On Friday evening, Sabrina had plans with her husband, William. They were supposed to have dinner at the Spanish restaurant they often went to.
For once, she didn't work late.
She gathered the design drafts on her desk, aligning each page carefully before pressing them flat. As she stepped out of the office, she glanced back without thinking.
The lights were still on.
Susan was still inside, revising a proposal that needed to be sent back to the client.
Night had just settled over the city. In the glass, Sabrina caught a blurred reflection of herself.
The elevator took her straight down to the underground garage.
Her phone rang just before her hand touched the car door.
William.
There was tension in his voice. A case had taken an unexpected turn. He needed to go back to the office—to go through the files again, retrace details, look for something they might have missed.
Sabrina said nothing for a moment.
The garage echoed faintly with its own emptiness.
"Alright," she said.
The line went dead.
She started the car.
But she didn't go home.
With a slight turn of the wheel, the headlights swept across the concrete walls as she drove instead toward the bar in Brooklyn—the one they had been going to lately.
—
The bar was dim, the music low, as if it were coming from somewhere underwater.
She ordered a whiskey on the rocks.
Ice shifted slowly in the glass.
Sabrina scrolled through her phone, the pale light reflecting against her face. She skimmed without focus, not really seeing anything.
Then, in the corner of her vision—
A familiar figure stepped inside.
Frank.
They had been coming here regularly over the past few months.
They had met a year ago—on the same flight from Beijing to New York.
At first, the flight had been smooth.
Then, without warning, the plane entered a bank of dense clouds.
The storm hit suddenly.
The aircraft lurched. Overhead compartments rattled with heavy, muffled thuds.
Someone began to pray.
The oxygen masks nearly dropped.
Time stretched, warped.
The plane made an emergency landing at a temporary airport.
After a short delay, it took off again.
Eventually, it reached New York.
At least—
That was how they remembered it.
After that night, they exchanged contact information.
It should have ended there.
But it didn't.
After returning to New York, Sabrina began to dream.
Not fragments.
Not ordinary dreams.
Another life.
In that life, she was not Sabrina.
Her name was Lihua.
She was a computer science lecturer at a university in Beijing. Her husband was the chief neurosurgeon at Tiantan Hospital. They had three children.
The details were unnervingly precise—
A crack in the kitchen tiles.
A slightly crooked book of poetry on a shelf.
The sound of rain outside the window when one of the children had a fever at night.
It didn't feel imagined.
It felt remembered.
Frank had experienced the same.
The fall.
The lightning.
The weightlessness.
And somewhere in the cabin—
The sound of a little girl crying.
Since then, they had been meeting here.
Drinking.
Reconstructing their dreams.
Comparing details.
They had begun to wonder—
Was this trauma shaping the subconscious?
Or something else entirely?
Something like crossing into another timeline?
Sabrina traced the rim of her glass.
Frank walked over and sat across from her.
They looked at each other.
No greeting.
There was a quiet 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 gray. The air was still.
His foot slipped.
The sound of him falling into the water was barely there.
Her daughter screamed.
Lihua ran.
The stone path was slick beneath her feet.
The air was cold against her skin.
The moment she leapt into the water—
Sabrina woke.
Her heart was racing.
Her skin damp with sweat.
She didn't know if she had saved him.
The room was silent.
She sat up and went to the kitchen, pouring herself a glass of water. The glass struck lightly against the faucet with a clear, sharp sound.
Behind her, the bed shifted.
"What is it? Another dream?" William murmured.
"Mm."
He turned over and drifted back to sleep almost immediately.
She pulled on a robe and walked into the study.
The computer screen came to life.
Lines. Proportions. Structure.
Everything exact. Everything real.
And yet—
In the back of her mind, the gray pond remained.
She picked up her phone and texted Frank.
He replied almost at once.
He was still awake.
She told him the dream.
Then she asked the question that had been following her—
Why, in every dream,
am I always this woman named Lihua?
Why are there always three children?
The eldest daughter—
And the twins?
This wasn't fragments.
It was a whole life.
She remembered the computer lab lights.
The hum of outdated machines.
A pregnant colleague wearing a radiation shield.
Lesson plans.
Corridors.
Gray winter skies.
The buildings—
Rigid. Square. Faded.
No glass towers. No modern skyline.
The clothing felt like another time.
The eighties. The nineties.
She had looked it up.
The details matched.
Almost exactly.
And yet—
She had never been there.
"Why is it so clear?" she typed.
"Too clear to be a dream."
