A Rip Through Time (A Rip Through Time #1)

by Kelley Armstrong

In the end, I cannot dismiss the words of that fictional saint of detectives. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Still, hard work never killed anyone, right? By midday, I decide that whoever coined that phrase never toiled as a nineteenth-century housemaid.

The first thing I will do when I’m home is run to Nan’s bedside. The second? Sleep. So much sleep. As a cop, I’ve pulled double shifts, and none left me as exhausted as a single day being a housemaid.

That is the true difference then. There are people of color, but I’d guess most are in service or working menial jobs. They are not doctors or undertakers, and not imposing and confident men wearing a gentleman’s attire. That is what makes people uneasy. Gray has stepped out from the box in which they’d like to keep him. Not that different from home, really.

What I suspect, though, is that what I encountered here was a rip in the fabric of reality. I was strangled in the same spot, on the same day, at the same moment as a young woman a hundred and fifty years earlier. That caused some crossing of wires in a cosmic sense, and my consciousness—my soul or whatever you care to call it—somehow swapped with that of Catriona Mitchell. Can such a thing be undone? I can’t even contemplate a negative answer. The despair would swallow me whole, and I might find myself taking the most desperate action to get home again. To put myself in those exact conditions. To die on that spot and hope that took me home because I cannot imagine being trapped here forever.

I do not judge lives that have seen the kind of hardship I struggle to comprehend. I was raised in an upper-middle-class family, the only child of a tenured professor and a law-firm partner. My parents made damn sure I understood just how much privilege I had, whether it was weekends on the farm or weeknights in a soup kitchen.

It’s easy to look into the past and presume few women wanted a job or an education. Just those “special” ones, who “aren’t like other girls.” That’s bullshit. Isla—and her grandmother—might not be the norm, but only because someone had encouraged them to dream bigger. Someone said they deserved to use their keen minds however they saw fit.

“Is nothing being done, then?” I say, waving around. “About this?” “Yes, something is being done. They are clearing the slums. You will see notices here and there. The buildings being knocked down, the people sent on their way. No reparations. No assistance. Driven out as if they were rats. For their own good. To convince them to better themselves, because all they need, obviously, is motivation.” Bitter sarcasm drips from her voice. Nothing has changed there either, then. The poor just need a kick in the ass to punt them into the middle class.

We may keep secrets to protect others, but they will only ever feel we didn’t trust them enough to share.