More importantly, it didn’t say whether Roger was successful in saving his son.

Most importantly, it didn’t say how Roger managed to actually time-travel.

I kept reading the article, though. I stared at the black-and-white photograph of Roger. In it, he was wearing a pretty basic-looking T-shirt. I wasn’t sure what I expected a shirt from 2034 to look like, but this wasn’t it. I hoped it was a shirt the cops had given to him. That would answer my doubts, at least.

After I read that first article, I couldn’t help myself from reading the whole stack. I never ended up coming back down for dinner, but Grams didn’t bug me. She let me stay in my room for as long as I wanted, which was basically all night, except for the short break I took to grab a bowl of cereal. To Grams’s credit, she never asked me any questions, only gave me a knowing smile that made me think that she somehow knew what was inside the box all along.

“Did you tell Grams about this?”

Quinn’s eyes widen. “What?”

“About the box. About what you put inside of it.”

Every news article inside the box had a headline more improbable, but also more amazing than the one I read before it. There was the one about the scientist in Greenland who claimed that by time-traveling she was able to add ten years on to her life, the one about the married couple from Japan who supposedly saved their dog by going back in time to fix the hole in their fence through which their dog had originally escaped, and there was the one where a preeminent professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was philosophizing about how not only did he believe that time travel was possible, but that he wouldn’t be that surprised to hear that someone had already accomplished it.

Every single article was short, though. They were glimpses, not fully fleshed-out studies. I knew I was going to need to do more research, but the moment I had that thought, I also knew that Quinn’s idea had gotten inside of me in the way cold air slips in through a crack in a thin windowpane. I’d shivered and kept on reading.

“No.” Quinn shakes her head. “I haven’t told anyone. So that means you read the articles?”

“I don’t know if you can really call them articles,” I say, even though that’s exactly what I’ve been calling them. “They’re so short. They’re more like summaries.”

Quinn doesn’t argue with me. She stays quiet. She’s always been better at silence than me. I don’t like silence at all. People need to be constantly talking or I get nervous. Quinn, though, she can ride it out. I’ve always envied that.

“So we need to do more research,” I finally say, and I realize she’s used silence again to her advantage. She’s gotten me to show my hand. A tiny smile appears on her face.

“That is,” I clarify, “if we work on this together. But I still don’t know about it. It seems very theoretical.”