“We have to go to the police,” I say matter-of-factly, my voice slightly muffled since the blanket has crept up toward my mouth. I push it away and sit up.
“Why on earth would we—”
“I know who did it. I know who took Jonas. I remember them.”
I’m not surprised by the look of shock on my mother’s face.
“Them?”
“Yes, them. A man and a woman. I can see them. I can help the police find them.”
“Slow down, sweetie,” my mom says, sitting on the couch to my right. “Tell me what happened.”
I do, and the tears are unleashed again. It’s all my fault.
“Honey, it’s okay,” my mom whispers, reaching over and stroking my hair. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Yes, I did!” I wail. “I unlocked the doors! It’s my fault he’s gone. It’s my fault he’s dead!”
I pull the blanket back to my face and cry until there’s nothing left.
“Shhh,” my mom says, over and over, and I feel like shaking off her kindness. I don’t deserve it. How can she still love me, knowing I’m the reason Jonas is dead?
Will she still love me when she hears the rest of the story?
“Mom, that’s not all,” I say through my tears. As terrible as the past memory is, it’s done. What I haven’t shared is the part in the future that hasn’t happened yet. It weighs on me so heavily that I sink lower into the chair.
“What is it, London?” Mom says in a hushed tone, brushing back my hair and wiping away my tears as they’re replaced by new ones. “You can tell me anything.”
Desperate to tell someone, I open my mouth and creak out the words.
“Luke is going to die, too.”
In a voice so low that my mom has to crouch to hear me, I tell her the future memory that seeing the criminals’ faces has triggered.
I tell her that it must be in five or six years, judging by my reflection in the storefront window on a city street I don’t recognize. Luke is there.
I’m clutching a torn piece of paper with an address scrawled on it. We’re watching, until someone emerges. We’re curious. We plan to tell the police.
A man leaves the brownstone; he’s wearing knockoff dress shoes and a blazer so that he doesn’t look like a kidnapper and a killer, but then and now, I know the truth.
The man veers off the cobblestones to a side street, then again into an alley. We follow without meaning to, and, with just a couple of wrong turns, the bustling city that felt safe doesn’t seem that way anymore. Luke and I turn back, but it’s too late.
The man knows we’re there.
“What gives?” he shouts at us. He seems drunk or high. He’s definitely unstable.
We say nothing for a moment. Then, like that idiot in a horror movie, words that I want to vacuum back in fly out of my mouth.
“You took my brother,” I blurt with false conviction.
“London,” Luke whispers harshly, squeezing the hand he’s holding. Luke is sensible.
“That’s what you think, huh?” the man says, edging closer to us.
I know with every fiber of my being that we’re in the worst kind of danger. This was the wrong move.
The man is chewing a toothpick, tossing it side to side in his mouth like he doesn’t have a care in the world.