12
My first test jumps went smoothly, despite the fact that I was terrified. I set two stable points within the house—one in the library, which was my departure point, and one in the kitchen, which was my destination. I had planned to do my first jump from the library to the kitchen at around noon, when I had been down there eating lunch, but Katherine suggested avoiding situations where I might encounter myself.
“Why?” I asked. “What will happen if I see myself? Does it disrupt the space-time continuum or something like that?”
Katherine laughed. “No, dear,” she said. “It’s just very tough on your brain. I’d wait a bit, until you’re more accustomed to the process. It’s not something you want to do regularly, anyway, and never for more than a minute or so. You have to reconcile two conflicting sets of memories and it always gave me the most awful headache. Saul claimed that he had no problem with it, but everyone else I knew dreaded the test where we had to go backward and engage a past self in conversation. We’d been warned that we would be totally useless for hours afterward and they were correct—it’s a real sensory overload. I heard some lurid stories about the early days of CHRONOS, when they were testing the limits of the system. A few people became rather… unhinged, if you will, trying to reconcile several hours’ worth of conflicting memories. One girl had to be institutionalized. Really unpleasant.”
That sounded almost as bad as disrupting the space-time continuum, so I discarded any ideas I might have had about sitting down for a long chat with myself. I decided to jump backward about three hours, to a quarter after twelve, when Connor had gone down to the kitchen to fix a sandwich. I was so nervous that it took nearly a minute for me to pull up the visual of the kitchen and another thirty seconds or so to set the arrival time. Once I had it locked in, I followed Katherine’s advice and blinked my eyes, holding the image of the kitchen in my mind. When I opened my eyes again, I was in the kitchen. Connor was by the fridge, stacking ham on a slice of wheat bread. The kitchen clock read a quarter after noon.
“And what are you staring at?” he asked, glancing down at his shirt as though looking for spilled mustard or mayo.
I smiled at him and then focused again on the medallion, pulling up the image of the stable point that I’d set near one of the library windows. The image was clear enough that I could see Katherine’s reflection in the window, looking toward the spot from which I had just embarked. I concentrated to pull up the time display, which was stamped with my departure time, plus five seconds. I blinked, as before, and opened my eyes to find Katherine a few steps in front of me, with an elated smile on her face.
“I didn’t think I would ever see anyone do that again.” There were tears in her eyes as she hugged me. “You know, Kate—we might just have a shot at this.”
The next morning, as I was reading through more of Katherine’s diary entries, I realized we were taking the wrong track in trying to pin down the murder date. “Why don’t I just watch the jump sites around that time for a few minutes just before Katherine’s scheduled arrival? We start with the last jumps, and the first one where she appears—that would have to be the trip during which she was murdered, right? Because she wouldn’t have been alive to make any jumps after that.”
Connor and Katherine gave each other an amused look. “Now that we have someone who can make the CHRONOS equipment work, that’s an excellent idea,” Katherine said. “This time, we were the ones thinking too linearly, I guess.”
Katherine hadn’t included the arrival time in the list of dates she had printed, so Connor went back through the diaries to pull out that information, pausing every few minutes to pull another pretzel rod from the clear plastic tub by his keyboard. I wasn’t sure which was more amazing—that Connor was thin despite the constant munching, or that his keyboard continued to function despite the variety of crumbs that were collected between the keys.
When he finished the list, I scanned through and noticed that several of the dates were repeated or overlapped. “Why are the same dates here twice?”
Katherine shrugged. “There were a lot of different events going on. Sometimes a meeting held at one end of the fairgrounds conflicted with something else we needed to observe—especially on jumps where Saul and I traveled as a team or where we were gathering some information for another historian. We did that a lot in Chicago, because we were the resident ‘Expo Experts’ and almost anyone who studied American history—politics, literature, music, science, you name it—had someone or something they wanted us to observe. For example—you’ve heard of Scott Joplin?”
I nodded. “A piano player, right? Ragtime?”
“Correct,” she said. “Richard—you remember, the friend who swapped places with me on that last jump? Well, he had information that Joplin led a band at a Chicago nightclub during the time of the fair, but there were no specifics. He would have had to spend a lot of time preparing for an 1890s trip, but it was a pretty simple matter for Saul and me to ask around, make a side trip to hear Joplin, and take back a recording for Richard to analyze. I also picked up some data for a colleague studying serial killers—there was a rather nasty one preying on young women during the Expo. And I got a brochure announcing Colored American Day at the fair for someone studying race relations.”
