The Chronos Effect
Chapter Fourteen: The Meeting
I didn't tell Amy about the message.
That morning, while she was in the shower, I told her I needed to meet with Dr. Vasquez about some paperwork for my degree. It was a weak excuse, and the way she looked at me—head tilted, eyes narrowed—told me she knew I was lying.
"Paperwork," she repeated flatly.
"Just some administrative stuff. Won't take long."
"Damian—"
"I'll be back by lunch. Promise."
She stood there in her bathrobe, water still dripping from her hair, and I could see her deciding whether to push. Finally, she nodded.
"Okay. But if you're not back by one, I'm calling Dr. Vasquez myself."
"Deal."
I kissed her forehead and left before she could ask more questions.
Café du Monde was crowded with tourists, everyone covered in powdered sugar from the beignets. I found a table in the corner, ordered coffee I didn't drink, and waited.
At 10:03, a woman sat down across from me.
She was maybe forty, with gray streaks in her dark hair and circles under her eyes that suggested she hadn't slept in days. She wore a hospital ID badge—Dr. Sarah Mitchell, Emergency Medicine.
"You're Damian Torres," she said. Not a question.
"How did you know?"
"Because I've been watching you. Or more accurately, I've been watching the temporal distortions that follow you around like a shadow." She ordered coffee from a passing waiter without looking at him. "I'm Sarah."
"The woman from the accident last night. Amy treated you."
"Your fiancée has excellent bedside manner. The head wound wasn't nearly as bad as it looked." Sarah touched the bandage on her forehead absently. "But that's not why we're here."
"Why are we here?"
"Because three weeks ago, I died."
The words hung between us while tourists laughed and cameras clicked and someone nearby ordered another round of beignets.
"What do you mean you died?"
"I mean I was in that truck crash. The one that destroyed your apartment. I was walking past your building when the drunk driver lost control, and a piece of flying debris went through my chest." She said it matter-of-factly, like she was describing a patient's symptoms. "I bled out on the sidewalk in about four minutes."
My coffee cup froze halfway to my mouth. "But you're here."
"Because I went back. Just like you did." Sarah leaned forward. "Except I didn't know what I was doing. I was just so angry—angry that I was dying for no reason, angry that my daughter would grow up without a mother. And then suddenly I was back in my apartment that morning, three hours before the crash."
"What did you do?"
"I stayed home. Called in sick. Figured if I wasn't near your building when the truck crashed, I'd be safe." She laughed bitterly. "But here's the thing about changing timelines—the universe doesn't like it. So instead of dying in your building crash, I almost died in last night's accident. Different time, different place, same result."
I set down my coffee cup. "But you're alive now."
"For now. But the buzzing hasn't stopped. I can still feel it, like there's this anchor point pulling at me, trying to drag me back to that moment when I died." She looked at me intently. "You know what I'm talking about, don't you?"
I did. The buzzing in my head had been constant since last night's accident, a low-grade headache that felt like my brain was trying to remind me of something I was supposed to do.
"How did you find me?" I asked.
"I'm a doctor. I see patterns. After I looped back, I started noticing... anomalies. People acting strangely, like they remembered things that didn't happen. And all of those anomalies centered around you." She pulled out a small notebook covered in scribbled notes. "You convinced a man named Robert Hendricks not to drive drunk on September 15th. But in my original timeline, he was the one who crashed into your building."
"So you died because I saved Robert?"
"No, I died because the universe needed someone to die that night. When you prevented Robert from crashing, it just... found someone else."
The waiter brought Sarah's coffee. She wrapped her hands around the cup but didn't drink.
"Here's what I've figured out," she continued. "Every time we loop back, every time we change something, we create a kind of... debt. The timeline tries to balance itself out. We save one person, someone else dies. We prevent one tragedy, another one happens."
"That's exactly what Dr. Vasquez said. About ripple effects."
"Dr. Vasquez doesn't understand the half of it." Sarah pulled out her phone and showed me a series of photographs. "These are people who died in the weeks after you started looping. Car accidents, heart attacks, random acts of violence. All within a five-mile radius of your apartment."
I scrolled through the images, my stomach churning. Dozens of faces. Dozens of lives.
"You think I caused all of this?"
"I think we both did. Every time we loop, we create fractures. And those fractures spread outward, affecting people who have nothing to do with our original traumas." She took her phone back. "The question is, what do we do about it?"
"Dr. Vasquez said we shouldn't loop anymore. That the fractures need time to heal."
"And what happens when we die? Because I'm telling you, Damian, the universe is trying very hard to kill me. And I'm guessing it's trying to kill you too."
"Amy almost died multiple times. But she's alive now, and everything seems stable."
"For how long?" Sarah asked. "How long before the timeline tries to correct itself again?"
I didn't have an answer for that.
Sarah leaned back in her chair, looking exhausted. "I have a six-year-old daughter. Emma. In my original timeline, she grew up without a mother. I went back to prevent that. But now I'm starting to wonder if I just postponed the inevitable."
"You don't know that."
"Don't I? How many times can we cheat death before it stops being cheating and starts being stealing?"
A family at the next table was laughing at something, their kid's face covered in powdered sugar. Normal people living normal lives, unaware that sitting a few feet away were two people discussing the mechanics of breaking reality.
"Why did you want to meet?" I asked. "If there's nothing we can do about it, why tell me any of this?"
"Because I needed to know I wasn't crazy. That someone else was experiencing this." Sarah's voice cracked slightly. "And because I thought maybe, if we compared notes, we could figure out how to stop it."
"Stop what?"
"The dying. The constant fear that every moment might be my last." She looked at me with desperate eyes. "Tell me you've figured out how to make it stop."
But I hadn't. The buzzing was still there, the anchor points still accessible. I'd just been ignoring them, hoping they'd fade with time.
