January 25
Two weeks had passed without a call from John. She'd spent a lot of time in various states of unhappiness - when she could afford the time to luxuriate in her emotions, that is. Most of her time was taken up with the course load from hell. On top of that, she was spending every free moment she had researching time travel and fluctuations, but was coming up empty-handed. She hoped that at the very least John was doing what he could to find an explanation.
College was proving to be quite the obstacle. She remembered it being tough, but she'd conveniently forgotten all the pain she'd endured to graduate with both a bachelors and a masters in four years. But at least she had the fortitude of an eighteen-year-old again, and found the sleepless nights to be much more bearable than they had been just a few weeks ago in 2002. Still, nothing eased the pain of the grinding, never-ending cycle of lectures, studies, tests, and papers. There wasn't much to be done, however. She'd never regretted her decision to go to Brown or to endure this hell. Sometimes she wondered how her life would have gone had she stayed in Academia, but joining the FBI had always consoled her. Her life, her struggles, everything had all suddenly made sense. There was nothing major she wanted to change. And it had led her to John.
It occurred to her at some point that John was sleeping with Barbara. Of course he was. He was happy to be back. He'd said it himself – it was good to be back with his wife before things went bad. And of course he didn't want his wife to suspect he had something going on on the side. The rational part of her brain told her that this was how it had to be. But the rest of her brain felt the stabbing pain of rejection that didn't exist in 2002 and couldn't be avoided now.
She also suspected that John was not really working on this as hard as he had promised her he would. How could she expect him to do any investigating when there was a smiling son to give him joy? Obviously, she would have to shoulder the burden. She managed to squeeze in a meeting with a professor of physics in between her classes. The man was delighted to talk at length about time travel, which would perhaps forever be just theory or maybe even fanciful thinking, he'd said. But as soon as she asked about souls being transferred, rather than whole bodies, he scowled as only a professor could scowl and advised her to take her questions to the philosophy department.
There was no place for her or her feelings in this world. John was well beyond her grasp. But would she be capable of figuring out a way to return them both to 2002, a way that would inevitably take Luke away from John yet again? She again wondered why they were here. If John had been returned to save Luke, then why was he returned now? It would have made far more sense for him to be returned just before the abduction. And what was her purpose here? There was none, not that she could figure. And if there was no real purpose for their return to this particular spot in time, then it suggested to her that whatever had happened had little if anything to do with them.