She made a face. “That was an interesting one—the leaders of the Expo decided it would be a good idea to give away watermelons to commemorate the occasion. Frederick Douglass was there representing Haiti—he was consul general to Haiti at the time. Let’s just say he was not amused.”
I laughed. “I would imagine not. But wasn’t it kind of risky to have several versions of yourself wandering around the same place?”
“Not really,” she said. “There were thousands of visitors each day, so as long as we kept away from the area where our earlier selves were working, there really wasn’t much chance of anyone spotting both sets of us. The CHRONOS costume and makeup department was also incredible. I saw myself on one occasion crossing the street, and I didn’t even realize it was me until I was halfway down the block. And we generally kept a pretty low profile, observing but not really interacting much—well, I did, at any rate. Saul clearly had different ideas near the end.”
The last jump before Saul sabotaged the system was to Boston 1873, when he and Katherine had quarreled. There were one or two other jumps to Boston, but most of the twenty-two jumps prior to that were all to Chicago, at various points during the year 1893.
“The Expo was in 1893, right?” I picked up the Log of Stable Points and began scrolling backward, beginning with the last entries on the list. “I really think it’s going to be one of those dates. After all, it was the 1890s diary that was stolen on the Metro.”
I started with Boston, however, since those jumps were the last two that they had taken together. There were seventeen stable point locations listed in the Boston area, but Katherine said that she and Saul had only used the one a few blocks from Faneuil Hall on their trips. The location, like many others, was a narrow alley. I pulled up the stable point and set the time for one minute prior to Katherine’s scheduled arrival: 04181873_06:47—April 18th, 1873, at 6:47 A.M.
A large rat ran into view after a few minutes, which kind of creeped me out, and I nearly lost focus. A few seconds later, however, a man appeared—so close that I could have counted individual threads in the weave of his black coat. As he moved away, and his face came partially into view, it was clear that this was Saul Rand—above-average height, with dark brown hair, pale skin, and the same intense expression I had seen in the two images in Katherine’s diaries. His beard was trimmed closely with no mustache, and my first impression was that my grandfather had been a slightly shorter, more handsome, but not very pleasant Abraham Lincoln, although that impression was at least partly due to the tall, black stovepipe hat on his head. Katherine was not with him.
Saul turned abruptly in my direction and I drew in a sharp breath as his eyes, narrowed and piercing, stared almost directly into mine, as though he knew I was watching him. I finally exhaled when I realized that he was just scanning the alleyway to make sure he’d arrived unobserved.
I tried the next-to-last jump and drew a total blank. The jump was either rescheduled or Saul skipped it, because although I waited several minutes, no one showed up, not even my good friend, the rat.
Since Katherine hadn’t appeared at either of the Boston jumps, I crossed that city from the list and focused on Chicago. There were four stable point locations listed within the fairgrounds, and the one used for most of the jumps was labeled as the Wooded Island—a secluded, shady area, with floral vines and lush foliage. I could see a cabin of some sort about twenty yards away, with large animal horns scattered about the exterior and a few park benches along the pathway. No one appeared on the first date I tried, although I observed, through the cover of the leaves surrounding my vantage point, a few people strolling along the sidewalk in the morning light.
On the next attempt, however, I hit pay dirt. About fifteen seconds into the surveillance, my view was suddenly obstructed by two figures. As they moved away from the stable point, I could see that one of them was Katherine. I immediately felt two strong, conflicting emotions—relief that we’d found the correct time and dismay that I would soon have to dress in something like the ornate period costume that she was wearing.
The tall man from the 1873 jump was next to her. His beard was gone, replaced by a long handlebar mustache. He gave the surroundings another quick scan, as he had done on the Boston jump, and then grabbed Katherine’s elbow to help her up the slight incline to the walkway. She held up the skirt of her gray dress. It was trimmed in dark purple and the outfit was topped off by a small hat with a ridiculously large lavender feather. As the two of them walked past the wooden cabin, a dark-haired boy of about eight or nine emerged from inside, a broom in his hand, and began to sweep away the leaves that had accumulated on the walkway.
