Chapter 2: A Chance to Return

1

“System, I want to go home.”

The system flickered into existence with a hum like static, familiar and distant all at once, like an old radio tuned to the wrong station.

“Have you decided? There is only one chance to return. Once you go back, you can’t come back to the era where Caleb is.”

The system’s digital voice almost sounded like it cared, regretful and soft around the edges.

After all, it was the system that ripped me out of my own century, plopped me down in an America so old it still creaked with wood smoke and Sunday bells.

To meet Caleb. To try to save him, to rewrite the ending.

I gave a crooked little smile, the kind that stings more than it soothes.

“I tried…”

Caleb is a renowned preacher in history, said to possess a rare faith, slender as frost and snow, leaving countless sermons for future generations—a cold, distant bright moon in the endless night.

And yet, for his childhood sweetheart, he died at twenty-five—just when the world ought to have started making sense.

For five years, I watched him like a historian and a lover. I scribbled every shift in his face, every flash of a smile in the margins of old notebooks, as if I could piece him together again from paper and ink.

Everyone around us knew: in my eyes, there was only Caleb. After all, before I even stepped into this life, I’d pored over his story so long the words blurred together.

For him, I gave up everything—my own sense of time, my old identity, even my accent started to slip sometimes.

I walked beside him through rainstorms, over muddy backroads where the dust never settled, just to kneel on cold floorboards in a remote church so old the pews squeaked with every sigh.

For this, I caught a fever and even broke my leg slipping on black ice. The memory still made my ankle ache on damp mornings.

The sermons were old English, thick and tangled, but I’d save every penny to buy him rare, crumbling books, just to see him bow his head and give me one of those shy, grateful smiles—brief, but bright enough to carry me through a whole week.