I don’t mention that I never waited for word (or permission), but I am happy to discover that we are headed to the mall. Until it occurs to me the debit card in my wallet is as useless as my phone. She sees both the rise and fall in my expression. “I got you. You can’t go too wild; I’m a schoolteacher, after all. But I’ve got enough for some more clothes, stuff for your room to hold you over. If we’re lucky, you won’t be here long.”

In her car, a hilarious walnut-colored monstrosity with a too-long nose and the sassy name Vega, she explains that she’s been gathering all the time travel books she could find in the school library. After she drops me off to shop, she’s going to expand on this with a visit to the big library one town over. “Even the craziest fiction is based on the human experience,” she says. “Sometimes fantastical plot points are really just metaphors for emotional truth, and sometimes they’re based on wild, but incontrovertible fact. Where would the ideas come from otherwise? The human mind only knows itself.” (She’s such an English teacher.)

I’m not sure if I agree with her, but I listen. (One perk of this experience so far: Me listening before weighing in is like growth.)

“Before yesterday, I’d have reluctantly agreed that time travel falls into the metaphor camp. But here you are. Fantasy became fact. And why not? Why would this experience occur so often in literature if it had never happened? The truth that this is the truth was hiding in plain sight all along, just like I secretly hoped. It’s easier to pretend otherwise, of course, because it’s just so rare.”

“Like violet eyes.”

Ms. Silverthorn lets her gaze drift from the road to me. “You’ve met Chaz, I take it.”

Not ready to go down that road, I ask what she’s found in the books. I don’t add that I’ve read some of these myself; it was all entertainment at the time, not life or death, so I wasn’t exactly mining them for instruction. “Is there anything that can help us?”

“Working on that.” I don’t like her answer—in its brevity or its worried tone—but we’re at Finger Lakes Mall, and she’s handing me an envelope of cash. “Maybe buy a wallet first, so it doesn’t look like you’re a drug dealer.”

Whoa.