I pulled my gaze sharply to the left to turn off the log display. The abrupt visual change from an autumn morning in the park to the interior scene of the library, where Connor was hunched over a computer and Katherine was replacing books on a shelf, was a bit disconcerting.
I carried the list over and put it on the table beside Connor, tapping the target date with my fingernail. “Found it. Chicago. A jump from April 3rd, 2305, to October 28th, 1893. Looks like it was the only jump to that date.”
Connor nodded at first, and then shook his head, pointing to an entry near the top of the log with one of the pretzel rods he was munching. “Yeah, the only jump specifically to the 28th—but look, here’s a two-day solo trip, October 27th to 29th, from February 2305.”
“Great,” I replied, rolling my eyes as I sank down into Katherine’s desk chair. “So there will be two Katherines strolling around the fair to confuse me.”
“Don’t know what you’re complaining about,” he said, taking another bite of pretzel. “At least you’ll get out of the house for a while.”
Katherine took the list from Connor. “I remember those trips—there was a lot going on. The fair was scheduled to close at the end of October, and it was horribly crowded with visitors who had procrastinated but didn’t want to miss out. There was a huge celebration planned for the last day, with fireworks and speeches, but the murder meant that everything was canceled.”
“Murder?” I asked. “Oh, yeah—you mentioned something about a string of killings at the fair…”
“No, no. This was separate. An assassination, actually.”
“McKinley?”
She shook her head. “President McKinley was killed at the next World’s Fair, in New York, in 1901. This time, the target was the mayor of Chicago. Carter Harrison. A very nice man… good sense of humor. Saul and I spent most of the day with him on the second jump and I was sad to think that he would be dead before the day was over.” She paused for a moment and then began to thumb through the stack of diaries on the desk. “Oh, right. That’s the diary Kate had on the subway. Hold on, it will just take a second to access the backup file.”
She grabbed the top diary and flipped it open, clicking a few buttons to locate what she needed. “Okay, here we go. The February jump was to view the reaction to the assassination and the final days of the fair—more general research for CHRONOS than part of my individual research agenda. Cultural research on the Midway, mostly. It was a nice little microcosm, with workers imported from around the world mixing with people from around the United States who had come to Chicago in search of work—the Expo took place in the middle of a major economic depression, you know.”
She chuckled. “I was posing as a writer for a travel magazine—complete with a huge, heavy Kodak camera around my neck. They called it a portable camera, but I was always very happy to take it off at the end of the day. Cameras were the latest fad, especially among the younger fairgoers—the older folks called them ‘Kodak fiends’ because they would jump out and snap pictures without asking.
“It was a fun trip,” she added, “but not very eventful, as I recall. I interviewed several people from the Dahomey Village and picked up a bit of information for a crime historian on a waitress at the German beer garden who had just disappeared. He thought she might have been one of the victims of the serial killer, but I never found any evidence one way or the other.
“The jump from April,” she said, tapping the screen again, “was triggered by an event that caught my attention during an earlier trip—American Cities’ Day, when about five thousand mayors from around the country visited the Expo. Mayor Harrison was scheduled to show a delegation of about fifty mayors and their spouses around the fair, prior to his big speech before the full assembly of mayors that afternoon. One of the individuals in this select group was the first female mayor in the nation, Dora Salter, also a leader in the WCTU—Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Prohibition? Anti-alcohol?”
I had a vague recollection of someone’s ninth-grade history project about Carry Nation bashing up a bar with her ax, so I nodded.
“Salter was no longer an active mayor at the time, and I suspect that someone with a twisted sense of humor added her to that invitation list,” Katherine continued. “Carter Harrison was well known for his gallantry toward the ladies, but he was a hard drinker and most definitely not in favor of the WCTU’s anti-vice agenda. I thought there might be some interesting conversations between the two, so Saul and I blended into the group, with him claiming to be the mayor of a little town in Oregon and me as his wife. But it was really a waste of time—Salter turned out to be this meek little mouse of a woman and the two of them never even spoke after they were introduced.”
“You have to wonder why she ran for political office if she was shy. Especially back then,” I added, “when most women couldn’t even vote.”
Katherine nodded. “Women could vote in local elections in Salter’s state—Kansas—but she didn’t actually choose to run. Some of the men in the town added her name to the ballot as a joke, and they were very surprised to discover that most of the women and quite a few of the men preferred her to the other candidate. I do have to admire her for turning the tables on them and actually taking the job when she was elected, but that was apparently the extent of her activism for women’s rights.
