“All right, I’m not. I’m dying. You already know I’m dying. But I want my son’s books, and you can give them to me. You’re from the future. I want to read all my son’s stories.” Her eyes were bright and shiny and full of water, but she did not cry. The corner of her mouth twitched in something close to a smile. “He’s so funny. He was always so funny.” Then, after a pause, “He shouldn’t be over there. None of our boys should be. It’s a bad war. That book of his made me laugh, but it also made me sick.” Then she smiled again. “He got the clap, didn’t he? Is that why he’s not writing me?”

We had swapped positions. She sat behind my desk as if she were the librarian, and I stood on the other side as if I were the one looking for a story.

“I think it might be,” I said. “He wasn’t sure how to talk to you about what he was seeing there. He started writing the book to explain. In your time he’s probably just started.”

“Yes,” she said, in a strange, stiff way. “Almost certainly.”

I turned to the fiction shelf. We had his entire collection in stock. Because he was a local guy, there was always a steady demand. I ran my finger along the spines, then hesitated.

Without looking at her, I said, “What are you going to do with them when you’re done?” My scalp was crawling strangely, the way it had when I met that first Late Return, Fred Mueller. I was troubled by her odd tone of voice when she agreed that yes, her son had almost certainly started writing his first novel over there on the other side of the world.

She didn’t reply.

When I looked at her, her chest was rising and falling and her damp eyes were shining with triumph.

“What do you think I did with it?” she asked. “My boy needs a reason to go on.”

I went all ice water inside.

“You can’t send him his own books,” I told her. “The ones he hasn’t written yet.”

“Maybe if I don’t,” she said, “he won’t write them. Have you ever thought that?”

“No. No. If he just copies the books I send back in time with you, then who wrote them in the first place?”

“My son. He wrote them before, and he’ll write them again. So I can read them and then pass them on to him.”

I’d had three glasses of bourbon that night with Terry Gallagher, Loren Hayes, and Ralph Tanner, but I felt more woozy standing there cold sober in the library car with the dead woman.

“I don’t think that’s how time is supposed to work,” I said.

She said, “It works however you say it works. His books exist. They exist now, whether I get to read them or I don’t. So that’s all you have to decide, mister. Do I get to have this last good thing in my life or not? Do I get to have another marvelous thing, or are you going to—”