It was daytime. She breathed deeply, smelled mist and mulch, redwood and grass. This was not the House in which she had been trapped for the past few days. This was the House in which she’d been born, the House of her childhood. She was herself, she was an adult, but all traces of her contemporary life had been erased and she was thrust back completely into the past.

Her past.

The feelings of childhood were back as well. The fears she’d been experiencing recently had been merely echoes of the originals, but now she was once again in the thick of it, her feelings sharp with the edge of immediacy.

There was danger here.

She stared for a moment at the barn, then turned, walked out of the bedroom. She headed downstairs, uncertain of what to expect.

“Laurie?”

At the bottom of the stairway, she saw her mother beckoning from the sitting room. It was unsettling and disorienting, being treated like a child when she was an adult, but she forced herself to smile and walked into the room.

Her parents, all four of them, were seated on the couch. The sight nearly took her breath away. It wasn’t all that shocking, really. But the emotional impact was far greater than she could have ever imagined. She remained standing in the doorway, staring, trying to hold back the tears that were welling up in her eyes as she looked upon the living faces of dead loved ones she’d never expected to see again.

Sitting between their parents, she saw Josh, a cute alert-eyed little boy with the hair of a little girl, and she wanted to rush over and grab him, hug him, hold him, but like his mother and father, he stared at her with only mild open friendliness. None of them, obviously, had any idea who she was.

“Ken?” her biological mother said. “Lisa? This is our daughter Laurie.”

It broke her heart to see the impartial distance of the unacquainted on faces she loved and knew so well, so intimately.

She sat with her biological parents, pretending she was a child listening politely while the grown-ups talked. Though she was obviously an adult and taller than her mother, no one acted as though it were anything out of the ordinary. She found herself looking at Josh, studying him, but he offered no clue as to what was going on. Why was she here? Had she been sent back in time? Had the past been sent up to her? Were these people real? It was impossible to tell, and she decided to just let everything play out and see what happened.

Her parents talked about nothing: the weather, gardening, her adoptive parents’ trip up here. There was no subtext to the conversation. It was what it was: an ordinary, everyday discussion between casual acquaintances.