“A very disappointing trip overall,” Katherine said. “Although I did finally manage a ride on the Ferris wheel. The line was always too long when I went on my few solo jumps, and Saul was never willing to wait for me when we went together—he is terribly afraid of heights. This time we were in the group with the mayor, however, so we were moved straight to the front of the line. A lot of people decided to wait on the ground, but Saul didn’t want to look like he was a coward. So he was green the entire time and nearly hurled on the peanut vendor when we got off,” she added, with a very satisfied smile.
With the date and general location of Katherine’s murder nailed down, we shifted the focus over the next few days to getting me ready—both mentally and physically—to attend the Exposition. The physical side of the preparations involved yards and yards of silk and lace and a corset that I loathed from the first moment it arrived via UPS. Katherine still had her clothes from the planned 1853 jump, but they were forty years out of date. That would hardly do in an era where fashions shifted with the whim of Parisian designers, even though it took several months for news of those changes to reach America from across the ocean.
“So why can’t we just forget all this and let me go dressed as a barmaid?” I asked. “Or one of those Egyptian dancers I saw in the photographs? They looked pretty comfortable…”
Katherine sniffed disdainfully as she sat down at the computer and opened a browser window. “You’ve read enough about this era that you should understand their perceptions of class, Kate. You have no idea where you’ll need to go and whom you’ll need to speak with. A barmaid could never approach the group I was with that day without drawing unnecessary attention. If you’re dressed as a lady, you can ask a question of anyone, regardless of their social class. The proper attire opens doors…”
Katherine ran a search for historical images of dresses from the 1890s and I was surprised to see that there were actual fashion magazines from that era available online. A publication called The Delineator even included tips on how to create the dresses, accessories, and hairstyles.
A local bridal designer came to the house the next day to help design my costume. She raised a well-manicured eyebrow at Katherine’s insistence that the dress be reversible, with a different color fabric on the inside, and that it have two hidden pockets, one in the bodice of the dress and another in the undergarments.
This made sense from our perspective, since I might have to stay an extra day and couldn’t easily walk around the Expo with luggage. I also needed quick access to the CHRONOS key, and Katherine was determined that I have a place to hide a spare medallion and some extra cash, just in case. However, a reversible dress with hidden pockets—heavily lined to contain the light from the medallion—made little sense for a costume party, which was our cover story. After a brief hesitation, the designer simply nodded, showing she was savvy enough not to question eccentric requests by someone willing to pay her outrageous prices.
My role in all this was to stand impatiently as the assistant took my measurements and then to endure repeated fittings, pin sticks, and admonitions to stand straight and stop slumping. The end result was an outfit that, while admittedly the height of 1893 fashion, was going to be hot, stiff, and a royal pain to wear.
When we weren’t engaged in fittings, I read and reread Katherine’s diary entries for the target dates, memorized maps of the Exposition, and combed through dozens of historical accounts of the exhibits and of 1890s Chicago. In addition to the accounts in Katherine’s library, I pulled up documents from the internet.
On two different occasions, Trey rented documentaries about the Exposition and Chicago in the late 1800s. Several were about the Exposition itself, and they really brought the images and stories I’d been reading to life.
One of them gave me the creeps, however. It was filmed like a horror movie, but it was actually a documentary about Herman Mudgett, the sociopathic killer Katherine had mentioned. Posing as Dr. H. H. Holmes, a physician and pharmacist, Mudgett had killed dozens, maybe even hundreds, of young women during the time he lived in Chicago. Several of them were women he had married or simply charmed out of their money, but most were total strangers. He had the perfect setup—a building he owned near the Expo was transformed into the World’s Fair Hotel, catering to female visitors. Some of the rooms had been specifically equipped for torture; in other cases, he piped gas into tightly sealed, windowless rooms through small holes he drilled into the wall, and watched through a peephole as the women asphyxiated. Then he dumped their remains into lime pits in the basement and, in many cases, sold their perfectly articulated skeletons to medical schools for a bit of extra cash.
We didn’t make it all the way through that show. I’m not a big fan of horror movies, even of the true-crime variety, so I ejected the DVD when it became clear that the three little kids Mudgett had been watching for a business partner weren’t going to survive, either. We spent the next hour watching a much more pleasant documentary about Jane Addams and her efforts to help Chicago’s poor. I was still on edge, so we rewatched The Princess Bride to get my mind off the murders. And despite all of that, I had to sleep with the bathroom light on that night.
