It was Mary Vaughan’s final evening in Sudbury, and she was experiencing decidedly mixed feelings.

She had no doubt that getting out of Toronto had done her good. After what had happened down there—My God, she thought, had it really only been two weeks ago?—leaving town, getting away from all the things that would have reminded her of that horrible night, was surely the right course. And although it had ended on a melancholy note, she wouldn’t have traded her time here with Ponter Boddit for anything.

There was an unreal quality to her recollections; it all seemed so fantastic. And yet there were countless photographs and videos and even some X rays to prove that it had really happened. A modern Neanderthal from a parallel version of Earth had somehow slipped into this universe. Now that he was gone, Mary hardly believed it herself.

But it had happened. Ponter had really been here, and she had indeed…

Was she overstating it? Magnifying it in her mind?

No. No, it was indeed what had occurred.

She had come to love Ponter, maybe even to be in love with him.

If only she’d been whole, complete, unviolated, untraumatized, perhaps things would have been different. Oh, she’d still have fallen for the big guy—of that she was sure—but when he’d reached out and touched her hand that night while they were looking up at the stars, she wouldn’t have frozen.

It had been too soon, she’d told him the next day. Too soon after…

She hated the word; hated to think it, to say it.

Too soon after the rape.

And tomorrow she had to go back home, back to where that rape had occurred, back to the campus of Toronto’s York University, and her old life of teaching genetics.