Intersect: The Parallel Duet, Book 2 Read online

  Intersect

  The Parallel Duet, Book 2

  Elizabeth O’Roark

  Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth O'Roark

  Editor: Kathy Bosman

  Cover Design: Lori Jackson

  Photography: Wander Aguilar

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Waking Olivia

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  QUINN

  The woods behind Nick and Ryan’s house are finally free of snow. There are buds on the trees, tiny green shoots poking out of the dirt.

  “I can’t believe your parents let you do that,” I say, watching Nick hammer a nail into the wood. Our treehouse steps took a beating over the winter, but my mother would never allow me to use a hammer like he is.

  “My dad had a treehouse when he was a kid,” he replies. “And he built the whole thing himself.”

  “Does he still go in it?” I ask.

  “Adults don’t like treehouses.”

  “I will,” I insist. “I’m going to keep coming up here, no matter how old I am.”

  He thinks for a moment and then shrugs, as if he’s announcing a decision he was already pretty certain of. “I think I’ll marry you when I grow up,” he says.

  I bite my lip to hide the sudden burst of delight in my chest. “Okay,” I tell him. “Sure.”

  I go home to my mother and report what Nick has said as I’m falling asleep. “Maybe I’ll go to the future and see if it happens,” she says. She’s teasing me. The room is so dark I can’t see her face, but I hear the smile in her voice.

  “You’re not supposed to go to the future,” I remind her. The stories she tells me each night about time-traveling are always about the past, because she says jumping to the future is dangerous, and you may learn things you wish you didn’t know. She promises when I’m old enough she’ll take me with her, but until then, I can only live through her adventures. “Tell me about visiting the soldier. That’s my favorite.”

  “That’s my favorite too,” she says, her voice a little sad. “But you’ll have stories of your own someday. Better ones.”

  My fears creep in. She’s so certain I can do what she does, but if she won’t jump to the future, how does she know for sure? “What if I can’t jump like you?”

  Her laughter fills the quiet room. “Oh, sweet girl. Your abilities will make mine look childlike by contrast.”

  “But when?” I plead.

  She pulls the covers up to my chin and plants a kiss on my forehead. “You’ll jump,” she whispers, “on the day when you need it most.”

  My eyes open. I see moonlight washing over new Ikea furniture, a Monet poster in a plastic frame…my mother’s guest room, no more real to me than the room in that dream. If I close my eyes it’s almost as if I’m still there: the smell of my sheets and my mother’s perfume, the sound of tree limbs sweeping the roof overhead, the soft brush of a cat walking past the bed—they all still linger. Your abilities will make mine look childlike, she’d said.

  Yet it had to be a dream. The house was unfamiliar. We never owned a cat. And most of all, my mother can’t time travel. Even if she could time travel, she would not. She’d be terrified of the ability, the way she’s terrified of pretty much everything that is outside the realm of the normal. I’m willing to suspend disbelief about a lot of things, but it’s a struggle to believe the woman in the darkness was my mother.

  * * *

  Tapping.

  My mother’s voice outside the door wakes me. “Quinn?” she asks tentatively. “It’s 10:00 a.m.” I hear the worry that underlies her words. Quinn never sleeps this late, she is thinking. The brain tumor, unfortunately, has become the filter through which every unusual behavior must be viewed.

  If she could see me at this moment she’d know that I do not look like a dying girl. In the mirror I see eyes that glow and a warmth to my skin that’s long been absent. Nick is undoubtedly responsible for both.

  And he is mine now. He’s mine again, corrects some other, wiser voice in my head. I replay it all like a favorite movie montage—ending my engagement at the airport, his trip here last night. In twenty-four hours I changed my life, entirely for the better. Maybe I am dying, but if that’s true, why does it feel like my life has just begun?

  * * *

  I walk into the kitchen where my mother sits, clutching a cup of coffee between both hands. She offers me a weak smile, but the skin beneath her eyes is dark, smudged with the hours of sleep she didn’t get last night.

  “I didn’t know you’d turned into such a late sleeper,” she says, rising from the table.

  “It was a pretty…difficult weekend.” My mother knows about the difficult part already. The magnificent part—the hours I spent with Nick at the lake on Saturday, our time together last night—will have to wait. If she learns I’ve already moved on from the man she considers a son, calling off my wedding will get a lot more divisive than it already is.

  She gets out a pan. “I can make pancakes?” she offers. “Or French toast?”

