2:17 A.M.
It was something entirely different — deeper, far more real than anything she'd experienced before, something with the texture of an actual memory, not imagination.
She finally looked toward the clock on the wall, her hand still visibly trembling.
It read 9:47 P.M. — a perfectly ordinary time, with no connection to the number she'd just seen in that sudden flash.
But looking at any clock now, whatever time it showed, no longer felt ordinary at all.
Eliana stayed on the floor a while longer, her back against the leg of the chair, and let herself ask, for the first time out loud, the question she'd been circling for days without daring to land on it.