The door creaked slowly shut behind her. In my time it was raining, a dismal, cold, January drizzle, turning the snow to slush, dirt to mud, and parking lots to shallow swimming pools. But for an instant I glimpsed big fat flakes of falling snow outside, and a black late-1950s car rolling by out on the street, and I had a wild moment of wondering if I could push by her and escape into the past.

But she was leaning over me, feverish and weak, her pupils very small and her lips dry and cracked. I came around the desk and touched her arm.

“Sit,” I said. “Please sit.”

She tottered to my chair and eased herself down.

“Should you be out of bed?” I asked.

She wiped one hand over her damp cheek, then hugged herself. “I’m fine.”

“The hell you are.”

“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.”