Most of the history that I read and watched was the same between the two timelines, except for a few references to Cyrist leaders who, like the leaders of all other major religions, had attended the World Parliament of Religions at the Expo in late September. And there were some other oddities, such as a picture of a smiling Mark Twain entering the tethered balloon ride with several young Egyptian dancers—although Twain had, according to Katherine’s history books from the pre-Cyrist timeline, fallen ill upon his arrival in Chicago and never left his hotel room.
Even though I’ve never had a great passion for history, I found the reading more interesting than I would have imagined. It felt less like research and more like reading a tour guide in preparation for an upcoming vacation, even if it wasn’t exactly a trip I would have chosen on my own.
I was also working on the practical side of things, perfecting short, in-house jumps with the medallion. I could now focus on a stable point and set the display in under three seconds. I even showed off for Trey a few times, popping up in the foyer when he arrived for a quick kiss, and then back to the library.
I also set an extra stable point in the living room and confirmed that I could, as Katherine had suspected, jump from point A to point B to point C, without returning to point A first. The restrictions that had limited the CHRONOS historians to round-trip jumps were a safety feature mandated by headquarters, and not something that was hardwired into the medallion. Unlike Saul, Katherine, and the other original CHRONOS crew, I could travel when and where I chose, assuming the existence of a nearby stable point. We also suspected that I could travel back to a known stable point from a location that hadn’t been previously set as a stable point, although Katherine wasn’t keen on having me test that possibility. Connor couldn’t think of any logical reasons why it wouldn’t work, but Katherine insisted that we should consider that to be a last-resort, emergency exit option.
The next test, before attempting a long-distance jump, either geographical or chronological, was a short hop to a local stable point. The nearest location in the CHRONOS system that was easily accessible was the Lincoln Memorial—to the left of Lincoln’s chair, outside the roped-off area, in a section that was somewhat obscured by shadows. It was listed as a stable point between 1923 and 2092. I was tempted again to ask Katherine exactly what happens in 2092, but suspected I would still be told that it was none of my business. The memorial was staffed from 8 A.M. to midnight—and was also more likely to have visitors during those hours—so we decided that a 1 A.M. arrival would be a safe bet. Katherine and Connor were both concerned that, this early in the training, I might get there and not be able to lock in the return location, so Trey had offered to be there with a ride home, just in case.
We scheduled my departure for Friday at 11 P.M. Trey was in the library when I left. I gave him a big, brave smile and said, “One A.M., Lincoln Memorial. Don’t stand me up, okay?”
He squeezed my hand and said with a huge smile, “Our first date outside the house? I’ll be there, don’t worry.”
Katherine pressed her lips together firmly, her eyes anxious. “No dawdling, Kate. I mean it. You come straight back, okay?”
“She will,” Trey said. “We’re just joking. No unnecessary risks, I promise.”
She gave him a brusque nod and turned back to me. “You don’t have to be in the exact same spot when you leave—the key has a reasonable range on it—but get as close as you can.”
I released Trey’s hand and pulled up the stable point. I had been practicing the location all day, and had watched hundreds of visitors climb the steps to the memorial, taking photographs and videos, but I now took the additional steps of pulling up the time display and locking in my arrival time by shifting my gaze on the display to the appropriate options and blinking once. It was almost like a mouse click, although I had to wonder what happened if you were trying to select and dust blew into your face. I glanced at the final control, then took a deep breath and blinked.
A warm evening breeze told me that I had arrived before I even opened my eyes. After looking around for a minute, I saw Trey leaning against one of the nearby columns. He was holding a brown bag and a large soda.
I walked toward him, breathing in deeply. “Oh, yum—I smell onion rings.”
“Yes, you do,” he replied. I had confessed a few days before that I really, really missed the onion rings from O’Malley’s, the neighborhood bar and grill where Mom and I often ate on weekends.
I smiled and stood on tiptoe to kiss him. “Thank you. But you’re spoiling me, you know. And two minutes—then I should head back. Not that Katherine would know either way,” I admitted, “but we promised.”
