“Not the disappearing part? Because that’s the part I’m curious about. Is the future really that advanced that you can just—” He snaps his fingers, demonstrating. He waits for an explanation, one I can’t give him.

Michael smiles another lopsided grin that makes my heart skip a beat before he nods his head toward the wall. We both walk over to it as he points to a calendar. It’s a Lord of the Rings calendar. For the month of June, it has an illustration of Pippin and Merry riding the back of the Ents.

“You disappeared here,” he says, tapping the date—the fourteenth. That was the day I got home from the hospital visit. He then slides his finger across the calendar, stopping on the seventeenth. “And here’s today.”

“Three days,” I mutter.

“Three days,” he repeats.

Which doesn’t fully make sense, since I know I was there…here…whatever…last night.

I feel my mind doing what it does when I’m going down a rabbit hole. It’s like the walls of reality close in around me, and nothing else matters but the narrow truth in front of me. My tunnel vision, Mom always says, is what’s going to make me a good doctor, because it allows me to focus on one thing and get it done. I’m not sure I agree. But right now, my mind is focused on so many things: time travel, the ramifications of it, what will happen when I get back, if I get back…

But the thing that sticks out the most at this moment, like a sore thumb or an iceberg painted neon, is Michael and how calm he is.

“You’re not afraid.” I dumbly state this, rather than ask him the question.

Michael tips his head back, and the large ice cubes in his glass clink together and brush against his nose as he tries to get the last drop from the bottom of his drink.

“Should I be? Do I have a reason to be afraid of you, Andre?”

“Most people would be afraid of random men appearing in their house.”

“You’re not the first, and I doubt you’ll be the last,” he teases, putting his bowl in the sink. “And besides, you seem scared enough for the two of us. You’re better dressed today, though.”

I look down quickly to examine myself.

“Something about it fits you.” Michael gives me another look up and down before walking to the couch and jumping over the back side of it. He heads upstairs.

Without hesitation, I follow.

When we enter a room, I realize that it’s his room—and that in the 2021 floor plan, it’s the upstairs living room. Mom and Dad blew the walls out in order to make the master bedroom bigger.