chapter five

Ethan Hayes was twenty-five years old, living in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Somerville, just outside Boston. It was Christmas Eve 2015, and the city was wrapped in a thin layer of snow that had started falling in the late afternoon. The streets below his window glowed with colored lights strung across porches and storefronts, but inside his place the only illumination came from a small, lopsided tree he’d bought on impulse two days earlier. A single string of white lights blinked lazily; he hadn’t bothered with ornaments. He sat on the floor, back against the couch, a mug of spiked hot cocoa cooling in his hand. The television played It’s a Wonderful Life with the sound off—George Bailey mouthing silent pleas on the bridge. Ethan wasn’t watching. He was staring at nothing, the way he had been doing more and more often lately. The dreams had been getting worse. Not nightmares exactly—more like memories that didn’t belong to him. A girl with auburn hair laughing by a river. The crack of musket fire. Snow on his face, blood warm beneath his coat. A promise burning in his chest as the world went white. He’d started keeping a notebook beside his bed. Every morning he wrote down whatever fragments remained: gray uniforms, a silver locket, the name Amelia Rose spoken in a soft Southern drawl. The details never changed, only grew sharper. Tonight the dream had been different. He hadn’t been dying. He’d been walking a snowy road at night, heart pounding with anticipation, a small gold ring in his pocket. He was going home—to her—for Christmas. He woke gasping, the sensation of falling still in his limbs. For the first time, he didn’t reach for the notebook. He sat up in the dark and said her name out loud. “Amelia.” It felt like coming home and breaking apart at the same time. Now, hours later, he couldn’t shake it. He opened his laptop and started searching—terms he’d typed a hundred times before but never with this urgency: reincarnation Civil War Virginia James River past life memories. He read accounts from children who remembered battlefields, therapists who specialized in regression, forums where people shared dreams too specific to be coincidence. One article mentioned a woman who had found her “soulmate” from a past life after decades of searching. Another warned that most memories were imagination or cryptomnesia. Ethan didn’t care about warnings. Something inside him had cracked open tonight, and certainty poured through the fissure. He closed the laptop, stood, and walked to the window. Snow still fell, soft and steady. Across the street, a family carried presents into a warmly lit house. Laughter spilled out when the door opened. He pressed his forehead to the cold glass. “I remember,” he whispered to the night. “I remember everything.” The promise came back to him whole, as if he’d spoken it yesterday instead of a century and a half ago. I’ll find you again. If not in this life, then the next. He had died trying to reach her on Christmas. She had waited. And now he was here—alive, breathing, with no idea where to begin looking. Ethan went to his closet and pulled out a duffel bag. He started packing clothes mechanically, not sure where he was going yet. Then he stopped, hands shaking. He couldn’t just leave. He had a job—history teacher at a private high school—rent due in a week, parents who would worry. But the pull was physical, like a hook behind his ribs tugging south. He sat down again, opened the notebook, and wrote a single line on a fresh page: December 24, 2015 I know who I was. Her name is Amelia Rose. I have to find her. Then he added a second line, smaller, almost afraid to commit it to paper: I think she’s still waiting. The tree lights blinked behind him, casting shifting shadows on the wall. Outside, snow covered the city in quiet forgiveness. Ethan didn’t sleep again that night. At dawn on Christmas morning, he booked a train ticket to Richmond, Virginia, departing the day after tomorrow. He told his parents he needed a break, some time alone. He told his principal he had a family emergency. Neither was entirely a lie. As the train pulled out of South Station two days later, Ethan stared out at the snowy New England landscape sliding past and felt the first real hope he’d known in years. Seventeen years of searching lay ahead—years of dead ends, fleeting clues, lonely holidays, and stubborn faith. But on that Christmas night in 2015, sitting alone with a cooling mug and a promise older than electricity, Ethan Hayes took the first step toward keeping the vow Elijah Harper had made beside a river long ago. He was going home. Not to a place. To her.