Detective Stevens took the next couple of days off from work. She wanted time to really process what had happened and decide on what her next course of action should be. She wanted to get home, but as more days passed, her hopes of rescue diminished. She’d done all the things she’d been trained to do, but had messed up with her name! Such a blunder was probably the reason she hadn’t been found, she figured, but how could she go and fix it now? She could try having her name changed, but such records weren’t generally looked at by the agency since anyone could change their name to anything else. The last thing the agency wanted to do was grab the wrong person. Of course, in those instances they could modify the persons memory so they wouldn’t remember the details. It wasn’t a perfect system, and the memory erasure often left the person with some odd side effects. Apparently, a number of people in the past who had been accidentally temporally shifted and then had their memories of the experience erased went on to blame their laps in memory on an alien abduction. Most of the time, the person simply didn’t acknowledge their missing memory and would have difficulty even trying to think of that period if it were ever brought up.

Someone knocked on her door.

Detective Stevens looked up from where she sat, alone in her living room on the only chair she owned. What was the point in owning more? She didn’t intend to be here long and wasn’t making any effort to build friendships with others whom she might invite over. None of the people in this time knew where she lived so she ignored the knock and went back to her thinking. It was probably some door-to-door salesman. This time period still had those, she was pretty sure.

The knock on the door came again, this time louder and more insistent.

“Go away!” she shouted over to the door. She made a quick visual check to make sure the door was locked before turning her back again on the door.

“Detective Stevens?” a male voice called through the door.

She almost fell to the floor in her efforts to get up from her chair. Had she been found? Who else knew to call her that? But then why hadn’t they just retrieved her? Why send someone?

“Yes!” She called out, “Yes, I’m here, one moment!”

Detective Stevens scrambled over the door, unlocked it, and swung it open.

Dante Sacco stood before her with a backpack slung to one side.

Detective Stevens jaw dropped and for a moment she could do nothing at all besides stand there and stare. Dante, for his part, looked extremely nervous and uncertain about his apparent decision to seek her out.

“May I come in?” he asked finally.

She was so shocked that she actually stood back and let him in before considering whether she really ought to or not.

Dante Sacco walked  into the living room, pulled a short, three-legged, folding chair from his backpack, and sat down opposite Detective Steven’s chair.

Slowly, Detective Steven’s closed her door and turned to fully face Dante. He still looked extremely nervous but he at least attempted a smile and gestured towards her seat as though inviting her to sit down. She made her way slowly and carefully over to her chair and sat. He didn’t speak and so she studied him for a moment. He was in his forties, perhaps, and lean. He obviously hadn’t been eating very well for some time and his clothing did little to disguise that fact.

“Why are you here?” Detective Stevens asked at last.

Dante gave her a guilty smile.

“I never meant to trap you in this time,” he said.

“Can you send me back?” she asked with sudden eagerness.

Again, Dante gave her that guilty smile.

“I can only send people to their own time,” he said, and then when Detective Stevens gave him a puzzled look he went on. “Everyone, everything has a so-called Native Time that their matter resonates to. It’s by disrupting this resonance that time travel is possible, but the Native Time is always there, like a harmonic frequency. Now, to disrupt someone’s Native Time requires technology and power that I don’t have access to. All I can do is tap into a person’s Native Time and bring that to the foreground. It’s not perfect, and can still be off by as much as several years, but it’ll land the person within no more than a decade or two of their Native Time.”

“That’s fine,” Detective Stevens told him, “As long as I get that far they can send me backwards or forwards as needed to get me the rest of the way.”

“But I already tried to send you to your Native Time,” Dante said, “remember?”

“What? No,” she countered, “you sent me back a couple months.”

“I was pretty surprised myself,” Dante said. “Since everyone else your mother has sent got sent forward to the future. You were pretty dazed when you showed up so I took the time to figure out who you were. I shouldn’t have, but I did.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked, worried at what he might have done while she was unconscious.

“Well, your mother must have figured out pretty quick when you’d been shunted and tried to get you back. But she grabbed the wrong one.”

Dante pulled a small photo album from inside his pack and handed it to Detective Stevens. She looked at the picture on the front cover and froze.

“How did you get this picture?” She demanded.

Dante chuckled.

“That’s my daughter’s school picture from third grade,” he said and his expression told her that he knew exactly what she was thinking.

“That’s not possible,” she told him, “this is a picture of me when I was growing up. Did you steal this from my mom and then come here? Is this why she’s after you?”

“I didn’t steal anything from your mom,” he said, “just look at the rest of the pictures.”

Detective Stevens turned to the first page. There she was, her younger self, possibly eight or nine years old, smiling at the camera and frozen, mid wave, to whoever was holding the camera. Dante was standing beside her, his arm around her shoulder and waving as well.

“We were out for a picnic,” Dante explained, “and your mother wanted to take some pictures. She knew she would be going home soon and wanted to give you some memories of her before she left.”

Detective Stevens had no memories of that day, with or without Dante. Her mother had never been much for going out and doing things like that, especially as she got older.

