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  Zoë smiled back. “I’m beginning to see why Jeanne sent us up here together. I guess she knows that I have a few things I refuse to tell her and so do you.”

  “More than a few,” Faith said, and her smile widened.

  “Isn’t it odd that even though Amy is the one with the cute little life, she’s the one having the bad dreams?” Zoë said.

  “Until tonight, I thought they were good dreams.”

  “Me too,” Zoë said as she picked up her sketch pad off the couch.

  “You don’t think there’s any truth to what Amy seems to believe, do you?” Faith asked.

  “You mean about going back in time?” Zoë smiled. “Not in the least. None whatsoever.”

  “That’s what I think too,” Faith said as she looked about the room. It was tidy, nothing left out. She turned out the light as she and Zoë went to their bedrooms.

  The next morning, Amy was the only one who was chipper. She’d had a good night’s sleep after her bad dream, and she felt good. She’d even braided a few strands of her hair, intertwining it with a narrow ribbon her oldest son had painted for her. “I think we should go the first thing this morning,” she said as she flipped pancakes on the grill.

  Zoë was huddled over her sketch pad and Faith was looking at her plate.

  “Come on, you two,” Amy said as she put a tall stack of pancakes on the table. “This will be fun.”

  “I don’t think so,” Faith said.

  Amy sat down beside her. “What is it that you two are so afraid of? Being trapped in the eighteenth century? I told you that Primrose said we’d only be there for three weeks.”

  Zoë looked at her. “I think I can speak for Faith when I say that, no, we’re not afraid of being trapped in the eighteenth century.” Her voice dripped sarcasm.

  Amy ignored her tone. “Then why are you two so glum?”

  “We’re afraid of what we’ll be told!” Faith said loudly. “You may have a wonderful past and a truly glorious future, but I don’t. If this woman is a psychic she might see things that I don’t want to see, she might tell me things I don’t want to know.”

  “Primrose said her sister isn’t a psychic. She—” Amy broke off. They didn’t believe her and Amy wasn’t sure she did either. “Maybe she’ll see something good.”

  Faith just snorted.

  “Glass half empty,” Amy said under her breath. “What about you, Zoë? Are you afraid of the same things?”

  “More or less,” she said. “I know that I did something truly bad in my past and I really don’t want to know what it is.”

  “So you’re going to spend the rest of your life hiding, running from one house to another, and never getting to know anyone?” Amy asked.

  “That sounds good to me,” Zoë said cheerfully.

  “If I could paint, that’s what I’d do,” Faith said. “Escape. Get as far away from my mother-in-law as I can. Did I tell you that when I’m home she calls me three times a day?”

  “Even after you put her in the hospital?” Zoë asked, then bit her tongue for having given that information away.

  “I don’t want to know how you found that out, but yes, even after I beat her up, she still calls me. I’ve changed my number so many times that I can’t count them, but she pays people and Web sites to find it. Wherever I go, she finds me. She keeps three private detectives on retainers.”

  “What does she say when she calls?” Amy asked softly.

  “She cries and wants me to talk to her about Eddie. He was her entire life. She had no friends, no relatives who she liked. She just had Eddie. And me.”

  “That’s it,” Amy said, standing up. “The more I hear from you two, the more upset I become. And to think that I thought I had problems because I like to stay in my safe little world. Let’s go. You two have fifteen minutes, then we’re out of here.”

  “Sometimes I think you actually believe that you’re going to…I can’t even say it out loud,” Zoë said.

  Amy leaned toward her. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m going to make an effort. I’m not going to sit here and whine about my life.”

  “But then, your life is wonderful, isn’t it?”

  “True, it is, but I think that maybe my husband’s life isn’t so great and if there is anything I can do to fix it I’m going to do it.”

  That made Faith and Zoë look at her in astonishment. “All this is about your hunk husband?” Zoë asked.

  “Yes. At least I think it may be. I don’t really know what’s going on, but I want my baby to want to be born to us.”

  Faith and Zoë were still blinking at her.

  “Get dressed,” Amy said. “I’ll tell you about it on the way.”

  “You’re sure about this?” the woman called Madame Zoya said. She was as round as her sister, Primrose, but there was no coziness about her. She was as stern and unbending as her sister was sweet.

  “Yes,” Amy said firmly while the other two said nothing.

  They were in a pretty sunroom of the Victorian house. When Amy had led them down Everlasting Street, Faith said that the street had not been there the day before. “I was right here. I went from that shop to that one.” She pointed to opposite sides of the street. “There was nothing in between them.”

  “This town is magic,” Amy said.

  “Or it needs a good city planner,” Zoë said, looking at the forest around them.

  When they stood on the little porch and rang the bell, Amy said, “I hope Primrose’s sister opens the door. I think that’s the signal that she’ll do it.”

  Faith and Zoë stayed behind her, both of them torn between nervousness and feeling ridiculous.

  A short, stout woman opened the door and her frown had nearly made Faith and Zoë back down the stairs. But Amy smiled broadly and stepped into the house.

  “I received your card and they’re going with me,” she said brightly as she surreptitiously slipped three one-hundred-dollar bills into the woman’s hand. She hadn’t told Faith and Zoë about the money for fear that they’d say that was proof the woman was a huckster.

  She looked at the two women behind Amy. “They don’t really want to do this. They don’t even have my card.”

  “I know,” Amy said, “but they promised and they have to honor that, don’t they?”

  The woman looked Amy up and down. “You usually get your way, don’t you?”

  “I think that may be part of the problem,” Amy said.

  There was a tiny bit of a smile from the woman, then she turned and they followed her to the back of the house, to a room with windows along one wall. She sat behind a big desk and looked at Amy as the three of them sat down.

  “You know the rules?”

  “I think I do,” Amy said, “but maybe you’d better explain them again.”

  “You may go back in time to any three weeks that you want, and when you return, you may choose to remember or not remember.”

  “Remember?” Zoë asked, not understanding.

  The woman looked at Zoë with a hard glare that seemed to go through her. “You were in a serious car wreck, were you not?”

  Zoë just nodded and in her mind she begged the woman not to say more.

  She didn’t. “If you go back and manage to prevent the car accident, you may choose to remember that it happened or not. Your choice.” She looked at all three women. “I must warn you that if you change the past, you will change the future, there is no question of that. If you choose a different…” Hesitating, she looked at Faith. “If you choose a different man back in, say, 1992, when you return here, you will have lived a new life.”

  “So we wouldn’t really change just three weeks,” Faith said, meeting the woman’s eyes.

  “No. It will be your entire life that you’ll change. You’ll make the decision during your three weeks in the past, but I can’t control what happens in your new life.”

  “I’d like to do something that wouldn’t make me end up in mandatory ther