I tighten the hold around my neck. Heat rises to my face, and I’m gasping at the air, trying to fill my lungs. Is it possible to strangle yourself? I’m not sure, but damn it, I’m going to try. “Tell. Me.”

“But I’ve always been truthful with you!” she exclaims. “There’s nothing to explain.”

I squeeze harder still. I’m light-headed now, and black dots dance in my vision. I’m going to pass out any second, but I don’t let up. I’m this close to my answers. I just have to be strong enough, determined enough, to get them.

“Stop!” she screams. “Don’t be mad at me. I haven’t done anything to trick you. At least not yet.”

My grip loosens, and I choke at the air, refilling my lungs, reclaiming my senses.

There’s that phrase again. At least not yet. She’s used it twice now, but the words don’t make any sense. She has lied to me. She has tricked me. And yet she seems to believe what she’s saying.

Snippets of conversation come back to me, crashing into one another. The moments when she’s repeated herself. Her erratic behavior, the change in her personality with each visit.

The times when she called me Malice. Three separate occasions. The only conversations that were accompanied by physical pain.

In the first visit, she made me tell Bandit that I loved him. In the second, she tricked me into giving him the cupcake. And in the third, she named him as the target.

Bandit, Bandit, Bandit. The only times she ever mentioned him were the same visits she referred to me—to herself—as Malice.

That has to mean something.

I assumed that time travel was messing up her mental faculties. But what if I was wrong? What if there’s another explanation for her strange behavior, one that I’m a hair away from grasping?

You’re used to thinking about time as linear, she said earlier. All those concepts go out the window when it comes to traveling through the fourth dimension.

I glance at the jellyfish, at the arc it chooses to travel after it hits the wall. Like time travel, it can choose to go all the way back to the beginning of the path…or it can insert itself midway.

I’ve never lied to you. At least not yet…not yet…not yet…

The answer hits me like a bolt of lightning.

That’s it. That’s the huge something at the edge of my mind. But I have to be sure. I need one last confirmation.

“Why are you here?” I whisper. “You said in our very first conversation that you would go away, once and for all, if I did one thing for you. If I told Bandit that I loved him. And yet you continued to come back. Again and again. Why?”