“I’m not here for any of that. I’m here to learn to ride, you know, properly. It’s all been arranged.”

Ryan raised his eyebrows. “It has?”

She nodded.

“Are you sure?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“It’s not that . . .”

“What is it?”

“Well,” he started to say, speaking with an air of importance, “if you’d made a booking, I’d know about it, and I definitely don’t recall there being one for you.”

“Well,” she said, parroting him, “maybe you should take another look?”

After a lighthearted standoff, Ryan cleared his throat with an incredulous “ahem” and led his precocious visitor over to the barn. While she went up and down the stalls saying hi to all the horses, he disappeared inside the tack room and flipped back through his journal. He stopped at today’s page, drew his eyes across the booking column, checked the entries, then froze. Impossible, he thought. Right there in front of him, in blue ink, and in his own handwriting no less, was the young girl’s name booked for a riding lesson at 11:00 a.m. It was an entry he had absolutely no recollection of making.

“Told you!” Chloe yelled, apparently supremely confident in what he would find. “Guess this means you have to teach me, right?”

Ryan tucked the journal under his arm and stared at her somewhat dumbfoundedly. “Chloe, when was this booking made?”

“You’d have to ask Mom.”

“Did she phone it in? Maybe she spoke to my father. Do you remember?”

Chloe thought about that for a while, even though she projected a look suggesting she wasn’t really thinking about it at all.

“I’m not sure,” she finally said. “But that doesn’t matter because my name is in your little book, so that means you can teach me, right?”

“Not so fast. I really do need to talk to her first.”

“About what?”

“Well, for one, why she left you here on your own. And another, aren’t you a little early?”

“Am I?”

“Yes, you are,” Ryan said, except when he looked down to check the time, he realized his watch was broken. But that wasn’t the strangest part—the strangest part was that his watch had seemed to have stopped ticking at the same time as the clock in his attic. What a crazy coincidence, he thought, that both his wristwatch and bedside clock should fail within hours of each other, and both precisely at the exact same time: 10:57.

“Come on, let’s start,” Chloe said. “I want to choose my horse.”

Ryan found it hard not to get swept up in her enthusiasm, despite the fact that he was still trying to make sense of this bizarre sequence of events.