CALLUM CUTS THE ENGINE OF his car.

He and Isabella have parked across the road from the Irving house, white wood shingles and brown roof tiles. When she first asked him for a ride to visit her old foster family—a little nervous, too quick to say that he didn't have to if he didn't have the time—he was overcome with pride. From what she's told him about her upbringing in foster care, and what else that he had to infer from close observation, Callum knows that revisiting her past is frightening. He wanted nothing more than to be there for her.

He gives her hand a squeeze over the gearshift. "Take your time. I will wait here."

"Are you sure? You could go visit the town center if you like. It's cute, lots of thrift stores and cafés."

This town, called Splendid (and it is), is twenty-five minutes from Carsonville. Depending on his mood, Callum finds it either sad or strange or serendipitous that when he was a teenager, teenage Bay was growing up only a short drive away. It gets him thinking about human beings all living lives parallel to each other, sometimes intertwining crossing over, sometimes changing each other's lives forever. It gets him wondering if they were in the same crowd at one point, sitting on the same bus, one shoulder brushing past another.

"I'm sure," he says. "I'll stay right here."

Isabella gives him a weak, grateful smile and exits the car. Before this visit came the phone call, and before the phone call she simply messaged Marlon Irving on Facebook. It was fear that kept her away all these years. To her, the Irvings represent one of the best periods in her childhood. It was a period of safety, stability and self-discovery. She felt like a person in this house.

But to the Irvings, who knew? They'd been fostering for years before her and years after her, and Isabella was always painfully conscious that she was nothing. She was not a daughter, or a sister. She was temporary, a state-delivered paycheck. They say to never meet your heroes. She had never wanted to visit only to see vacant stares and hear obligatory well-wishes. She had never wanted to love anyone more than they loved her back. Never had the courage, till now.

She knocks on the door. Through the frosted glass windows in the door, she sees Tanya striding down the hallway, a smudge of brown and purple. Tanya opens the door smiling, hair cut shorter, waist a little rounder. "Oh, baby, hello," she says, folding Isabella in to a hug.

She smells exactly the same.

Isabella returns the hug, smiling. "Hi, Tanya."

"I'm so happy you made it today. Welcome back."

"Thank you," she says, and when she steps inside it is instantly familiar. She knows to take her shoes off and place them on the rack in the foyer. She knows the way to the kitchen, where a cutting board piled with diced vegetables rests on the counter, and knows to sit at the dining table and tuck one leg up under her like she always used to do.

"Marlon is grilling," Tanya says, retaking her position at the cutting board. "You can say hi, but I want you to come back and sit with me so we can catch up. Or you could go out later, whatever makes you happy."

"Yes, ma'am." Isabella is grinning now. How lovely when things change less than one had dreaded.

She follows the sharp scent of smoke and tangy barbecue into the backyard. Marlon, once her foster brother, now a twenty-something with a job and a girlfriend and a cat, is standing over the grill. He's tied an apron loosely over his front, and Isabella knows from just the faded blue and white striped straps that it will say BARBECUTIE on the front.

"I can't believe that apron never got thrown out," Isabella says.

Marlon turns around and grins. Indeed, she sees the palimpsest of various stains—coffee brown to a suspicious yellow and even some magenta ink—that she expected. Barbecutie, too.

"You think Mom would throw anything out?" Tanya was always a bit of a hoarder, she remembers. "Lord, wait, when did you get so tall?"

"Yesterday."

"Oh, okay. Sit down."

Despite Tanya telling her to return to the kitchen, Isabella sits on one of the plastic lawn chairs. The dining table had already been covered with the roasted potatoes and mac and cheese. Tanya was tossing together a salad, and Marlon is now just finishing the grilled meats. Under the warm June sun, they catch up about school—"I saw that you just graduated. Congratulations"—and work—"I'm moving out to Boston at the end of the summer"—and love.

"Aren't you dating a white boy now?"

