On Friday evening, Sabrina had planned to have dinner with her husband, William, at the Spanish restaurant they frequented.
For once, she wasn't working late. She carefully stacked the design drafts on her desk, aligning each page before pressing them flat. As she stepped out of the office, she instinctively glanced back.
The lights were still on inside. Susan remained at her desk—her revised proposal needed to be resent to the client.
Night had just settled over the city. The glass windows reflected Sabrina's blurred silhouette.
The elevator took her straight down to the underground garage.
Her phone rang just as she reached for the car door.
William.
His voice on the other end was tense. A case had taken an unexpected turn. He needed to return to the office immediately—to go over documents with his assistant, to retrace details, to search for something they might have missed.
Sabrina was silent for a moment.
The garage echoed with a hollow stillness.
"All right," she said.
The call ended.
But after starting the car, she didn't head home.
With a slight turn of the wheel, the headlights swept across the concrete walls as she drove toward the bar in Brooklyn they often visited.
—
The bar was dimly lit. The music was low, as if filtered through water.
She ordered a whiskey on the rocks.
The ice shifted slowly in the glass.
Sabrina scrolled through her phone, the cold glow of the screen reflecting on her face. She wasn't really reading anything.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a familiar figure entering.
Frank.
They had been coming here often over the past few months.
They had met a year ago—on a flight from Beijing to New York.
The flight had started smoothly, but midway through, they entered a dense storm. It came without warning.
The aircraft shook violently. Overhead compartments rattled with dull, heavy thuds. Some passengers began to pray.
Time seemed to stretch.
The plane was forced to make an emergency landing at a temporary airport. After a brief stop, it took off again and eventually arrived safely in New York.
—At least, that's how they remembered it.
After that harrowing experience, they exchanged contact information.
It should have ended there.
But it didn't.
After returning to New York, Sabrina began to dream—frequently.
In her dreams, there was another world.
In that world, she was not Sabrina.
She was "Lihua."
A university computer science lecturer in Beijing. Her husband was a chief neurosurgeon at Tiantan Hospital. They had three children.
The details were unsettlingly vivid:
A crack in the kitchen tiles.
A crooked book on the shelf.
Rain tapping against the window while a child burned with fever.
It didn't feel like a dream.
Frank's experience was similar.
The same turbulence.
The same lightning.
The same sense of falling.
And the faint sound of a little girl crying in the cabin.
Since then, they had been meeting here regularly.
Drinking.
Reconstructing their dreams.
Comparing details.
They had begun to wonder—
Was it trauma reshaping the subconscious?
Or something else—something like parallel timelines?
Sabrina traced the rim of her glass.
Frank sat across from her.
They exchanged a glance.
No greetings were needed.
There was an unspoken understanding between them.
As if both of them knew—
Tonight,
the dreams would continue.
—
That night—
In the dream, her son was playing by a pond.
The water was dull, the air still.
He slipped.
The sound of him falling in was barely audible.
Her daughter screamed from the shore.
Lihua ran.
The stone was wet. The air cold.
The moment she jumped into the water—
Sabrina woke.
Her heart pounded violently. Her body was drenched in cold sweat.
She didn't know if she had saved him.
The room was silent.
She sat up and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. The glass tapped lightly against the faucet.
Behind her, the bed shifted.
"What's wrong? Another dream?" William murmured.
"Mm."
He turned over and quickly fell back asleep.
She put on a robe and walked into the study.
The computer screen lit up. Clean lines. Precise proportions. Everything in order.
Reality.
But deep in her mind, the gray pond remained.
She picked up her phone and texted Frank.
He replied almost immediately.
He was still awake.
She told him about the dream.
Then she asked the question that had been haunting her:
Why, in every dream,
was she always Lihua?
Why the same three children—an older daughter, and a pair of twins?
These weren't fragments.
It was a complete life.
She remembered the computer lab.
The hum of old machines.
A pregnant colleague wearing a radiation-protection apron.
Lesson plans.
Hallways.
Gray winter skies.
The buildings—
square, heavy, muted.
No glass towers. No modern skylines.
People dressed like it was the 1980s or '90s.
She had looked it up.
The details matched that era with unsettling precision.
And yet—
She had never been there.
"Why is it so clear?" she typed.
"Too clear to be a dream."
Frank paused.
Then:
"Same for me."
In his dreams, in Hong Kong, he wasn't a curator.
He was an accountant.
High-rises.
Cubicles.
Endless spreadsheets.
Late nights.
Recurring places. Recurring people. Recurring pressure.
"It feels real," he wrote.
Sabrina stared at the screen.
In reality, he curated art.
In reality, she designed spaces.
But in their dreams—
They lived other lives.
With continuity. With timelines.
What was happening?
Subconscious fabrication?
Or—
She didn't send the thought.
What if the plane had never landed safely?
—
Saturday.
William was working.
The sky was light, clouded like a thin veil.
Frank messaged her. A small gallery in Brooklyn was hosting a temporary exhibition—an African sculptor, known locally, with a few oil paintings on display.
They met in the afternoon.
The gallery was small. White walls. Concrete floor. Cold lighting.
Elongated wooden figures stood in the center. Distorted faces, silent.
The paintings burned in red and black—migration, loss, memory.
Sabrina paused in front of a sculpture.
"It feels like it's waiting," she said.
Frank smiled. "Or watching us."
They didn't stay long.
Outside, the air carried the last chill of winter.
They went to a nearby restaurant.
After ordering, Frank leaned forward.
"I've been trying to find other passengers from that flight."
Sabrina looked up.
"What do you mean?"
"My colleagues were on the same flight. Nothing happened to them. No dreams."
He paused.
"But I don't think this is coincidence."
Voices and laughter filled the restaurant.
"What if there are others?" he continued.
Sabrina tapped her cup lightly.
"Can you find them?"
"It's hard. But maybe—airline records, social media…"
Silence.
"If we find someone like us," she said finally, "then this isn't just in our heads."
He nodded.
—
That night, Sabrina couldn't sleep.
She opened an old photo.
Taken at the temporary airport after the landing.
Gray walls. Plastic chairs. Passengers scattered.
She and Frank stood on the right—exhausted, relieved.
She zoomed in.
Slowly.
Then stopped.
In the lower left corner—
A man.
Leaning against the wall.
Face turned sideways.
Dark coat.
Not looking at the camera.
Looking somewhere else.
Or at someone.
Her breath slowed.
She sent it to Frank.
"Do you remember him?"
"Who?"
"The man in the corner."
Pause.
"No."
She stared again.
He didn't look like someone who had just survived an emergency.
He looked—
calm.
As if he had been waiting.
Her phone buzzed.
"I found someone," Frank wrote.
"Another passenger."
"What did she say?"
"She's been dreaming too."
Sabrina's fingers tightened.
"She lives in Guangzhou in the dream. A music teacher. Has a son with a disability."
"She's never been there in real life."
Silence thickened.
"Is it continuous?" Sabrina asked.
"Yes."
Pause.
"1990s."
Sabrina froze.
Same as Lihua.
"Any storms?" she typed.
Pause.
"Yes."
"A blackout during a storm."
Sabrina closed her eyes.
She remembered.
The dark hallway.
The date on the wall calendar:
September 1, 1996.
The same day, in reality, she had started middle school.
She set the phone down.
City lights glowed outside.
Reality—solid.
Dreams—precise.
Two timelines.
Parallel.
And then—
a thought, sharper than the rest:
These dreams—
were not the future.
Not even the present.
They were—
the past.