THE SECOND QUESTION
1393 Words
Sunday is the day she does not think about him.
She decides this at 7 a.m. with her coffee at the window, formally and with intention, the way she makes all decisions that require active maintenance. Sunday is laundry and the long walk along the water and the book she has been reading in actual chapters rather than stolen paragraphs between tasks. Sunday is the day that belongs entirely to the architecture of ordinary life and she will not allow anything to disrupt that architecture because the architecture is load-bearing and she knows it.
By 9 a.m. she has thought about him eleven times.
She stops counting after that.
The long walk helps more than the counting did. She takes the coastal path that runs north from her neighborhood, where the city gradually loosens its grip on the landscape and the water gets louder and the fog sits closer to the ground. She walks until her legs register the effort and her mind goes quiet in the specific way it goes quiet when the body is working hard enough to require full occupancy.
She does not bring the journal.
She brings only herself and the cold and the sound of the water and the question Dani asked yesterday that has been sitting in her chest ever since like something that got in through a crack she did not know was there.
When is the last time you walked toward something.
The answer, if she is being precise, is: before Marcus died. Before the accident and the aftermath and the long process of rebuilding a life around an absence. She had been a different kind of person before that. More willing to move toward things that frightened her. Less convinced that her movement toward something was itself a form of danger to it.
She does not let herself think about Marcus often. She has systems for this too.
Today the systems are not working at full capacity.
She walks until the path reaches the northern headland where the cliff edge is fenced and the view opens suddenly to the full width of the ocean, grey and enormous and completely indifferent, and she stands at the fence for a long time with the wind doing what October wind does and thinks about her brother and her journals and a man who turned to look at her in a dream in an abandoned observatory whose name she learned in her sleep.
She thinks: Marcus would have had an opinion about all of this.
He would have said something that was simultaneously unhelpful and exactly right, delivered with the specific grin of someone who knew they were being unhelpful and found it worth it. He would have said something like: you are doing the thing where you research the jump instead of jumping.
She almost smiles.
Almost.
She turns and walks back toward the city.
His name, she discovers on Sunday afternoon without fully intending to discover it, is Cael Doran.
She is not looking for him. She is looking for the Tidal Observatory, because the dream gave her a name and names are data and data can be cross-referenced. She finds it quickly: a decommissioned coastal research facility on the northern headland, closed in 2019 when its funding was absorbed by a university consortium, used intermittently since as a field station for graduate research projects.
His name appears in a 2021 paper in a minor astrophysics journal, third author on a study that used the observatory's historical atmospheric data. The affiliation listed is a university two states north. The paper is dense and technical and she reads the abstract three times before extracting what is relevant: he was studying atmospheric anomalies. Specifically, the kind of localized weather events that had no adequate meteorological explanation.
She looks at the author photo for a long time.
It is a small, low-resolution image. Conference setting, slightly blurred. But it is him, the particular set of his shoulders, the quality of his stillness readable even in a photograph, and she sits at her kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon and understands that the dreams did not invent him. That whatever brought him to Ashveil four months ago has roots she has not yet fully mapped. That the observatory she saw in last night's vision is a place he has actually been.
She opens the journal.
Writes: Full name: Cael Doran. Astrophysics. University of Northern Cascades. 2021 paper: atmospheric anomalies. Used the observatory. Connection to the location in the dream is not coincidental.
She pauses.
Writes: He came here for a reason. The coffee shop job is not the reason.
She looks at this for a long time.
Then she does something she has been resisting since Thursday night. She takes out her phone and opens a new message and types his name into the search because he works at a coffee shop in a neighborhood where people leave reviews and reviews sometimes include responses from staff and staff sometimes have names attached.
She finds him in forty seconds. A review response from three weeks ago, signed simply Cael. Professional and warm and brief.
She has his last name. She has a paper trail. She has the beginning of a map.
She puts the phone face down on the table and sits with the ethical weight of what she just did, which is minor by most standards and which feels to her, given everything, like a significant line crossed.
She crossed it anyway.
That is new information about herself.
He comes into the journal on Sunday night.
Not as C or Subject but as his full name, written at the top of a fresh page in the careful handwriting she reserves for things she is committing to rather than things she is still deciding about.
Cael Doran.
Underneath it she writes everything she knows, organized in the way she organizes things when she is trying to see the complete shape of something: what the dreams showed her before she met him, what she has observed directly, what the paper trail adds, what is still missing.
The missing column is longer than the known column.
What she does not know: why Ashveil specifically. What he saw in his version of both futures. What he is withholding and why. Whether the observatory is significant to Future One or Future Two or both. What triggered the change in the dreams Friday night, the turning, the looking, the words she could not hear.
She writes: He spoke directly to me in the dream. I need to know what he said.
Underneath that, after a pause: I need to go back to the coffee shop.
Underneath that, after a longer pause: Not for coffee.
She closes the journal. She turns off the light. She lies in the dark and listens to the building settle around her and thinks about the review response she found online, the warmth in it, the way even three sentences in a professional context carried something recognizable.
The same stillness. The same quality of attention.
She thinks: he has been in Ashveil for four months. He has been waiting. She does not know for certain that she is what he has been waiting for but she has four journals worth of evidence pointing in one direction and she has spent three years learning to trust evidence even when it frightens her.
Especially when it frightens her.
The dream that comes is quiet and brief. She is in the observatory again but it is daylight this time, thin winter light through the large windows, and the equipment is not dusty. Someone has been using it. She looks around the room and on one of the panels she sees a photograph fixed with a small piece of tape.
She moves closer.
It is a photograph of the coastal road, the specific stretch she has seen in both futures in different states of destruction and preservation. Taken from above, from the headland, the road visible below and the water beyond it, and someone has drawn on it in red pen. Not words. Just a circle, precise and deliberate, around a single point on the road.
She reaches for it.
Wakes up.
4:08 a.m. Cold. Heart moving faster than usual.
She picks up the blue pen and writes one line.
He already knows where it happens.
- Writer