"Yes," Isabella says, chest swelling a little at the thought of Callum, sitting patiently out in his car. She almost feels like she's left a puppy in a hot vehicle. "He treats me good, don't worry."

While Tanya would have loved to invite another guest to lunch (she was always very hospitable) and Callum would have loved to meet any new person, Isabella wanted this moment to herself. To rediscover her past on her own terms, without being outshone by her boyfriend's charming but relentless loveability.

When lunch is ready, she and Marlon take the trays inside to the kitchen. Tanya puts her bowl of vegetables on the table and they eat. Bay repeats the stories about her graduation, meeting and dating Callum, and applying for work in the city. Her Philosophy major was as useful as she expected it to be when she first enrolled in freshman year (read: not at all) but Math got her several interviews for data analyst, modeling, and even quantitative trader roles. She informs them of her new position as a risk analyst at the Boston branch of an international consultancy (this huge nebulous company that somehow consults about everything) and how the pay is competitive, the workplace culture reportedly friendly.

Marlon tells them he is planning to propose to his girlfriend. Not any time soon, but before he wasn't sure if the relationship was the sort to last, and now he has decided that it is. Except, he wants to be more financially stable before proposing. Tanya says, "Boy, don't tell me that you've 'decided'. Tell me when you've done it."

After lunch, Tanya sends her out the door with leftovers. She discovered too-late that Callum had driven Isabella to Splendid and wouldn't let her leave without taking some food for her man, in case he was hungry.

Callum has fallen asleep when Isabella stops beside the car. He wakes with the slamming of the passenger door. "How was it?"

"Good."

"Just good?"

Isabella lets the emotions within her—peace, joy, hope—trickle over her face. "Perfect."

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The first time Isabella met Callum's family was a very conventional dinner with his parents and brother on graduation day back in May. The Vierras drove to Halston University to watch the commencement, cheer for their boy, and take photographs in front of the historic red brick arches of the main library. That morning, Callum had presented her with a graduation gift: a silver ring studded with a pale, spherical opal. "I know you don't wear a lot of jewelry, but I think this one screamed your name."

Isabella was still unused to receiving gifts, especially from Callum, but ever since she has worn that ring more days than not. The Vierras seemed to assume that she would be included in the graduation photos; a real family affair, though there wasn't much talking amongst the frenzy of the day. That night, Isabella ate with them at a restaurant.

"What if your parents don't like me?" They had shed their robes and caps at Callum's house, and were walking to the restaurant in their dressy graduation outfits. Isabella noted, not for the first nor last time, how great Callum's arms look in rolled-up sleeves. Callum relished those rare moments that Isabella wore high heels.

"They will," Callum said.

"But you told your mother you hated me," Isabella retorted.

"I also told her how much I love you, and she's really focused on that second part."

"Did you really?"

"Yes," Callum said. He noted the panic on her face. "What?"

"Nothing. Okay." If they ever broke up, his mother would go back to hating her, and then she chastised herself for anticipating a breakup.

"Hey, Christian likes you already, and Dad was a Math major in college, so talk to him about proofs."

"Math majors hate proofs."

"Talk to him about how much you hate proofs."

The proofs did not come up in conversation. Callum's parents were delightful, as expected, Christian goofy and funny. The food and wine was divine, paid for by the real adults as a graduation gift, the waitress good at refilling water glasses. They asked Isabella about her hobbies, her majors, her new job. Somehow it came up that she would be between accommodations after she moved out of campus housing but before she and Callum moved to Boston, and somehow an invitation was offered to her to stay at their house for those nine days. Isabella tried to protest, because she didn't want to impose, but caved, because she hadn't yet found a friend with space for her, and temporary accommodation was always so fucking expensive. Who was she to turn down a place to crash?

"They really liked you," Callum said after dinner.

"How do you know?"