There was a pause.
Then Frank replied—
"Same for me."
In his dreams, in Hong Kong, he wasn't a curator.
He was an accountant.
High-rises.
Cubicles.
An office.
Ledgers.
Reports.
Endless late nights.
Not fragments.
Recurring places. Recurring people. Recurring pressure.
Again and again.
"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 different lives.
Different professions.
Different identities.
And everything followed a continuous timeline.
What was happening?
Subconscious invention?
Or—
She didn't send the thought that crossed her mind.
What if the plane never truly landed?
—
The study was quiet, lit only by the dim glow of the screen.
She turned it off.
Went to the kitchen.
Poured a glass of milk.
The cold slid down her throat.
Back in bed, William was already deeply asleep.
She lay down.
Closed her eyes.
Would it continue?
If the dream returned—
Would the child in the pond surface this time?
—
Saturday.
William was working again.
The sky was pale, clouds stretched thin like gauze.
Frank sent her a message. A small gallery in Brooklyn was hosting a temporary exhibition—an African sculptor, along with several paintings.
They agreed to meet.
The gallery was small.
White walls. Concrete floor. Cold lighting.
Wooden figures stood in the center—elongated, distorted, silent.
The paintings were layered with red and black, heavy with themes of migration, loss, memory.
Sabrina paused in front of one sculpture.
"It feels like it's waiting," she said.
Frank glanced at it.
"Or watching us."
They didn't stay long.
Outside, the air still carried the chill of late winter.
They went to a nearby café and sat by the window.
After ordering, Frank spoke quietly.
"I've been trying to find other passengers from that flight."
Sabrina looked up.
"What do you mean?"
"Two of my colleagues were on that same flight. Nothing happened to them. No dreams. No abnormalities."
He paused.
"But I don't think this is coincidence."
The café hummed with quiet voices. The espresso machine hissed.
"What if there are others?" he said. "Others like us?"
Sabrina tapped her finger lightly against the rim of her cup.
"Can you find them?"
"It's difficult. But I'll try."
She was silent for a moment.
"If we find someone else," she said finally, "then this isn't just in our heads."
Frank didn't argue.
They both knew—
These weren't ordinary dreams.
And neither of them realized—
Some doors, once opened,
do not close again.
—
That night, Sabrina didn't fall asleep right away.
She opened an old photo on her phone.
Taken after the emergency landing.
A temporary airport waiting area.
Gray walls.
Passengers seated on plastic chairs.
She and Frank stood off to the right—tired, but relieved.
She zoomed in.
Moved slowly across the image.
Then—
She stopped.
In the lower left corner, a blurred figure leaned against the wall.
A man.
Side profile.
Dark coat.
He wasn't looking at the camera.
He seemed to be looking at something—
Or someone.
Sabrina's breathing slowed.
She sent the image to Frank.
"Do you remember him?"
"Who?"
"The man in the corner."
A pause.
"No. That day was chaos."
She zoomed in further.
The image began to break apart.
But the man's expression—
Was calm.
Too calm.
Not like someone who had just survived.
More like—
Someone waiting.
A strange feeling settled in.
As if—
He had known.
Her phone vibrated again.
"I found someone," Frank wrote.
She sat up.
"Who?"
"A woman from the flight. I found her on LinkedIn. She was sitting in front of me."
"What did she say?"
Typing…
Pause.
Then—
"She's been dreaming too."
Sabrina's fingers tightened.
"What kind of dreams?"
"She lives in Guangzhou."
"An elementary school music teacher."
"She has a son with a disability."
The air seemed to thin.
"She's never been to Guangzhou," Frank added.
The gray pond flashed through Sabrina's mind.
"Is it continuous?" she asked.
"Yes."
A pause.
"And the time period… the 1990s."
Sabrina froze.
So was Lihua's world.
She typed slowly:
"Did she mention storms? Thunderstorms?"
A long silence.
Then—
"Yes."
"She said there was a blackout during a storm. The entire city went dark."
Sabrina closed her eyes.
She remembered.
In Lihua's world—
There had been a blackout.
The building swallowed by darkness.
Voices echoing through the corridors.
And the date—
She remembered it clearly.
September 1st, 1996.
The same day—
She had started middle school.
She set the phone down.
Outside, the city lights were steady.
Reality was solid.
The dreams were clear.
Two timelines—
Running side by side.
And then—
A realization.
More unsettling than anything before.
These dreams—
Were not the future.
Not a parallel present.
But—
The past.