Chapter Text

Chapter 1

I have crossed this street a thousand times. The same cracked sidewalk splitting around stubborn weeds that refuse to die no matter how many winters Ohio throws at them. The same tired storefront windows reflecting a town that settles into quiet resignation after four in the afternoon. The same drifting smell of coffee from Miller's on the corner, promising warmth and sugar and a few stolen minutes of ordinary after a day spent standing beside grief.

The funeral ran late. They always do when the deceased is a child.

The little boy's mother had held onto my hands long after the last guests left the chapel, her fingers trembling against mine as though I were the final solid object anchoring her to the world. I let her hold on. You learn quickly in this profession that time stops belonging to you — schedules dissolve, hunger disappears, and the only thing that matters is presence. Now the silence afterward feels louder than the service itself, and the cold air outside is almost a relief after hours of managed grief.

I step outside into the thin winter light and settle my overcoat over my shoulders, the fabric still carrying the faint scent of lilies, polished wood, and the particular sadness that follows you home from these things no matter how many years you've been doing them. My dark purple dress is conservative and deliberately unremarkable — funeral appropriate, invisible, the kind of thing that lets the living forget you're there so they can grieve without an audience. My black flats are sensible. My hair is twisted back and pinned with the lacquered hairstick my grandfather gave me the summer I turned ten, dark red-brown coils gathered neatly at the back of my head in deference to the day's formality, though several pieces have escaped over the course of the afternoon in the way they always do, because my hair has never once in my life done exactly what I asked of it.

The familiar weight of my messenger bag settles against my hip and I shift the strap automatically across my chest, fingers finding the waxed canvas I stitched myself years ago after deciding that no store-bought bag was ever built quite right. Reinforced seams. Deep pockets. Space for everything I might need, which in my case is an embarrassing quantity of things because I was raised by a man who believed preparation was next to godliness and I have spent twenty four years finding no evidence to the contrary. Wallet, phone, notebook, three pens because one is never enough, Kindle, a small pharmacy's worth of ibuprofen and antihistamines and things that might be useful if something goes wrong, a folded rain poncho, a solar charger I threw in this morning because I forgot to charge my phone, a travel sewing kit, two protein bars from last Tuesday, and my nan's small iron cross that has lived in there as good luck charm more than a religious act.

Murphy's Law, my grandfather used to say, is not a law but a personal relationship, and some people simply have a closer one than others. I am, apparently, one of those people, and I have learned to pack accordingly.

My facial piercings are already tucked into the small zippered pocket inside the front flap — the snake bites, the nose stud — removed before the service the way I always do, because grieving families deserve not to notice me. The rings and bracelets are off too, all of them, the thick silver ones that usually crowd my fingers in various states of stylistic ambition, the ones my coworkers have long since stopped commenting on. They live in their own small pouch when I'm working. What remains are the studs up my ears, small enough to be overlooked, and the smart watch on my left wrist which gave a gentle buzz forty minutes ago to remind me that I was supposed to eat lunch, a reminder I ignored because I was elbow-deep in a service that needed my full attention and my body knows by now that funeral days run on adrenaline, empathy, and whatever is left in the vending machine afterward.

The bag swings lightly as I step toward the crosswalk.

I press the pedestrian button out of habit even though traffic is sparse. A pickup truck rolls past, tires humming against asphalt. Somewhere behind me a door chime rings as someone enters the bakery. The wind carries sharp winter air across my face, cold enough to wake me fully for the first time since morning. I think about coffee and how, much like charging my phone, I had forgotten to make some before leaving and was now four hours overdue for my caffeine fix. Something warm. Maybe a bagel if Miller's hasn't run out. My stomach files a formal complaint about the skipped lunch. Noted. We're working on it.

Green light.

I step forward.

I am thinking about whether a cortado counts as a meal replacement when something shifts.

Not dramatically. Not the sharp cinematic wrongness of emergencies — nothing that triggers the professional part of my brain that knows how to respond to crisis. Just a subtle change in the air, the way a room changes when someone opens a window you didn't notice. I take another step and the wrongness deepens, thickens, becomes something I can almost taste. My smart watch buzzes again, inexplicably, and then goes silent.

The smell reaches me before understanding does.

Coal smoke. Horse sweat. Wet stone.

A combination that belongs to no street in Ohio, to no decade I have ever inhabited, and my heel comes down on pavement that is completely, unmistakably wrong. I blink. The pickup truck is gone. The quiet Midwestern street is gone. Sound crashes into me all at once — wheels clattering violently over cobblestone, a man shouting in an accent that is sharp and unfamiliar, hooves striking stone close enough that I feel the vibration travel up through my flats and into my ankles.

I keep walking. Stopping in the middle of a street has never once solved anything.

My brain does what it always does under pressure, which is to say it begins filing and categorizing at a speed that would be impressive if it weren't also completely failing to produce a useful conclusion. Dissociation — that's the first word it offers. Delayed grief response. Emotional overload. Acute stress reaction following traumatic exposure, which sounds extremely plausible given that I have spent the better part of today holding the hands of a woman whose child is in the ground. I catalogue symptoms the way I would if someone else were describing this experience to me. Visual distortion. Auditory hallucination. Environmental displacement. Yes. Fine. That must be it. I am a mental health professional's case study and I will sort it out after coffee.

I step onto the opposite curb — except it isn't a curb. Uneven stone meets my feet, worn smooth by decades of foot traffic, and people brush past me in wool coats and hats pulled low against the cold. A woman in a long skirt nearly walks directly into me and murmurs an apology without slowing.

I turn in a slow full circle.

