Prologue

I'll remember that day as long as I live. Tuesday, June 23^rd, 2009, was a very warm early summer day in Wisconsin. I'd finished my standard wage-slave thing for the day, writing in-house software for a small company, and had just sat down to read while supper simmered.

That's when it struck me! All of the books that I was reading at that moment were time travel stories! The paperback that I had in the kitchen was Terry Pratchett's "Night Watch", I had "Outlander" marked and sitting by the bed and my ebook reader showed I was part way through David Weber's "Apocalypse Troll". It was a very strange conjunction as I didn't have many books dealing with time travel in my library. I'm sure thinking about all of those stories at once is what caused my mind to wander down some new, at least for me, paths.

What would have happened, I wondered, if I had made different choices at various times during my life? If I hadn't climbed that tree when I was 9, falling and shattering my arm, what would have been different? If I'd buckled down and applied for scholarships in high school I would probably never have met my first wife — what would the rest of my life have been like then? Would I ever have met my second wife, who, while I was musing, was starting to help put dinner together, if I hadn't joined the Navy — even though I didn't meet her until long after I was out?

The big question, though, was the one that stayed with me for the rest of the evening: What would my life have been like if I'd fought to stay with my father and stepmother in Denver rather than being shuffled off to stay, supposedly just for the summer, with my mother and her new husband in Tacoma? That change cost me my few friends — there were never many — and set me on a direct course to those musings on that fateful Tuesday. At the time, and for most of the years that followed, I felt the change in scenery had been a net gain even with having to try to build new friendships. There was always one nagging issue, though; my relationship with my youngest stepsister, Trish.

After dinner, and all of the normal post cooking cleanup, I put down my book and just kicked back to think about what my life might have been like. The question was a hard one — I hadn't stayed in touch with my father or anyone else down there. I'd only seen Trish once after I boarded that flight to Sea-Tac, and that was only briefly when my grandparents dragged me down to see my father the summer before my sophomore year in high school. Even then she had been open and friendly — a far cry from her mother's and next older sister's reactions to me.

I was still pondering those unanswerable questions as I drifted off to sleep that night next to my wife of 22 years. The morning would bring more questions than answers.