"Because I know them." He'd seen the way his mother tilted her head and leaned in to Isabella's words, the impressed glimmer in his father's eyes, the easy rapport between her and Christian. They were giddy about her already.

The second time she met Callum's family was more casual: moving her things over to their house. Renata had already traveled back to her home state for the summer, otherwise she would have helped Isabella move her things downstairs from their dormitory. Instead, she and Callum wheeled the housing carts in and out of the elevators until all her belongings were stacked into his car. Both Vierra parents were at work when they arrived in Carsonville, but Christian was watching TV in the living room, and they talked about the new season of a show that they both had recently started—so Isabella counts this as another Meeting of His Family.

Ever since, she's been waking up in Callum's childhood bed. She sees the cereal that his family buys: Cinnamon Crunch for most, and Special K Cranberry Bran for his mother. They've driven around his hometown. He pointed out his elementary school, middle school, and the private high school which he thinks should be burned to the ground. The skate park where he earned the faded scar on his elbow. The parking lot where he learned to drive. He spoke about which cousins and which grandparents live nearby, which ones have the beach house on the west coast.

On the third day Isabella stayed in the Vierra household and the first weekend that Callum's parents weren't working, they took her to the local park for a picnic. "There's not much to do in Carsonville," his mother said apologetically, as if she is solely responsible for the quietness of the town, "I've been wracking my brain all week for something fun to show you."

Callum interjected, "See, there's nothing."

Isabella waved a hand. "Oh, you shouldn't have."

In the middle of the park is a lake, called Haywood, with walking trails around and rocky shores and picnic tables with all the paint chipped off. Callum points to a jetty in the distance and asks, "Have you ever ridden pedal boats before?"

Moored at the jetty are a dozen pedal boats—blocky, plastic, two seater foot-powered vessels—bobbing up and down with the gentle waves of the lake. They are all different colors, some brilliant and new, some dull and faded. A shaded kiosk sits on the grassy side of the lake and inside the kiosk sits an operator, motionless, bored. Callum seems to already know her answer and becomes determined to get Isabella into one of them. Christian tags along, needing a partner, so Callum's mother volunteers while his father sets the food up on a picnic table.

Once the operator has been paid, the tutorial delivered, and the four of them helped into the boats, Isabella and Callum push off. They paddle for ten minutes out of the allotted hour before Isabella says, "Do we just keep doing this?"

"Shut up, you love this."

She scoffs a little, but her belly is warm. The sun is bright on their foreheads, the water murky and a little polluted. From the shore, Callum's father has started picking at the box of blueberries. Christian and his mother are bickering about how to steer the vessel, and which part of the lake they want to see. "Did you ever do this?"

"No," Callum snorts. "No-one did the touristy shit in Carsonville. This is my first time, too." Isabella is glad for it, and she hopes any time he looks at pedal boats or visits this lake, he will think of her.

The next day they return home from wasting the time away together to an argument between Christian and his mother (she is starting to learn that this is the pairing that fights the most, and can easily see how Callum adopted his role as peacemaker). They lower their voices when Isabella and Callum step through the threshold but make no effort to tuck the dispute away for later, which strikes Isabella like a hammer. For the first time, she thinks these could be her in-laws, her family one day. It's way too early to be thinking about marriage. It's just her overactive imagination again, raising hopes to be shattered later. But for a moment, she gets this feeling, an intuition, just like the one she had when she kissed Callum for the first time.

You're the big one.

In Callum's bedroom are her suitcases and boxes and laundry hamper. He reclines on his bed with a satisfied sigh. "What do you want to tomorrow?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

Isabella leans her knee on the mattress and crawls into his arms. "Is that okay with you?"

Callum wraps his arms around her. Their bodies are so comfortable with each other lately. There is an entire dictionary of different poses that their limbs take with each other—tuck this arm otherwise it will get pins and needles; when their legs tangle, one of hers slides between his; she can always breathe easily if her nose is right in the pocket of air beneath his earlobe—and it feels like she's memorized the whole thing.