She flipped through the pages of the album and was greeted time and again by images of herself as a child, smiling and playing. Sometimes Dante was there, sometimes her mother was there. At last she reached the end of the photo album where at last there was a picture she recognized. She and her mother stood side by side, both smiling to the camera but neither one seeming to really mean their smiles. That picture had been something of a metaphor for much of her relationship with her mother lately. It was the only picture of her that her mother displayed in her home.

“Your mother had me take that picture,” Dante explained and there was a hint of anger in his voice, “the day she brought us to her time.”

Detective Stevens met his gaze but his expression was unreadable.

“It’s against the law to bring someone from the past into our time,” she told him as if to discredit his story. “She never would have done that.”

“She shouldn’t have done it,” Dante said, “but she did. You see, she helped me design and build the machine we used to send her back to her time, and then she began working on a way of bringing us to her. ”

“Yeah, I bet you were thrilled with the idea of going to the future and getting away from all of this.”

Dante frowned.

“We never wanted to go,” he explained. “We love her, and wanted her to stay, but it was clear she could never be truly happy in a time that wasn’t her own. Just as we could never be truly happy in a time that wasn’t ours. I tried to make it work, for your sake and for your mothers, but it was no use. Eventually I found out your mother was planning on having our memories modified to make us believe we were from her time and that was the last straw. While your mother was at work we packed our bags and I used a stolen pass card to gain access to the temporal shift generator. I sent us back to our own time and we’ve been hiding ever since. Your mom’s sent a few others before you to try and bring us back but so far I’d been able to keep us safe.”

“You said your daughter was taken in my place,” Detective Stevens remarked and Dante nodded.

“You both have essentially the same temporal signature,” he explained, “and where you’d just been shunted you would have been a little harder to find. Though it may have been intentional. Perhaps she knew it was only a matter of time before you were discovered as being from the past. Then your mother would have had to explain how her daughter had come to be. She told me when we first got married that she wasn’t suppose to have any children since it would make returning to her time more complicated.”

“My mother was only trapped in the past for a few months,” Detective Stevens said, though she knew she was losing ground in the argument.

“That may be what you were told,” Dante said, “It may even be what she’s convinced everyone there of, but she was with me for almost nine years.”

“No,” she said with greater resolution. “I would have remembered this. I would have known about you.”

“You’re mother was already prepared to erase our memories before we fled,” Dante countered, “what makes you think she didn’t go through with it once she got you back? Do you remember your childhood?”

“Of course I do!” Detective Stevens said.

“Then tell me about it.”

She thought back and searched for her past memories.

“In high school my best friends were Caleb and Tiana. They’re married now and have two kids. In college I–

“You see!” Dante interrupted her suddenly, “Do you have any memories from before high school?”

“Well who can remember that far back?”

Dante eyed her knowingly.

“Most people do,” he said. “Hasn’t it ever struck you as odd that you don’t remember your past?”

In fact, many people had commented on this oddity to her whenever it came up but she had somehow always brushed it off. Now with Dante forcing it front and center into her view it looked like a gaping hole she should have seen long ago. She looked down into her lap and was shocked to see tears falling onto it.

“That’s the nature of a memory wipe, though,” Dante said, “your mind will work to fill in the gaps or explain away the absences.”

It couldn’t be true and yet at the same time she knew it was. Her mother, had she been found out regarding Dante and her daughter, would have not only lost her job but she would have been arrested and charged with illegal temporal travel against multiple unwilling subjects, not to mention the illegal memory erasure of her daughter. She would have been locked away for the rest of her life. This was an elegant, if brutal solution to her mothers troubles. Sending Detective Stevens into the past where, given the results from the previous attempts, she would likely be trapped in the past, would clear her of any suspicion and remove Detective Stevens as possible evidence against her. And it seems like it also allowed her mother the opportunity she’d been looking for to get the younger version of her daughter.

“I’m not getting back, am I?” Detective Stevens asked finally.

“No,” Dante admitted, “I don’t think you are. Much in the same way that I don’t think I’m getting my daughter back. Not really.”

He patted her on the knee and then stood up to leave.

“Judging by the fact that you have no memories of me, I’m assuming your mother gave up on trying to get me back,” he sighed, “so I suppose I can stop hiding now.”

He folded up his small chair and packed it away in his backpack and walked to the door.

“I know it’s a lot to take in,” he said, pausing before leaving. “But if it’s alright, I would like to come by again some time. I could tell you about the things you don’t remember, and you could tell me about the things I missed.”

Detective Stevens nodded absently and he left.

Only then did it strike her that he was a man who had just lost his daughter that he’d been trying so hard to protect and must have realized he’d never get to finish raising her. How in the world he was holding it together was beyond her. Perhaps they were both in shock still. Perhaps she could still find a way back, but even if she did, could she ever look at her mother the same way again? Could she even work for the agency? No. She would have to begin getting use to living in this time, in her time, and let the future deal with itself.