The Golden Spiral (35 page)

“Then, if you can’t fix it, how will I get my family back?”

Dante was quiet, his attention focused on the crisscrossed pattern on the blanket crumpled in my fist. His fingers traced the path of my veins along the back of my hand. When he looked up at me again, his eyes were as serious as I’d ever seen them.

“When I gave you the plans for the door, did you find the note I left for you on the last page?”

“Yes.” I remembered every word he’d written. “You asked me if I was willing to live without limits.”

“And are you?”

“Of course,” I answered, confused. “Isn’t that what you wanted? Isn’t that why you gave me the plans? So I could build the door?”

Dante tugged at my hand until he had pulled me close enough to kiss. But instead of touching my lips with his, he touched his finger to the locket around my neck. “I gave you the plans for the same reason I gave you the key inside this locket. So that when the time came, you would have everything you needed to make your choice.”

My heart pounded so hard it felt on the edge of breaking. “Last time, I had to choose between you and Zo and it almost killed me. What choice are you asking me to make this time?”

“Whether or not you really are willing to live without limits. Whether or not you’ll be brave enough to use the door once I fix it.”

Chapter

24

If you go through the door,” Dante said, “know that you’ll be bound to the bank, just as I was. As Leo is. It’s not an easy life. You’ll have to find your own balance. You’ll have to make sacrifices.”

My body trembled at the implications of Dante’s words. I’d been to the bank both in person and in my dreams and I’d hated everything about it. I’d seen what being exiled from time had done to Leo’s life. I thought about Lizzy and how she had lost her father to the river and didn’t even know it. If I did go through the door, I would have to leave behind everything, my entire life. And though I could return and visit my family and friends, it would only be for a short time.

Dante had said that no one had knowingly and willingly chosen that path. Would I?

“You think that if I go through the door, I’ll be able to restore my family,” I said as a half-statement, half-question.

He nodded. “You’ll be able to see the connections that I can’t because they are part of your family and thus part of your timeline. And once we know how the connections fit together, we can reverse what Zo did without fear of making it worse.”

My true family was fractured—my parents divorced, my sister nonexistent. Did I dare walk into the darkness behind the door if I knew that when I came back, they would be whole?

“What happens if I don’t go?” I asked, numbness prickling the pads of my fingers.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I do know that the barriers between the bank and the river
are
weakening. We’ve both felt it. Even V and Leo have noticed it. Maybe, between the four of us, we can keep them from breaking.” His eyes never wavered from mine. “I’m afraid that if the walls break, it may not be possible for you to use the door at all. Your family may be lost forever.”

I sat back against the couch and pulled the blanket up to my chin as though it could protect me from the horrible possibility Dante had laid in front of me.

When Dante had given me the plans and asked me to join him, I hadn’t thought much beyond the promise of being with him again. I had thought building the time machine would be an adventure and something I could do that would somehow help Dante protect the river from Zo. I had even imagined the moment when I would walk through the door and straight back into Dante’s arms. But I’d forgotten the harsh truth of the time machine—it wouldn’t take me anywhere I wanted to go, it would only take me to the bank.

The barren bank that could crush a soul and crack a mind.

I didn’t know why I hadn’t made that connection until now.

If I went through the door, I’d be stepping onto the bank, risking my life and my sanity. But if I didn’t go, then Zo would break down the barriers and erase not only my family but the whole world, washing it away so he could remake it according to his will.

I blinked as tears started trickling down my face, quickly turning from a few drops to an endless stream.

“I know it’s a hard choice,” Dante said, wiping his thumb across my cheek as fast as the tears fell. “I’m sorry to have to ask you to make it. I wouldn’t ask it of you at all if it weren’t so important.”

“I just want my family back.” I felt a brittleness settle into my body, my skin as taut and sharp as glass. “Why do I have to make the choice?”

“Because only you can close this loop.”

I huffed in frustration. “Leo said something about that too, but I didn’t understand his explanation. What does that even mean?”

Dante gathered his stillness around him as effortlessly as he gathered me into his arms. “Maybe the best way for me to explain it is to tell you a story. Close your eyes and pretend we’re under that tree on the hillside.”

I did as he asked, relaxing into his embrace and nestling closer to his side. I folded my arms against my chest as though I could keep my heart from breaking. “What’s the story about?”

“What all good stories are about: a boy and a girl and how they met.”

I sniffled a little and wiped away a stray tear. “If this is about how you and I met, then I know this story.”

“You know the story of how we met that day at school.” Dante smoothed his hand over my hair and pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “This is the story of the first time I
saw
you.”

I stilled as though I had turned to stone. “Isn’t that the same story?”

“No,” Dante said softly and tilted my face toward his. “It isn’t.”

I opened my eyes to see his gray eyes turn the silver-blue of the stars at dawn.

“This story begins in Italy, long ago. I was locked in a dungeon cell, fighting what I feared would be a losing battle for my sanity while I waited to learn my fate. And then, one day, I saw a girl standing in the doorway of the prison. She had the face of an angel.” He gently traced his finger across my forehead, around the edge of my eye, down the slope of my cheek, and along my jaw before coming to rest on my chin. His thumb traced my lower lip. “She had
this
face.”

I didn’t dare breathe. His touch left fire tingling inside me.

“I’d never seen her before that moment. I didn’t know her name or who she was or why she was there, but when her eyes met mine, I felt . . .” He closed his eyes, the memory moving across his face, smoothing away the lines of worry around his mouth and eyes. “It was like the roof had been ripped away and taken all the shadows with it. Like I’d been granted one last glimpse of the summer sun.”