"Of course." A beat of silence. "You know, I think you're the only person in the world who I can enjoy doing nothing with."

Isabella smiles into Callum's chest. She knows what he is really saying. "Me, too."

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In August, Isabella and Callum return to Halston University for band camp.

They are not students nor musicians nor leaders of any kind this time, but lowly field crew volunteers. Maude Keller asks every summer for band alumni, who have time to spare, to come and help stock-take instruments, distribute shirts and water bottles and sunscreen, and corral any lost freshmen to where they need to be.

The campus was empty when they walked through in the morning, a smattering of postgraduate students and summer school kids walking between the red brick buildings. Now the sun beats down on the football green, where Keller is currently teaching basic marches and commands. They both remember their four band camps like they happened the four previous weeks in a row.

"God, I feel old," Callum says, misty-eyed. Isabella knows his greatest fear is getting old and missing out on life. She secretly suspects a lot of this fear is superficial, that Callum knows how attractive he is and is terrified of losing that springy golden hair, the flawless skin, the muscle tone he somehow maintains without significant physical effort.

"You're younger than me," Isabella says.

"Ooh. You're such a MILF." A freshman in a ponytail (they can both tell who is new at band camp and who isn't, because the freshmen from last year are sophomores now, the sophomores juniors, the juniors seniors, and Shane the new percussion section leader—anyone unfamiliar has this doe-eyed innocence, this scent of high school on them, and they just know) walks by and definitely overhears. Her lips curl into a shocked smile, eyes widening, and Isabella wants to die.

She glares at Callum, who averts his stare. "I hate you."

"Wow," he drawls, reaching to sling an arm around her waist. "Bay hates me, we're back at band camp. Feels like old times."

The day is for working and the twilight is for catching up. After the band members are dismissed for dinner, they find Maude in line at the cafeteria and hug her tight.

"It's so good to see you two!" The old woman seems to squeeze them like a grandmother. "How are you? Are you both happy?" You, too. Good. Yes. Very.

Shane locates them as they are about to take a seat in a booth. She bumps Callum out of the way and takes the spot he wanted—across from Isabella—and so he is forced to sit next to Isabella, which is, alas, less romantic. This year, Shane has died her platinum hair lime green.

"Thanks. It wasn't that hard," she explains when Isabella compliments it. "Since my hair was already lifted, they only had to do two layers."

"Are you excited about being section leader or did you take it because no-one else put their hand up?" Callum asks.

"Oh, both. If there was strong competition like your year, I probably would have still applied, but I wouldn't have tried that hard. Fuck, I don't know why you two cared so much. You threw those parties like a politician asking for money—" Shane recalls, pointing her chopsticks at Callum, "—and you had the audition piece memorized within, like, a day," she says, pursing her lips at Isabella. "And for what? A tie and a situationship. No, sir, I decided if my coasting was not enough, then so be it. I have a degree to earn."

Callum and Isabella exchange a furtive glance. They know now, of course, why they cared so much about their rivalry, that spring over a year ago. It was the only way she would interact with Callum. He wasn't ready to let that go, and she wasn't ready to let it go further. And with maturity and hindsight, everything becomes embarrassing.

"Oh, my God. I forgot to ask. I'm exhausted from band camp already. Show me your new apartment!"

Callum claps his hands together, spaghetti neglected. He is very proud of their new apartment in Boston not because it's good, but because he has already imagined how they can convert it into their own personalized space. He likes telling people his decor plans. He envisages posters, a skateboard rack (though everyone in the city rides those awful electronic scooters everywhere) and even getting a potted plant.

"You don't own plants," Isabella reminded him. "Can you even keep one alive?"

"I don't know. We should find out. Let's be plant parents!"

