All Chapters of The Child Between Worlds: Chapter 1 - Chapter 8

My body went rigid.Was it a coincidence?I stared at Vivian.During our five years of marriage, she had always been a composed, reserved university professor. She never talked this much, and she certainly never wore such an eager, almost fawning expression.Her explanation matched the advice in the post almost word for word.The blood rushed to my head.My voice shook when I finally spoke. "Vivian, if you found him abandoned, shouldn't we call the police and child protective services first?"Vivian looked down and teased the baby in her arms. When she raised her head, her eyes were damp."I already reported it. The police said finding his parents would probably be difficult. When I held him, he suddenly smiled at me."In that moment, I thought maybe he was a gift sent to us because we have been alone for so long."Her voice was gentle and emotional.The tenderness in her expression left me cold to the fingertips.Years earlier, an injury had left me permanently infertile.

At three o'clock that afternoon, the paternity results arrived.[DNA analysis supports Aaron Scheffler as the child's biological father.][Probability of paternity: 99.99 percent.]The laboratory had originally requested a sample from Vivian, but the birthmark had made me submit my own instead.The world tilted around me.I braced one hand against the wall to keep from collapsing.I was the baby's father?How was that possible?I had never touched another woman, and I was medically infertile.My hand moved instinctively toward my lower abdomen. Five years earlier, Vivian had been caught in a laboratory explosion. I dragged her from the fire, but a collapsing steel support crushed the lower half of my body.The surgeons saved my life, but they said the damage to my reproductive system was permanent.Vivian knelt beside my hospital bed and swore that only my survival mattered. Children meant nothing if she still had me.Then what did this paternity report mean?If I couldn't

When we returned home, Vivian shoved me into the primary bedroom and locked the door from the outside.The windows had been sealed, she took my phone, and she disconnected the internet.I was being held prisoner.Through the heavy door, I could hear her pacing in the living room.Sometimes I heard muffled sobbing.Other times, I heard her whispering urgently into a phone."He found it. The memories are beginning to overlap. What do I do?"The breach won't close. Is this attempt going to fail too?"No. I will not lose him for a ninth time. I won't."I pressed my ear to the door, cold spreading through my body.A ninth time?What did that mean?Had I already died eight times?On the third night of my confinement, exhaustion finally took her. Heavy breathing came from the living room.She had barely slept in days and guarded the door like a jailer.I stared into the dark night beyond the glass and remembered the journal.The first page had been dated three years earlier.

By the eighth reset, Vivian had broken.She stopped trying to ease my despair and chose an extreme way to shatter the cycle.Using her knowledge of theoretical physics, she found a fracture between parallel timelines.She discovered another version of me: Elias Rowan.In his world, I was healthy and fertile.But that world's Vivian had died young in a traffic accident, leaving Elias alone.The Vivian from my world used the cost of temporal displacement to lure Elias across realities.She told him this was the future and promised that if he helped create a child, she could revive the wife he had lost.Elias believed her.He cooperated with the experiment and remained hidden in the abandoned house outside Briarwood.Did Vivian treat him well?Yes.But whenever she looked at him, her eyes held grief and guilt.Because she knew she was killing him.The laws governing temporal displacement couldn't be reversed.Two identical souls could not coexist in the same timeline for lo