Page 7 of Ideal Life

Talia slumped into her chair and set the cake on her desk, where she shoveled giant chunks of it into her mouth, bite after bite, without stopping.

She got through about a third of the cake before the buttercream was just too much, and she threw it all up into her trash can.

Then she crawled onto the purple sofa on the opposite side of her office—the one she’d catnapped on many times during the all-nighters she’d pulled to build this company—and curled up as small as she could.

Talia hadn’t meant to fall asleep—she wouldn’t have thought it possible, given the circumstances—but she had. It was still dark outside her office windows, though, so she couldn’t have been out for too long.

Groaning, she sat up and wiped the drool from the corner of her mouth, the glass face of her watch cold against her skin.

Wait, what?

She didn’t wear a watch.

But there was definitely a watch on her wrist now.

It was an elegant analog clock with a silver link strap, black roman numerals on a white face, showing that it was one thirty in the morning. On the right was a blue knob—the crown—with two little arrows on it, one pointing up and the other, down.

Talia had never seen this watch before in her life.

She jumped up from the sofa and poked her head outside of her office door. “Hello? Are you guys pranking me?” Maybe some of her employees had come back upstairs, seen their boss passed out in a sugar fugue, and decided to play a joke on her.

There was no one there, though. And Talia was a light sleeper. Surely, she would have noticed if someone took her arm and strapped a watch onto it.

Also, she had locked the door to her office.

What if I was the one who put the watch on and forgot? But that was unlikely. Talia had had about half a glass of champagne the whole evening. She couldn’t have procured a nice watch and then completely blanked about it.

Maybe she was too groggy to figure it out right now. She turned her attention instead to the watch itself—namely, the arrows on the crown.

“Why label it?” she mumbled. “Kind of obvious that the knob goes either one way or the other.”

Still, she turned the crown in the direction of the down arrow.

Nothing happened. The knob didn’t budge, and the hands on the watch didn’t move like they ought to. It was like it was stuck on the current time.

She used a little more force, but the crown still didn’t give.

So Talia turned it the other way.

The crown spun easily with an accompanying mechanical whirring beneath it as the internal gears moved the watch’s hands backward.

But all around Talia, her vision whipped into a frenzy, too, like she was rewinding a movie at 4x speed.

“What the…?”

She stopped turning the watch crown.

All of a sudden, she found herself not sitting on the couch but at her desk with a partially demolished sheet cake in front of her and a fork in her hand. Her stomach lurched a bit, as if she were on a roller coaster. In reverse.

What just happened?

The time on the watch said it was 12:30 a.m., a full hour earlier than it had been a few seconds ago.

Talia shook her head. This has to be a dream.

The watch still claimed it was 12:30 a.m.

If Sam were here, he would be giving her an “I’ve told you before” shrug. He was always wary of new technology and warned Talia against cavalierly adopting it. Usually, she laughed him off. But what the heck had she just done?