“You are thinking of that room,” he says. “The one with the baseball poster.”

Baseball poster. That is what Bronwyn called it when we told them about her room. The poster of a famous player in an American sport. There are so many layers there to comprehend, and I am still not quite certain I do, but I want to. I want to know it all, and I cannot help but feel all the answers—twenty lifetimes of answers—wait beyond the stitch.

“I have been thinking about that room,” he says. “About what we felt at the window.”

“As if someone needed us. As if we were there because we were supposed to do something.”

His arms tighten around me. “You have been thinking the same.”

I nod. “Perhaps it was simply a mishap. A glitch, as Bronwyn called it. Yet I cannot help but feel . . .”

“The others travel between the same two distinct times. You are different. You came back to my time for me. To save my life.”

“To save you? Or to meet you? I feel as if the ‘saving’ was incidental, and my true purpose was to assist you in that which you could not accomplish on your own, lacking the Sight. I was there to communicate with Andrés so that you might stop his killers.”

“Perhaps, yet the core of my theory holds. I believe there is a reason we stopped in that other world, if only briefly. Something this ‘stitch’ wanted us to see. Someone it wanted us to help.” He kisses the back of my neck. “Does that sound foolish?”

“Not to me.” I take a deep breath. “What if it was not simply that one thing? What if there is more? An adventure each time we step through? Lifetimes of adventure and—” I stop short. “Now I am the one who sounds foolish.”

“Not to me.” He kisses my neck again. “Would you like to find out, crécerelle? To step through and see what awaits?”

“Yes.”

“Then talk to your sister in the morning.”

It’s morning, and I’m in the office with Portia. My sister stands at the window, having circumvented the stitch with great care. I did not fail to notice how wide a berth she gave it. As she stands at the window, deep in her thoughts, I observe her with a pang of some unnameable sorrow.

When we were growing up, Portia was considered the prettiest of the Hastings sisters. A perfect diamond between two pearls, someone once said, and the phrase has stuck with me ever since. Rosalind’s delicate beauty made men stumble over themselves to protect her, only to learn she did not need their protection, thank you very much. To others, Rosalind was a bit too waifish, too delicate, perhaps a sign of ill health. And then there was me, brimming with health and vitality to an unseemly degree.

Portia falls in the middle, taller than either of us, with a figure between ours, honey-blond hair and piercing blue eyes. Today, that beautiful hair hangs in perfect waves, and she wears the most delightfully ornate confection of a dress, with enough lace to decorate three coverlets. This is the real Portia, relaxed and at ease in the privacy of her family. In public, she is altogether different, hair pulled severely back, clothing as dull and plain as a Quaker’s, spectacles perched on her nose—spectacles of plain glass. That is my glorious Portia with her light doused under the heavy basket of constraint because it is the only way she can enjoy even the slightest grudging respect as a “medical woman.”