The fog had lifted, but something in the air still hung heavy—like a breath being held, waiting to exhale. When we stepped back into our world, or what we thought was our world, something felt… off.
It was Bobby who first noticed the time discrepancy.
He stood frozen outside the cottage, flipping through his phone's calendar app like it owed him an explanation. "Guys," he said, eyes wide, "we didn't lose time."
Jacob frowned. "What do you mean?"
"We didn't skip forward. We've gone backwards. By three days."
A silence fell over us. I could hear the wind whistling through the trees and my heart beating in my chest.
Three days.
We hadn't lost time in the rift. We'd returned to a time before we even entered.
The implications hit all of us differently. For Bobby, it was excitement—the kind of fevered energy you'd expect from someone handed a mystery with too many variables. For Jacob, it was discomfort. He hated irregularities. Hated things he couldn't plan for or measure. He was already pacing.
Ambrose, of course, broke the tension.
"So… do I have to relive my dramatic torchlight monologue? Or can we fast-forward past that bit?" he said, waving his hand like he was skipping scenes in a movie.
I cracked a small smile, but it faded quickly.
Back inside the cottage, we sat around the fireplace. The warmth was familiar, but the room felt colder somehow. We weren't ready to go back into the rift. Not yet.
"We need to figure out what this means," Bobby said, spreading a makeshift timeline on the table using napkins and a permanent marker. "If the rift spit us out into the past, then that implies it's not just distorting time—it's rewriting our position within it."
Jacob leaned against the wall, arms folded. "We could be stuck in a causality loop for all we know. Going in might change more things next time. If we're not careful, we could end up stepping on our own shadows."
Ambrose perked up. "That sounds like a terrible idea for a yoga move. 'Now slowly inhale, and step on your existential shadow.'"
Despite the laughter it earned, the undertone was clear: we didn't know the rules anymore.
Bobby scribbled equations and diagrams while muttering to himself. "Time anchor, temporal sync point… rift resonance levels. It's all theoretical, but if Evelyn's presence shifted the loop, then she might be the key. Or the catalyst."
"Or the cause," Jacob muttered.
I caught the look on Bobby's face. He didn't like that. But he didn't argue.
The next few days passed slowly. None of us suggested going back. We took walks through the nearby woods—this time, never too far, never past the tree line. We revisited the village, chatted with the old tea-stall lady again, though she seemed to barely recognize us now. That unnerved Ambrose more than he'd admit.
"I'm unforgettable," he said later, mock-offended. "Either time's a jerk, or she's a bad liar."
Jacob kept detailed logs of every hour that passed. He didn't talk much, but I knew he was looking for cracks. Any inconsistency. Any proof that our world hadn't remained untouched.
Bobby, meanwhile, had turned the living room into a pseudo-lab. He'd rigged a tablet with a motion sensor, ran battery tests, even strapped his smartwatch to a squirrel at one point to monitor its biological rhythms. That… didn't go well.
"I think I made an enemy," he told us when he came back scratched and limping.
Each night, we stayed in. No siren. No glowing nodes. No Evelyn.
Just us.
On the fifth day, Jacob finally spoke what we were all feeling.
"I don't think this place is real anymore. Or if it is, we're not in the part that is."
I looked at him. "You mean like a pocket loop?"
He shook his head. "No. Like… we're in a version of our timeline that branched off the moment we entered the rift. And the real version of us is still in there."
Ambrose sat up straighter. "Whoa, that's not funny."
"I'm not trying to be," Jacob replied. "What if we're not the originals?"
Bobby looked up from his notes, lips tight. "That's… plausible. It would explain why the calendar reset but our memories didn't."
I stood. I couldn't sit still anymore. "So what does that make us? Copies?"
"No," Bobby said quietly. "You can't copy a soul. Just a state."
It was the first time I saw real fear in his eyes.
The next morning, Jacob and I walked out to the cliffside near the resort. We hadn't said much to each other in days.
He broke the silence. "You ever feel like we passed the point of no return weeks ago?"
I nodded. "But I'm starting to think there wasn't a return point to begin with."
He chuckled. "Figures. You always were the poetic one."
I looked at him. "You scared?"
"Terrified," he said simply. "But I'd rather be scared with you guys than lost alone."
We sat there for a long time. Just watching the wind move through the trees.
Back at the cottage, Bobby had made a breakthrough—or so he said.
"I think… the rift node reacts to emotional resonance."
"What?" Ambrose asked, mouth full of cereal.
"Think about it. The sirens. The timing. Evelyn's arrival. They all happened when one of us was at a breaking point. Maybe the rift isn't just spatial—it's reactive. It opens to those who need it most."
"Like a therapist with bad timing," Ambrose added.
Bobby ignored him. "I think it pulled us back because it needed us to see something. Or stop something."
Jacob leaned over the map. "What if we already did? And this is just the reset?"
We looked at each other.
I didn't have answers.
But something told me… we were being watched.
That night, as we all turned in, I paused outside the window, watching the treeline.
For just a second, I thought I saw Evelyn.
But when I blinked, she was gone.
And the forest was still.
Too still.