June 1987 Day One.

Riley woke up.

His chest rising and falling heavily. His face wet.

He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and lay still for a moment, staring upward, waiting for his own ceiling to appear.

It didn't.

The ceiling above him was wooden. Old. The kind that had absorbed decades of humidity and emerged darker for it. An electric fan somewhere to his left made a sound like it was having a private argument with itself every time it rotated.

He sat up slowly.

The room was small. A worn cabinet in the corner. A calendar on the wall with a picture of a mountain and a year that made no sense. A window with no screen letting in the smell of something frying and the distant sound of children.

He stood.

Walked to the doorway.

Outside, a narrow street. Motorcycles passing without helmets. A transistor radio playing from somewhere he couldn't see. Sari-sari stores with hand-painted signs. Children playing hide and seek between parked vehicles, counting loudly with their eyes pressed against a post.

No modern signage. No convenience stores. No bright tarpaulins advertising anything.

Just a street that looked like a photograph he had seen somewhere — familiar in the way old pictures of places you know are familiar. The same bones. Different skin.

"What the hell," he whispered.

He pulled out his phone.

No signal. No data. The time read 00:00 and the date was blank.

"Excuse me — are you okay?"

Riley turned.

A young man stood a few feet away, looking at him with the open, uncomplicated concern of someone who had not yet learned to be suspicious of strangers. Around Riley's age. Dark eyes. An easy posture. The kind of person who took up exactly the right amount of space.

"Uh — yes." Riley looked around. "Where is this place?"

The man frowned slightly. "Hm? Just here at—" He named a street Riley recognized. A street Riley had walked down a hundred times.

A street that did not look like this anymore.

The man's eyes dropped to Riley's phone. "What kind of calculator is that?"

Riley looked at him slowly.

"What year is it?" he asked.

The man laughed — uncertain, polite. "Are you sure you're okay? It's 19—"

Riley's heart stopped.

The number landed in his chest like something dropped from a great height.

That year.

That was the year his parents first met.

"What is your name?" Riley asked. His voice came out very careful. Very still.

The man hesitated. "Miguel."

The word hit Riley like a door opening onto somewhere he had never been and somehow always known.

Miguel.

His father's name.

He looked at the man's face properly for the first time. Really looked. The same eyes he saw in the mirror every morning. The same nose. The same way of holding the jaw slightly forward when uncertain.

Just younger. Lighter. Unmarked by everything that was coming.

His father — before grief made him quiet.

Riley stepped back.

"This isn't possible," he whispered.

Miguel scratched the back of his neck. "You look lost. Do you have somewhere to stay?"

Riley couldn't think. Couldn't find the edges of anything.

"You can come to our house first if you want," Miguel offered. Simply. Without hesitation. The way Riley would come to learn was simply how Miguel was — showing up for people before he had a reason to.

Riley nodded slowly.

I'm dreaming, he told himself. This is a dream. When I wake up I'll be in my room. I'll be in my room and the ceiling will be white and everything will be exactly where I left it.

He followed his father down a street that smelled like garlic rice and decades he didn't belong to.

And he held onto that thought —

When I wake up, I'll be in my room.

He held onto it the whole way.

He was still holding onto it when he lay down that night in a borrowed room in his father's house and closed his eyes tightly.

He did not wake up in his room.

But he did, eventually, sleep.