He sat the bag and soda on the steps and pulled me into his arms. “I know, I know. We’ll eat fast—I’m going to make you share those onion rings. I even brought a mint, so if you eat neatly for a change”—he laughed as he blocked my punch to his arm—“and if you avoid breathing in their faces when you return, our secret is safe.”
It was a beautiful night and the romantic glow from the lights and the reflecting pool made me wish we could do ordinary things like this all the time. I was feeling more and more like someone under quarantine.
Trey was apparently on the same wavelength. “Too bad we can’t do this more often. Especially with your birthday this weekend…”
“And how did you know my birthday was this weekend?” I had purposefully avoided thinking about the day, knowing that it would only make me think of past birthdays, Mom, Dad, and everything else that was now missing.
He gave me a sly smile. “I have my ways. Think Katherine would give us a temporary furlough for a night out?”
I sighed. “I think we both know the answer to that. This will probably be our only night out for some time, unless you’d like to come with me to the World’s Fair?”
“Chicago I could probably do,” he said. “Eighteen ninety-three might be a problem, however.”
“True,” I admitted.
I hesitated for a moment, taking another onion ring from the bag. There was one thing I really wanted to know more about—and one person I felt I needed to see—before making the trip to Chicago.
“Maybe you could take me to church instead?”
“What?” Trey laughed for a moment and then stopped. “Oh. Charlayne?”
I nodded. “She’s not the entire reason, but yes, I want to see her.” I turned toward him. “I also want to see what they’re up to, Trey. The Cyrists. I mean, right now, my main motivations for changing this timeline are personal—getting my parents back and being able to leave the house without this damned medallion. But Katherine and Connor seem to think that the Cyrists are…”
“Evil?” he asked.
“Yeah. I guess that’s the right word. Granted, I’ve only been to one service at the Cyrist temple—and that was before the last time shift—but I just didn’t get that sense. And, on top of that, I can’t say I’m totally down with the idea of a future where many of the most important decisions you make in life are decided while you’re still an embryo.”
“I know,” he said. “I can understand why they do it, but it doesn’t leave much room for individual choice, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t. I don’t doubt that Saul’s methods are evil—I mean, he pretty clearly killed Katherine to set this up—but what about the larger movement? I feel like there’s so much that I don’t understand. And, if the Cyrists as a whole are as rotten as Connor and Katherine believe them to be, I guess I want to try and get a better idea of what I’m up against.”
Trey thought for a minute, and then nodded, giving my shoulders a squeeze. “When and where? They have something going on at the temples most days, but the main services are on Sunday mornings, right?”
“They are. Could you pick me up here around seven, before the guards arrive? If I get caught… sneaking out, I’ll just act like I’m practicing a short jump. I do that enough that Katherine shouldn’t think anything of it. And I’ve been to the temple on Sixteenth, so I’m at least somewhat familiar with the layout.”
“Why do you need to know the layout?” he asked, a suspicious look in his eye.
I shrugged. “Well… I mainly want to see Charlayne and I’m probably just going to ask some questions, but I might need to… look around a bit. I don’t know. I’m playing this by ear.”
Trey frowned slightly and then leaned his head down to nibble on my earlobe. “It’s a very pretty ear, too. Let’s just hope we can keep it attached to your head. Those Dobermans look hungry.”
I elbowed him. “They don’t keep guard dogs on the prowl during services, silly. But if you’re worried, we’ll bring a few of Daphne’s dog biscuits to bribe them.”
The onion rings were now reduced to a few tasty crumbs at the bottom of the bag. I gave Trey a good-bye kiss and popped the mint into my mouth as I walked back over to the spot near Lincoln’s chair. “I’ll see you again in just a sec,” I said, pulling up the library stable point with the medallion. “But you’ll next see me tomorrow night for dinner—so drive safe, okay?”
Now that I wasn’t nervous, I accessed the location quickly, and when I opened my eyes again I was back in the library, where Trey, Katherine, and Connor were staring at me, with slightly anxious expressions.
“Lincoln sends his best,” I said with a grin.
A few minutes later, I walked Trey to the door, since he still needed to get across town for our meeting. “Unbelievable,” he said, when I kissed him good night and slipped the last little sliver of the mint into his mouth with my tongue. “You taste like minty onion rings. I was going to surprise you, but it really doesn’t seem like a surprise now.”
“It was very sweet of you and it will be a surprise. Or was a surprise,” I amended. “Take your pick.”