  I could be sixty and my mother would still want to take care of me. That fact goes a long way toward easing my irritation about yesterday’s argument. “I’m fine,” I tell her. “I’ll get something later.”

  “It’s already 10,” she frets. “Any later and you’ll have skipped breakfast.”

  I laugh. “I skip breakfast almost daily, Mom. It’s fine.”

  She frowns but puts the pan away, going to the counter instead and returning with a stack of mail. “We’ll need to contact everyone and tell them the wedding is off,” she says. “And then return the gifts that arrived here. If you’re sure you want to do this.”

  I meet her eye. My conversation with Nick last night eradicated any lingering concern I felt about calling things off. “I’m sure.”

  She glances at me with something that looks an awful lot like suspicion. “You seem pretty lighthearted for someone who just called off her wedding,” she says.

  Guilt makes my pulse go from a slow march to a jog. I hate lying, and it’s impossible for me to pretend I’m anything but thrilled right now. Not when Nick waits back in D.C. Especially not when every time I close my
eyes I’m seeing him shirtless, muscles straining as he pulls the trailer out of the water. Or remembering the way he kissed…and if his abilities there are any indication, he’s going to be very good at everything.

  * * *

  I spend the morning sending emails, calling all the vendors to cancel, and my mother helps where she can. As I’m shuffling through the RSVPs, looking at names of distant relatives I barely know, I think once again of the Rule of Threes. Even if there can’t be more than three time travelers in one family, I still don’t see what that could have to do with us. My uncle is gay, so I seriously doubt he’s accidentally sired a time-traveling daughter. That only leaves my dad’s sister, who ran off to Paris after high school and was never heard from again. The way she left the farm behind always made her a bit of a hero in my eyes, growing up.

  “Did Dad ever look for Aunt Sarah after she left?” I ask.

  “I’m not sure,” she says briskly, staring at her computer screen. “I know they spoke, but he never wanted to talk to me about it.”

  My eyes lift from the RSVPs. My father wasn’t an evasive person by nature. Why was he where his sister was concerned? “Did she stay in Paris? She never came back to visit?”

  My mother’s expression sours a bit. “If she did, she never came to visit us.”

  In a way it seems as if she didn’t even exist. My father almost never mentioned her, even when he discussed his childhood. “I’ve never even seen a picture of her. Have you?”

  “No,” she replies, her fingers flying over the keyboard. “Damn these people to hell. They haven’t shipped anything yet but they’re refusing to cancel the order.”

  “You’ve never seen a single photo?” I ask.

  “She was strange about it apparently, hated having her picture taken.”

  I freeze. Rose refused to have her photo taken too—with her favorite band, no less. It didn’t occur to me when it happened, but what teenager refuses a photo with her favorite band? Maybe one who wants no photographic evidence that she existed in any time at all. Does that mean my aunt can time travel? It could, but it still feels like a huge leap to take. It’s just as possible she simply hated something about herself—crooked teeth or a big nose—and refused to be photographed. And even if she does time travel, the bigger question is this: what is my mother capable of? In last night’s dream it seemed that she didn’t just carry the mutation…she time traveled, and did so enthusiastically. So if that really happened, in some other life, what would have changed it so much this time around?

  “What do you think about time travel?” I ask, watching her face closely.

  She frowns, her brows coming together, her mind still on her irritation with the vendor. “I liked Outlander well enough, but I’m more of a mystery person I guess.”

  I hear nothing hidden in her response, but surely there’s some piece of her that at least responds to the idea of it when she did it so gleefully in another life. “I was just kind of wondering if you think it’s possible?” I persist.

  Her mouth sags and then her eyes brim with tears. “Oh honey,” she says, as the tears start to fall. “No, I don’t think it is.”

  * * *

  “I’m staying another night,” I tell Nick.

  I hear his disappointment in the ensuing silence. “Why?”

  I laugh miserably. “I made the fatal error of asking my mom what she thought about time travel to see if she’d react in some telling way. Now she’s convinced Jeff is right about the tumor making me crazy. She can’t stop crying.”

  “Has she stopped trying to convince you to go through with the wedding at least?”

  I lean back against the headboard of my bed and close my eyes. “More or less. She obviously still wishes I would, but it’s hard to argue with a dying girl.”

  “Don’t say that,” he snaps. “You have no idea if it’s true.”

  My heart twists a little. The closer we become, the harder it will get knowing I’m going to have to say goodbye to him. Which means it will become harder for him too. But I don’t want to think about that right now. I want to enjoy this.

  “How are things there, with you?”

