of the marks. They were laid out too precisely to be random. A machine like this had limits. Boundaries. Rules some engineer had thought through somewhere far from Texas.
And every machine with rules can be tested.
Over the next stretch of time, I worked the thing the way I’d work any stubborn problem—careful, methodical, and with just enough mule-headedness to be dangerous. I used the office as my marker. Mary’s lunch bag on the corner of her desk. The stack of permit forms on the filing cabinet. The time of day outside the window. I’d put the goggles on, turn the dial, watch the office change, then pull them off and mark in my head where it had landed. That lunch bag came and disappeared over and over again as I turned the dial.
Lucas watched me like a man observing a surgeon remove his own appendix.
Mari paced. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Hold your britches.”
“Dallas—”
I kept at it.
By then I knew the harder I pressed the dial in, the more time would elapse backward from minutes, to hours, to days. I watched the office move through earlier mornings and the day before. Mary wore a different blouse. The courthouse flag outside snapped in a stronger wind. A rainspatter showed up on the window in one stretch, then vanished as I rolled past it.
The machine never stuttered. Never fuzzed. Never guessed.
It knew.
That was what set my teeth on edge. It didn’t reconstruct. It didn’t approximate. It knew what the room had been.
Finally, I pushed hard and gave the dial a longer, steadier turn and braced myself.
The office went peeling back through day after day like pages caught in a gale. Light changed. Weather changed. Mary’s desk clutter shifted shape. A little ceramic pumpkin appeared near the front and then later vanished. A stack of Christmas cards materialized and decorations splashed on the wall and back off again. Then slid away into fall decorations. The tree outside went from a full leaf Texas live oak to thinner foliage.
I could not have said exactly how many days were passing. But I knew I was moving in bigger gulps now.
Then the movement stopped.
Not because I stopped it.
The dial hit resistance.
Not a soft resistance neither. A hard one. Final. Mechanical. Like the machine had come to the end of the road and laid a steel gate across it.
I twisted once more just to be sure.
Nothing.
The office through the goggles held steady. I was staring at the station in an earlier season—same room, same bones, same place in the world—but the dial would not go another hair farther.
Then it started playing in real time forward and then I saw myself.
Not the me from ten minutes earlier with divorce papers in my desk and fresh hurt in my chest.
This was a different creature altogether.
I was slumped in that very chair like my strings had been cut. Hat off. Shirt half-wrinkled. Face gray and swollen. I had both elbows on the desk and my hands up over my temples like I was trying to hold myself together by force. Even through the machine I could see my shoulders jerking.
I was sobbing.
Not pretty crying neither. Not a lone tear slipping down the cheek of a tragic lawman in some fool movie. I mean the full-body kind. The kind that comes up from someplace so deep it sounds like an animal caught in a trap.
And in my fist—crumpled so tight it looked fit to tear—I was holding the paper wristband from the county hospital. Hannah Hawthorne and the date of the hospital visit when the doctors tried fierce to save her, but she had died.
The sight of her name in my own hand hit me like a tire iron to the teeth.
I knew that day.
Lord, I knew it exactly.
The day after Hannah died.
The day folks had stopped by with casseroles I never ate. The day the preacher called. The day men shook my hand too long and women touched my arm like I might break apart right there in front of them. The day I sat in that office because I could not stand the thought of going home to a house that still smelled like her shampoo in the shower and cinnamon in the pantry.
I watched that broken version of me bow forward over the desk and clutch that hospital wristband like it was the only solid thing left in the world. I was alone. I had waited to fall to pieces until after everyone left. No one knew this had happened but me.
I pulled the goggles off slow as a man disarming a bomb.
Lucas took one look at my face and said, “What?”
“It stops.”
Mari quit pacing. “Stops when?”
I looked at the calendar on the wall.
The anniversary was tomorrow.
The square that had been dogging me all afternoon sat there plain as judgment.
And all at once, the answer came together so hard it near knocked the breath out of me.
“One year,” I said.
Nobody spoke.
I moved so fast I kicked a trashcan across the floor. I crossed to the calendar and put a finger on tomorrow’s date. “That’s it. That’s as far as it goes. The machine goes back exactly one year and no farther.”
Lucas stared. “You know that for sure?”
“Sure enough.” I turned back toward him, pulse starting to hammer in my neck. “It hit a wall. Not a guess. Not static. A hard stop.”
Mari’s eyes narrowed. She was already a step ahead, which was the trouble with smart deputies. “Dallas.”
I barely heard her.
Because another thought had come on the heels of the first, and this one was meaner.
Hannah.
My mouth went dry clean through.
Hannah had moved out months before the wreck. She’d rented that little place a county over because she wanted room to breathe and because every road in this country had my fingerprints on it. I couldn’t see her anywhere. Not in this office. Not at my house. Not at the diner. Not at church, not at the gas station, not crossing Main in that old blue sedan with her sunglasses pushed up on her head.
Nowhere in this county.
I could search every inch of this county through that machine and never find her alive in any place she hadn’t been in the past year.
The only place I could still see her breathing…
The only place left inside that one-year window…
…was where she died.
Sparkwood and Route 21.
One year minus one day.
The room seemed to lean funny around me.
Mari said my name again, sharper now. “Dallas.”
I looked at her, but I reckon she saw the answer in my face before I ever opened my mouth. Her own expression changed with a speed that told me she understood exactly where my mind had gone.
“No,” she said.
Lucas looked between us. “What?”
Mari didn’t take her eyes off me. “Tell me you are not thinkin’ what I think you’re thinkin’.”
My legs wanted to fall out from underneath me. My mind swirled in every direction at once. Law. Duty. Honor. Responsibility. Safety. Love. Longing. Desire. Regret. My body moved at each turn of emotion like it couldn’t get it’s bearing. My hands went everywhere trying to find something to do. My mouth moved like it couldn’t decide what to say. I rubbed my eyes and pounded my desk.
Tomorrow.
One year.
Last chance.
Now, this is where that terrible, awful, good-for-nothin’ idea came slithering up full-formed and sharp into my mind.
It wasn’t just that I could see Hannah again.
But that I knew exactly where to go.
Maybe, just maybe, I could see my beautiful Hannah alive one last time.
Tune in next week for Chapter 3 – Part A. Take Advantage of this limited offer from Creation Press. The first 100 free subscribers will automatically be upgraded to a paid account for one year.