Strangers in Time

by David Baldacci

It seemed Hitler was becoming increasingly unhinged with the war turning against him and had decided to kill as many people as possible before all was lost. How a single madman could do so much damage to the world, Oliver thought. God was indeed testing them all.

Oliver had responded, trying to draw his wife back from one of her moods. “Dreams, either asleep or awake, can be silly and happy, or sad and sometimes frightening, but they are part of what makes us human. I daresay it can make an unbearable life at times tolerable. Is that so wrong?” She had finished her port before answering. “It is not simply a question of wrong or right, Iggy.” This was her nickname for him, which he loved, because of the intimacy it implied. “It is a question of honesty. To dream is often to deceive oneself. We may dream so often about another sort of life that we forget to live the one that we already possess.”

We must make the best of what we have. To seek out something different merely because it is perceived better by standards laid out by people we may not even know? I would say that is the height of self-deceit.”

“I believe lots of thin’s are possible,” replied Charlie eagerly. “It’s not just believin’ that they can happen. It’s more unnerstandin’ there’s no good reason they can’t happen.”

But for Oliver, as even a casual observer of history could say with complete confidence, such one-man governing structures never ended well for anyone, not even the strongman. Humans make poor gods. We’re just not up to it.

Books filled with truth, turned to ash, and turning minds the same in their absence.

He looked at the fire. “It feels quite odd bein’ here without him.” “It will always feel that way, I suppose. He was this place, really. You can’t imagine one without the other.”

It wasn’t so much the decisions you made, it was simply who you stumbled into while you were trying to work out important matters. Run into one person instead of another, and one’s future could be completely altered, as Oliver had said in somewhat different language on New Year’s Eve so many years ago.

She knew there was a price to be paid with important relationships like that. They were wonderful, but they also had the capacity to exact a punishing price when one in the relationship was gone. Grief, sadness, anger at a loss, and terrible, unrelenting hurt were the costs to be paid for loving and being loved. It felt completely worth the bargain right up until the very moment payment was demanded. She would never get over the loss of Ignatius Oliver, but she would always benefit from having had him in her life.