She was the one, for due diligence, who made Callum photograph every bare room before they moved their belongings in. In the event that their landlord turned out to be seedy and tried wrongfully to pin damages on them, they would have evidence and some degree of protection. Now Callum flicks through these pictures while Shane leans over the table, craning her sideways for the upright view.

"That looks tiny," she comments. "But cute. I like the big windows in the bedroom."

"Rent in Boston is insane," Isabella laments.

"Agree. I heard it's getting as bad as the Bay Area." The thing Isabella has always loved about Shane is how extroverted she is. Putting her and Callum together always guarantees that she can withdraw from the conversation and nod along, which is a great relief to her introverted self. Shane, on her own steam, tells them about a Berkeley student who completed his degree by living with his family in Los Angeles and buying flights to school because it was cheaper than renting. "Now, that's insane."

"What the fuck?" Callum says, "Who is this guy?"

"Hold up. I saw it on Reddit. Let me find it."

After dinner, Isabella and Callum take the long way back to the visitor parking lot. They circle back to the football field and climb up the bleachers in the student section. The metal is cold when they sit, the sky mostly dark blue with a seam of brilliant orange from the already-set sun. How silly their enmity was. How beautiful the times they spent here. It all washes over them: running laps on the grass, sweat behind their knees; practicing in frigid rain and hail, teeth chattering; their music blasting up to the audience and the roar of the home crowd back at them; the confetti sprinkling down after each victory. Band was the time of their lives.

Isabella glances to her right and startles when she realizes Callum is crying. Silent, unblinking tears. He stares at the fading orange glow like he wishes he could pull the sun back up and reverse time.

"What's wrong?"

"I don't want to be a stupid software engineer. I already found the orientation boring, so that doesn't bode well for the rest of the job. I just—I just want to freeze moments like this and walk around in them and relive them forever."

Her chest tightens. She puts her hand over his and strokes his wrist. "You know, I always thought your fear of mortality was partly because you want to stay hot forever. You don't want to get flabby and wrinkly."

Callum cries harder, sniffling, laughing. "That, too. Look at me. I'm in my prime."

They both laugh, their giggles ringing out over the empty stadium. Callum runs his finger under his runny nostrils. She pulls a packet of tissues out of her tote bag and he smirks. "Always prepared."

Isabella, despite her teasing, is very proud of Callum. She rather likes it when he cries because he turns into this sensitive, thoughtful, introspective person that she's seldom seen before. Each time he opens up, connects with his emotions, it inspires her to keep confronting her own demons.

"It's okay," she says, kissing his palm. He pulls her hand to his face and kisses it back. "The orientation is supposed to be the most stale, HR-approved, tokenistic, buzzwordy part of the job. I bet you'll meet people on your team that you like well enough, and you'll find projects that interest you well enough, and it'll be fine."

"Really?"

"Yes. You'll be rich. And I will be here, less rich. Any bad days at work will be over when you come home to me."

"Okay," Callum smiles softly.

Isabella's heart swells with the truth of her words, how much she really believes this. He loves her. She loves him. So nothing bad can stick to them.

"We will do it together."

(And they do.)

THE END

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OUTRO

You can't hear this, but I'm playing a dramatic drum solo to end this book! 

Thank you all so much for reading this story, whether you were following along in the earliest days, filling up those empty comment sections on each chapter, or you gave Double Time a chance more recently. I submitted to the Wattys and have fingers crossed.

Each story I write captures moods and lessons that I am experiencing in my offline, real life. Double Time will forever be a favorite because of how much these characters taught me about bravery, healing, and staying open and empathetic in a cruel, harsh world. I love Bay for her strength and resilience. I love Callum for his big heart and perseverance. I hope you loved them too!

Usually I have a book in progress or an upcoming story to share with you all, but this time I have nowhere to direct your attention (unless you are interested in a wildly angsty legal-drama Miraculous fanfiction). Life has been so busy, and so beautiful. So I will just say: thank you. This was so much fun.

That's all for now,

aimee <3