  “Yeah,” he says slowly. “About that. Something happened this morning. I was going to wait until I saw you in person but…I went in early today, and inside my locked office, which only myself and one other person have a key to, was a woman looking at your file.”

  I grip the nightstand, as if the world has suddenly turned over, and I’m about to be spilled from its surface. “You’re kidding.”

  “That’s not even the weird part. She looked up at me and then she vanished, sitting right there. Just like Rose did.” He draws in a breath. “I think she’s the one behind all this.”

  Fear opens wide in my stomach. Having a brain tumor is bad enough, but the threat this woman presents is far more imminent. “God. Nick, all she has to do to separate us is go back a few months. It would just take one little tweak—"

  “She won’t,” he says, with a certainty that makes no sense to me. Even his size and strength can’t combat a superpower. “And we’re going to figure this out. There are no security cameras in my office but since she was wearing scrubs, I knew she must have been in the hallway at some point, so I analyzed the hospital’s security footage and found her. I’ll forward you the picture in case you recognize her.”

  He texts the photo and I pull away from the phone to look at it.

  And then my breath stops.

  The same white-blond hair. The same beautiful, severe face. “It’s her,” I finally whisper. “The woman I’ve been dreaming about since I was small. She’s the one who took me away from you.”

  “This time we have her, though,” he says. “We’ve got a picture and we can track her down.”

  Except I seemed to know exactly who she was in London too, and it didn’t appear to do me any good. Which makes sense, because how the hell do you stop someone who can vanish at will?

  * * *

  2

  QUINN

  I leave my mother’s first thing in the morning, before she can guilt me into staying another day…or another two years, like she did when my father died. I get back to Caroline’s apartment just after ten. The old Quinn would use this day off to pay bills or organize paperwork or get her car washed. The new one, the one who suddenly realizes time is fleeting, chooses to do none of those things. It’s entirely possible this could be my last summer. If I’m on my deathbed next year, am I going to wish I’d spent today paying bills or getting my car washed? I doubt it.

  Instead I lie out on Caroline’s balcony. I start off in the red bikini, as I’m still limited to the clothes I brought for the trip to Vegas, but then, on impulse, I remove the top. Not a soul can see me since she’s on the highest floor and faces the woods, but I feel rebellious for the first time in my life. It’s Nick. Something about him makes me feel safe, willing to take risks, even when he’s not around.

  I’m too drowsy to read so I find myself thinking instead, my mind returning again and again to what my mother said: that she thought my father knew something about my future, some terrible outcome that marrying Jeff would help me avoid. I know it’s related to Nick somehow, but I just don’t see how it’s possible. Being with him makes me feel like a better person. It makes me want to run out to the street and hug everyone that passes—clothed, of course.

  I just don’t see how it’s possible something so good could turn bad.

  * * *

  I wake slowly to the sounds of Nick getting ready for work. Outside our flat the sky is winter gray, though it is, theoretically, spring, and the light is so dim it must be early. I vaguely wonder how far along he is in the process of dressing…if I catch him early enough I can almost always convince him to get back in bed. I roll over to check, and instead wind up lunging forward, barely making it to the toilet before I expel the contents of my stomach.

  Nick follows me in, looking more like a worried husband than a doctor who’s seen ev
erything. And in spite of the fact that he’s seen far worse, I wave him away. “Don’t look at me,” I plead. I flush the toilet and he comes and sits on the edge of the tub.

  “We’re married. I was going to see you throw up eventually.”

  I shake my head. “You’re not going to want to have sex with me after this.”

  He laughs low. “I fucking guarantee I will still want to have sex with you.”

  I sit up, leaning my head against the cool tile on the wall. “What if I was pregnant? Would you want to have sex with me then?”

  His eyes widen a bit. “Of course I would,” he says, tensing. I hate the hint of dread I hear in his voice. “Why?”

  I reluctantly meet his eye. “Because I threw up yesterday too.”

  The next day, after three positive pregnancy tests, an obstetrician tells us we are about ten weeks along, which means we got pregnant pretty much the first time we slept together.

  “We were so careful,” Nick says, as if he might persuade the doctor she’s wrong.

  The two of us come home from the appointment, looking at our small one-bedroom flat in dismay. I’m on the cusp of apologizing, though I took that pill every day as if my life depended on it, but before I can he wraps his arms around me.

  “Do you think the baby will be more comfortable sleeping on the terrace, or on top of the washer?” he asks with a laugh. “Because that’s pretty much the only space we have left.”