I felt a tremor start deep inside my body, rippling outward. I had seen that same moment in the river: a girl standing in a doorway, looking into a dungeon. Was it possible that girl had been looking for Dante? Was it possible that girl was me?

Dante opened his eyes. “The guards pulled her away and she was gone, but it didn’t matter. I had caught a glimpse of heaven, and I held on to it all the way through the darkness, all the way through the door, and all the way to the bank. When Leo taught me about the river, it wasn’t long before I started seeing that angel’s face again in its liquid depths. This time, though, she wasn’t looking for me, I was looking for her. And I finally found her one snowy January day at her school auditorium.”

“You were covered with snowflakes that day,” I said, my voice low, my memories spiraling back to the past.

“And you were as beautiful as I remembered you.”

“But how could that girl you saw back then be me?”

“Because when faced with the choice you’re facing right now, you chose to go back.”

I blinked in surprise and then sat up, pushing away from Dante. “Wait a minute. So you’re saying I’ve already made this decision? What about all that business about how you don’t know what’s going to happen downstream? If you already know what I’m going to do, then why should I bother making any choices at all?” My tears evaporated in a heat of rage. “I guess my life is already planned out, huh?”

“No, Abby, it’s not like that. You still have your free will. Your choices still matter. In fact, yours might matter most of all.” He ran his hands through his hair, his mouth a tight line of frustration. “In one sense that moment has already happened—I remember seeing you in the doorway of that prison—but in another sense it
hasn’t
happened yet because you haven’t yet gone back to the past to stand in that doorway. And it
won’t
happen until you actually make your choice and do whatever it is you’re going to do.”

“So, if I decide
not
to go through the door, then you won’t have seen me in the doorway?”

“That’s right. But I will still be sent through the door, and I will still end up on the bank with Leo. It’s just that if I don’t see you in the doorway, then I won’t go to the school that day to meet you.”

My emotions ran as hot and wild as my words. “But if you’d never met me, then you’d never have taken me to the bank, and then Zo never would have known about the door and how he could go back. He wouldn’t have gained the power to change the river.” I barked a harsh laugh. “He wouldn’t have changed my family at all—he wouldn’t have had any reason to!” I pressed my fists against my eyes, squeezing until my knuckles ached. It was too much to process. There was too much to think about.

“I can’t do this, Dante. I’m sorry. I’m just so tired. I just want my old life back,” I muttered.

The room was silent. The stillness that had been centered around Dante shattered. I imagined it was the same sound as a heart breaking.

“If that’s really what you want,” Dante said softly, “I can arrange that. If that would make you happy.”

My hot blood froze to ice in an instant. My memory flashed back to Zo sitting on a park bench, an impossible question on his lips:
If you truly wish we’d never met, why haven’t you asked Dante to change things? He would do it; he’d do anything for you. Even if it meant endangering the river, or his own life.

Here was my chance to change things. And I wouldn’t even have to ask anyone to change anything for me. I could simply choose to go home, destroy the hinge buried in my sock drawer, and never look back. No door meant no Zo. Tomorrow I would wake up and I’d have my old life back. My parents. My sister, Hannah. Jason. The Valerie who lived with her parents and not in a mental hospital.

I would have everything.

Except Dante.

Zo’s voice reached out to me across my memory again:
You can honestly say that you’d be happier without Dante in your life?

I pulled my fists away from my eyes, blinking away the pressure spots. Zo hadn’t given me a chance to answer that question, but I realized that the answer I would have given then was the same answer I felt now.

Without Dante in my life, whatever happiness I felt would be incomplete.

My family and Dante. I wanted both. I needed both.

If there was only one way it was possible to have both, then there was only one choice I could make.

Dante sat with his hands resting limply in his lap. “I understand, Abby, and I’ll leave if you ask me to. If that is your choice, I’ll go. I’m sorry for the pain I have caused you. Believe me, that was never my intention.” He leaned his elbows on his knees and dropped his head in his hands, his dark hair falling over his face. “But there will always be a part of me that will miss you forever, even if we never meet.”

Tears returned to my eyes, but this time they weren’t from anger or fear. They were tears that came from understanding the truth about myself and from realizing that what I had was exactly what I had wanted all along.

“Dante?” I said, touching his shoulder, my heart fluttering in amazement at what I was about to do. “If I choose to go back, then everything happens just as it has happened, right? We meet, we fall in love. Everything. The good and the bad.”

He nodded, but didn’t look up.

“And if I go back, you think we can restore my family
and
stop Zo from breaking down the barriers between the river and the bank, right?”

He nodded again. “That’s what I was trying to explain. If you go back and stand on that doorstep so I can see you before I go through the door, then everything unfolds along this path we’ve already traveled. But that moment is also what will close the loop and protect not only this part of the river but the past as well. And once the loop is closed, the river will be locked in place and protected all the way back to da Vinci. No one will be able to change it again. Not even Zo.”

“That’s why you said that our best chance of stopping him would be to let him go,” I said. “Because if I let him go, then I would let you go as well, and I’d be more likely to build the door that would take me back to that crucial moment when you saw me on the doorstep of the prison.”

Dante lifted his head and looked at me, admiration flickering in the depths of his eyes. “Exactly. Abby, seeing you then was what saved me during that long journey through the time machine. Having you in my life now is what has saved me here.” He touched the locket at my neck before reaching for my hand. He kissed my fingers and then pressed my palm flat against his chest, covering my hand with his own. “My heart and my life have always been in your hands.”