“Yes, Cora London. You are going.” Grams stands up from her chair. “I insist on it. I’m sure Junior Quiz Bowl is counting on you to help out at their booth.”

Considering I’ve missed the last two practices, I don’t think they’re counting on anything from me. I sink lower into the wheelie chair. “I didn’t volunteer to staff it. And I’m not ready. I don’t even have a—”

She cuts me off and reaches behind her chair. “A costume? Lucky for you, I have that taken care of. I’ve spent the past few weeks making this for you.”

She holds out a black headband with cat ears and a knitted black sweater with a matching knitted skirt. It’s admittedly very cute and very much my style if I were going to go to the fall festival, which I most definitely am not.

I sigh. “That’s really nice of you of you but—”

She cuts me off again. “Corrie, I don’t ask you for a lot of things. But I’m asking you for this.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s an important moment. And I know this past year has been unbearably hard, and you’ve been robbed of so many things—” Grams’s voice breaks a little, and I feel my insides softening. Sometimes I get the mashed potato feeling around Grams, too. “And I’ll be damned if I let you be robbed of this moment.”

The curse word makes me stand at attention. Grams never swears.

Dad clears his throat. “I’m in agreement with her.”

I roll my eyes a little. “Of course you are.”

Dad smiles faintly. “It would mean a lot to both of us if you went.”

I grab the cat costume out of Grams’s hands. “Fine.”

Dad’s smile turns to teasing. “And it would also be nice if you took a shower?”

I make a face back at him as I head up the stairs. “Noted.”

And so that’s how I find myself a few hours later being driven by Dad to the fall festival in the cat costume that Grams made me when it’s one of the last places I want to be going. All I want is to be back at my computer, researching the connection between thunderstorms and time travel, obsessively refreshing the weather report. But because I haven’t yet been able to time-travel and make everything okay again, I’m still the only Hamed girl.

And because I’m the only one, I can’t make Grams and Dad sad. I can’t disappointment them. I just won’t.

Dad turns on the car’s blinking lights and idles in front of the school. “I know we forced you into this,” he says. “And as a general rule, I’m against doing that. But I think in this case, it was the right thing to do.”

I frown. “Why?”

“Because you need to live your life, Cora.” He looks back at me. “You can’t keep waiting for your sister to come back.”

That last sentence is like a punch in the gut.