"I'm getting married in a few months," I said instead. "Having a baby. I can't spend my life waiting for the universe to kill me."
"Then what are you going to do?"
"Live. As normally as I can. Hope that's enough."
Sarah stared at me like I'd suggested we could fly by flapping our arms hard enough. "That's your plan? Hope?"
"You have a better one?"
"Yes. We find whoever else can do what we do, and we figure out the rules. There have to be rules. Patterns we can predict and control."
"There aren't any others. Just us."
"How do you know?"
"Because Dr. Vasquez has been monitoring temporal disturbances. She would have told me if there were more."
"Maybe she did tell you and you looped back before hearing it." Sarah stood up abruptly. "I'm going to keep investigating. If I find anything useful, I'll contact you."
"Wait. How will you—"
"The same way I found you the first time. By following the ripples." She dropped a twenty on the table for the coffee. "One more thing, Dr. Torres."
"What?"
"Stop trying to control everything. It's making the fractures worse."
Then she was gone, disappearing into the crowd of tourists like she'd never been there.
I sat there for another fifteen minutes, my untouched coffee going cold, trying to process everything Sarah had told me. The timeline as a balance sheet. Death as a debt that had to be paid. Every life saved creating a corresponding loss somewhere else.
My phone rang. Amy.
"Hey," I said, trying to sound normal.
"Where are you?"
"Still at the university. The paperwork is taking longer than I thought."
"Damian, I called Dr. Vasquez. She said she wasn't meeting with you today."
Shit.
"I can explain—"
"I'm sure you can. But I'm tired of explanations that don't explain anything." Her voice was tight with anger and hurt. "Where are you really?"
"Café du Monde."
"Why?"
"I was meeting someone."
"Who?"
I closed my eyes, feeling the weight of all the lies I'd been telling press down on me. "Someone who's experiencing the same things I am. Someone who can... do what I can do."
Amy was quiet for a long moment. "Come home. We need to talk."
She hung up before I could respond.
The drive back to the Chens' house felt like driving to my own execution. I knew what was coming. The questions I couldn't answer honestly. The choices I'd have to make between protecting Amy and telling her the truth.
She was waiting on the front porch when I pulled up, arms crossed, face unreadable.
"Inside," she said. "My parents went shopping. We have the house to ourselves."
We sat in the living room, Amy on the couch, me in the chair across from her. The distance between us felt like miles.
"Start talking," Amy said.
"About what?"
"About whatever you've been hiding from me for the past month. About the nightmares that aren't really nightmares. About how you knew things before they happened. About this person you met today who can 'do what you do.'" She made air quotes, her anger barely contained. "All of it, Damian. I want all of it."
So I told her. Everything. The original timeline where she died. The loops. The fractures in reality. Robert Hendricks and Sarah Mitchell and the debt the universe was trying to collect. Dr. Vasquez's warnings. The buzzing in my head that wouldn't stop.
When I finished, Amy was staring at me like I was a stranger.
"You're telling me you can travel through time," she said flatly.
"Not exactly. I can loop back to specific moments. Moments of extreme trauma."
"And you used this ability to save me."
"Yes."
"Multiple times."
"Yes."
"And each time you saved me, someone else died instead."
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
Amy stood up and walked to the window, her back to me. I could see her shoulders shaking, though whether from anger or fear or something else, I couldn't tell.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she asked finally.
"Because I didn't want to scare you. Because I thought if I could just fix everything, make it all work out, you'd never have to know."
"But you couldn't fix everything."
"No."
She turned around, tears streaming down her face. "Damian, do you understand what you're telling me? You're saying that our baby—this life we're building together—only exists because you let other people die."
"That's not—"
"That's exactly what you're saying!" Her voice cracked. "You played God with people's lives, and now you want me to just accept it? To pretend like we're a normal couple planning a normal future?"
"We are normal. I stopped looping. Everything's stable now."
"Except it's not stable, is it? Because this Sarah woman is still experiencing it. Because the buzzing hasn't stopped. Because you're still lying to me about where you're going and who you're meeting." Amy wrapped her arms around herself. "How am I supposed to trust you when you won't tell me the truth?"
"I'm telling you the truth now."
"Only because I caught you in a lie."
She was right, and we both knew it.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm so sorry, Amy. I was trying to protect you."
"I don't need protection. I need honesty. I need a partner who trusts me enough to tell me when he's carrying around impossible knowledge about how the universe works." She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. "I need you to stop treating me like I'm fragile."
"You're pregnant. You almost died three weeks ago."
"And I survived. We both survived. But we can't build a life together if you're keeping secrets this big."
I stood up and moved toward her, but she held up a hand.
"Don't. I need space right now."
"Amy—"
"Please. Just... give me some time to process this."
She walked past me and up the stairs. A moment later, I heard her bedroom door close.
I sat back down in the chair, my head in my hands, and tried to figure out how everything had gone so wrong so fast. This morning, Amy and I were planning our future. Now she couldn't even look at me.
My phone buzzed. Text from Sarah.
Found something. Three more people experiencing temporal awareness. All within the city. All connected to your original fracture.
Three more people. Three more Sarah Mitchells trying to cheat death and creating chaos in the process.
I typed back: What do we do?
We meet with them. Tonight. There's a pattern here, and we need to understand it before more people die.
I looked up at the ceiling, toward Amy's room, and felt the weight of another impossible choice. Tell her about this meeting and risk pushing her further away. Or go alone and add another lie to the pile.
The buzzing in my head intensified, and I realized something terrifying.
The anchor points weren't fading. They were multiplying.
And somewhere in the city, three more people were discovering they could break reality just like I had.
The fractures were spreading, and I had no idea how to stop them.