As the years went by, Amelia found it harder and harder to remember how to act “normal” about time. Although she always knew when it would happen, she found it unpleasant when her husband would catch her staring off into space, and she would see that look of vague fear upon his face.
It was easier with the children. They seemed to understand the hidden world that everyone keeps inside, and how different it is from that world created by grownups, of days and weeks, of time diced into meaningless little calendar boxes. There was a point when she began to wonder whether growing up is a kind of forgetting, an erasing of the ability to see how time is a sculpture, a world of beautiful shapes carved forever into the fabric of the Universe.
Sometimes she wished they could see what she saw — past and future twisting together, frozen moments stretching as far as the eye could see, like glistening stalactites in a beautifully wrought cave of ice. But there was no way to show anyone, nobody to tell who would have the slightest idea what she was talking about.
And so, as the years went by, she spent more time with the shadow, as she knew she would. Until one day, when the time came to make a choice.