Brick buildings crowd together against a grey sky, soot-dark and tall, exhaling pale smoke from chimneys into air that smells of coal, horses, and something faintly industrial underneath. No traffic lights. No beeps from a crosswalk. Not a single familiar marker of the world I was standing in thirty seconds ago. Only carriages, carts, very old-looking vehicles, and a crowd moving with urgency through a city that feels impossibly, aggressively alive. A city that is completely indifferent to the fact that I have apparently lost my mind in the middle of it.

My hand drops to my messenger bag without conscious decision, fingers gripping the strap the way they always do when I need something solid — the familiar texture of the waxed canvas, the weight of everything I thought to bring. The horse on the carriage rattling past smells warm and unmistakably real, not theatrical, not decorative, the leather of its harnesses creaking with actual use. I press my fingers to my temple and shake my head once, hard, the way you do when you're trying to reset a system that's thrown an error, but the city doesn't flicker or resolve and the wool coats keep passing and none of the accents surrounding me belong anywhere near Ohio.

"No," I say quietly. That's ridiculous. I laugh once, thin and completely unconvincing. "Okay. You're projecting. Too many documentaries. Too little sleep. You have been at a child's funeral, your blood sugar is approximately zero, and your brain is doing something very dramatic about it."

My hand is already in my bag, pulling out my phone before I've made a conscious decision to reach for it, because modern problems require modern solutions and surely this qualifies. The screen lights instantly and the relief that hits is immediate and disproportionate — the familiar interface, the date, the time ticking forward, proof that Ohio still exists somewhere. Then I see the signal bars. Or rather the complete absence of them. I rotate slowly, holding the phone up as though a slightly different angle will produce a cell tower from somewhere in this impossible city, and nothing appears. The date is correct. The time is correct. The world on my screen belongs entirely to Ohio, the world around me absolutely does not, and I have no explanation for either of those things being simultaneously true.

I lower the phone slowly.

And then I see it — rising above the rooftops to my left, unmistakable even through haze and coal smoke. Big Ben, pale stone against grey sky, utterly unconcerned with my feelings about it.

The bells begin to toll, deep and resonant, the vibration settling into my ribs like a hand pressing flat against my chest, and the realization arrives the same way as weather, regardless of whether you are prepared for it or not.

London.

Not a themed street. Not a reenactment. Not a hallucination shaped vaguely like a history documentary. London, full of strangers living completely ordinary lives in a century that should not exist around me, none of them noticing the woman from Ohio standing in the middle of their morning having what is shaping up to be the worst day of her professional career.

I turn sharply behind me, half-convinced that if I look fast enough Ohio will still be there.

There is only more stone. More smoke. More strangers. More past.

The smart watch on my wrist has gone completely dark.

I press my hand flat against my chest and take stock the way I always do when I have no idea what to do, which is to say methodically and without drama, starting from what is verifiably true. I am standing. I am breathing. My heartbeat is elevated but steady. The phone is still warm in my hand, the date still correct, my nan's iron cross still zipped into the front pocket beside my piercings, my rings, my solar charger, two slightly stale protein bars, and every careful preparation I made this morning for a day I understood completely. I am still here. I am simply not anywhere I recognize.

A man pushes past, muttering about bloody traffic, his irritation perfectly and mundanely human. Life continues around me without pause or acknowledgment. Whatever just happened, it has clearly only happened to me.

My grandfather's voice surfaces without permission, carried up from somewhere deep in the archive of things I absorbed as a child without fully understanding them.

"You don't linger at crossroads," he said, pointing his cigarette at the intersection at the end of our street while summer heat settled over the yard and I sat beside him on the back steps thinking he was being poetic. "You cross with purpose."

I was seven. Maybe eight.

"It's just where streets meet," I told him.

He shook his head, slow and certain. "No. It's where choices meet."

I had nodded the way children nod at the wisdom of old men — respectfully, and with absolutely no intention of remembering it. I forgot that conversation through school, college, and a career built around the organized management of death. I forgot it thoroughly and completely, the way you forget things that turn out to be instructions rather than stories.

I am currently revising that assessment.

"Nope," I say quietly, to no one, to the coal-smoke London morning pressing close around me. "No. Absolutely not."

The city doesn't respond. A cart horse stomps impatiently somewhere nearby. A woman in a long coat steps around me, clearly irritated that she has to navigate an obstacle.

I slide the phone back into my bag. Turn off the dark smart watch and unclasp it from my wrist, dropping it beside the phone because it is useless to me now and the last thing I need is for someone to notice something they cannot explain. I tighten the strap across my chest like armor. Straighten my coat. Smooth imaginary wrinkles from my dress the way I do before I walk into a room full of people who need me to be steady.

My grandfather told stories about crossroads. I didn't believe him. I time traveled on my lunch break, and I still — standing here in the impossible middle of it — do not entirely believe him. Which is a level of psychological self-defense that I can only chalk up to either extraordinary denial or a deeply practical survival instinct.

Probably both.

Function now, I tell myself.

This has been my motto since I was 14 and found my grandmother cold in her bed. I understood then that the world would not stop for my feelings about it.

Panic later. Function now.

First priority: understand when I am. Second: understand where exactly. Third: find somewhere safe before dark. Fourth: figure out how to get back, because I have a service on Thursday, Mrs. Kowalski's family is counting on me, and I absolutely cannot be stuck in what appears to be Edwardian London for the foreseeable future.

I turn toward the intersection behind me, take a breath, and step forward — determined, absurdly hopeful, and fully prepared to cross that street until something corrects itself — because crossroads matter, and maybe if I do it exactly right, with the right intention, with whatever purpose my grandfather's stories required, I can undo the last four minutes and be back in Ohio in time for a very strong coffee and a long, private cry about the fact that apparently magic is real and I have been the last to know.