At the time I thought that was an odd thing to say. Why wouldn’t I be able to talk? And then I realized that she was treating me the way I used to treat her. She thought I couldn’t talk because Layton might be with me. But even though I was free to talk, there was too much to sort out for me to have that conversation now.

We’ll talk on Monday, I told her.

A long pause, and finally she wrote, OK, I get it.

The Toys “R” Us was gone. At first, I thought it had been torn down, but then I realized that it had never even been built. Instead there was a burned-out church in the middle of a field with tall weeds, and the faint memory of a gravel path. It was an old-fashioned clapboard church: narrow with a sharp wedge of a roof, mostly skeletal now, and the steeple, still intact, stood like a tombstone above the ruin. From the charred remains, you could tell it was once painted sky blue. Out front, a faded sign still held the title of its last sermon. A biblical quote.

“Live Thy Life with Unwavering Conviction.”

—Bartholomew 5:11

I’m no biblical scholar, but I know that the gospel of Bartholomew wasn’t in anyone’s Bible before last night.

Although the roof was barely a memory, the walls still stood. So did the front doors, clinging stubbornly to their rusty hinges. I pushed a door open to find that, sure enough, this was the Edwards’ new lair. The squeal of the door alerted them to my presence.

“Look who finally decided to show,” one of them said. The implied distaste in his voice make it clear that this was Edd.

“It hardly matters anymore,” said another—Eduardo, I think.

Ed just offered a weary sigh and a shake of his head, and Eddy ignored me entirely, tapping away single-mindedly on the QuIRT.

Ned—Edward number six, that is—approached me. “You do realize what you’ve done, don’t you?” And then he explained to me the consequences of my 0.73-second shift. How so many people were radically different versions of themselves, and how that had affected the world.

“The basic thrust of history is mostly the same as your previous world,” Ed explained, “but the particulars are different.”

After my injury last night, I had been too dazed to notice how many faces around me had changed. My mother was exactly the same. So were Hunter, Katie, and Layton. But as for everyone else, I had no idea.

“How about Leo?” I asked. “Is he changed?”

Ned glanced to Eddy, who worked it out on the QuIRT.

“You’ll find his cheekbones higher, and a half-inch increase in height. But otherwise he’s mostly the same.”