Page 8 of Ideal Life

She reached over to her phone on the desk and tapped the screen. It confirmed the time—12:30 a.m.

Talia slapped herself across the cheek, then pinched herself really hard. Wake up.

She opened her laptop to check the time there.

12:31 a.m.

How is this possible?

Then Talia gasped. “No…”

At 11:11, she had wished she could rewind the day to stop the murder.

“Holy shit.”

But that couldn’t really be what had happened, right?

Talia was a scientist, which meant she never accepted the first result without deeper experimentation. So she took a deep breath and turned the crown upward again, just a little, but slowly this time.

Everything around her reversed. Including a bite of cake coming out of her mouth and back onto the fork, then back into the cake itself.

That was gross, but it also wasn’t like spitting out food, because the cake reverted back to being uneaten.

She stared at the reconstructed purple-frosting star. This was very, very difficult to wrap her head around.

Still, the scientist in Talia persevered, and she verified the time on the watch itself, her phone, and her laptop.

12:25 a.m. She’d gone six minutes into the past.

Oh my god.

Her pulse sped up at the possibility that maybe she could go back and stop the Tinder murder from happening.

She wouldn’t know unless she tried.

Talia spun the watch crown hard, and her vision and her body flew into reverse as if sucked into the past at hyperspeed.

Talia

She bolted upright in her bed. Her vision was still wobbly, though, and Talia had to brace herself against the headboard until her brain caught up with her body and where they were in time.

Speaking of time, she checked the watch—1:30 a.m.

Talia frowned. It had been 12:25 a.m. when she spun the watch crown. But she had turned it to go back in time.

She reached for her phone on the nightstand, and she exhaled as the screen came to life: 1:30 a.m. Thursday. She had gone back a full day.

Her brain immediately prodded at the boundaries of her impromptu science experiment. Is that the limit?

Because 1:30 a.m. was exactly twenty-four hours from when the watch had appeared on her wrist. Exactly twenty-four hours from the farthest point “forward” in time that she’d been.

Talia carefully turned the crown toward the up arrows.

The crown wouldn’t move.

Okay, then. At least based on this small sample size of results, it seemed like Talia could rewind up to twenty-four hours max.

Then her eyes went wide.