Wrong Place Wrong Time

“How has she raised a murderer […] Which hand have they been dealt?”

Jen is sure she spirals back in time to save her son from being a murderer. Yet the novel reveals an additional layer: Jen not only travels back in time to save her son, but to save herself. She is racked by guilt over being an absentee mother and is sure that her neglect is to blame for the murder. She learns through her time travels that the killing was not her fault, and that her son loves her.

“Todd is here, safe in their house, grounded. And she has the knife. Perhaps it has been stopped.”

If her mission was simply to stop the murder, the mission—and the book--would have ended here. She found the knife and grounded Todd, preventing him from leaving the house. Jen keeps regressing back in time, showing that more is at stake.

“It is so strange for Jen to witness this: the things that happened when she was lawyering, while she was too busy caring too much about work and—clearly—not enough about home.”

The time loop begins to focus more on Jen’s character than stopping the murder, and reveals to Jen how much she missed. She begins to see the cost of her commitment to her job.

“His brain feels like a shaken snow globe. He thought it would be different from this.”

Ryan joins the police department to help people. In his first days on the job, he’s disappointed by the bureaucratic nature of police work. The above quote uses a simile, comparing Ryan’s brain to a “shaken snow globe.”

“As she thinks over the past few days of panic and alienation, her eyes moisten and a tear tracks its way down her cheek.”

Jen’s experience of time travel isolates her. As a time traveler, she becomes alienated; she knows more than everyone around her with each regression. She is unsure where she is headed or whether she will ever return, or if she even has the power to change the future.

“The teddy Todd’s had since he was two, the one who holds a blue fluffy Bunsen burner and a test tube. He must still sleep with it. Her heart cracks for him, here in his bedroom.”

Along the way to solving the murder, Jen taps into what she always assumed she did not have, maternal love. She rediscovers the joy of being Todd’s mother. In these lines, the reader can see both of their vulnerability: Jen longs for Todd, and Todd still sleeps with his teddy bear.

“Jen can see that she was susceptible to wanting it all. A woman working in a job that took so much as you were able to give […] the vein of inadequacy running through her.”

Jen wrestles with the question that has haunted her since she found out she was pregnant and married Ryan. In dedicating herself to her job, in wanting it all, did she end up with nothing?

“If only she could work through this with someone. She’d figure it out much more easily, she’s sure.”

At the beach, when Jen sees Gormley’s art piece, she wishes she were not alone. This represents her tipping point. She begins to suspect her time loop is not so much about solving a murder as it is about the reclamation of her heart.

“A guilty stone arrives in her stomach. Maternal guilt, that thing she has tried to work against for much of her life, but that always—always—sits there anyway.”

Jen can’t easily shed her guilt over not being a hands-on mother. However, at this point midway in the novel, there has been a shift: She faces her guilt, the starting point for forgiving herself.

“In the cool night air, three weeks before her son becomes a murderer, Jen hears her husband begin to cry in their garden, his sobs becoming quieter and quieter.”

Jen’s time loop reveals how much she doesn’t know about the man she loves—his family, his profession, his past, even his name. At the same time, she sees, behind his stoicism, the depth of his caring.

“How sinister is it to relive your life backward. To see things you hadn’t at the time. To realize the horrible significance of events you had no idea were playing around you.”

Midway through her time loop experience, Jen despairs of reliving her life’s defining moments. She falsely believes she is unable to change anything and is only able to see how much she missed. Jen’s experience so far mimics the process of memory: Humans, in recollecting their past, notice things they didn’t at the time and are now powerless to change.

“But knowing the future is worse than not knowing it. Isn’t it?”

Time loop poses a challenge. Jen wishes she could tell a client what she knows will happen, the emotional catastrophe ahead. But she does not and cannot. The novel suggests that living linearly doesn’t come with the same heartache, even when there are surprises.

“‘How could you not know?’”

Jones pokes Jen where she is most vulnerable. He chides Jen for her lack of awareness, for not seeing the signs that would have revealed the depth of her husband’s emotional dilemma, the pain of living a double life.

“‘It’s hard to have a baby. Nobody says.’”

Jen’s father jokes about the emotional pain at the heart of his daughter’s guilt. What Jen experiences is the pain, distress, guilt, and regret that many mothers feel but don’t share. 

“She wants to stop being alone, just for a while, to stop figuring out all the incomprehensible clues, never moving forward, only backward, backward, backward, a game of snakes and ladders with only snakes.”

The time loop becomes not about saving Todd, but about saving Jen. Jen begins the novel driven by confidence and self-empowerment, and discovers the reward of human connection as the novel progresses. The above lines use repetition to underscore how Jen feels she isn’t making progress—“backward, backward, backward.” McAllister also uses a metaphor, where something is compared to something else without using “like” or “as.” Here, Jen’s time loop is compared to a treacherous “game of snakes and ladders with only snakes.”

“Maybe this is all deeper, deeper, deeper than organized crime, than lying husbands, than murders […] maybe it’s about her mothering of him. After all, does every action a child performs not begin with their mothers?”

Jen gains more awareness: Her going back in time is not about solving a murder. At the same time, she still has more insight to gain. At this point, she erroneously believes she is revisiting her life as punishment for neglecting Todd, while her real purpose will be to alter the future, realize that she is capable of maternal love, and learn who her husband is. Again, McAllister uses repetition to create a sense of urgency: “deeper, deeper, deeper.”

“Because our brains are so good at considering every possibility. We’ve known whenever anything was going to happen.”

Professor Vettese makes Jen’s time loop seem not only possible but logical. He suggests that the brain’s unsuspected power could have triggered Jen’s time loop. This theory upends the assumption that life—and time—are stable.

“She can’t deal with this. Finding and finding and finding things which she wishes she could forget. She turns the lamp out […] her husband’s forged identity held in her hand.”

Jen discovers she never even knew her husband’s name. She is sure, and wrong, that his secret identity means he is involved in something nefarious. The above quote features polysyndeton, where words are separated by the same conjunction, in this case “and”—“Finding and finding and finding.” This creates a sense of breathlessness, and mirrors Jen’s feeling of being overwhelmed.

“It isn’t her fault. She knows that she mothered him well enough. She knows because of his eyes. They are lit with love.”

As she plays Todd, who is a toddler, Jen understands that she was, in fact, a loving mother, and that Todd knew it in his heart. The above quote consists of short, declarative sentences; this has the effect of slowing down the narrative and drawing the reader’s attention to these lines.

“Ryan has truly become Kelly.”

Ryan’s charade as Kelly Brotherhood begins, born from his childhood desire to help others. Ryan understands that the only way to protect the woman he loves is to sacrifice himself and become the persona he created as an undercover cop. 

“The puzzle isn’t yet complete. Clearly, it isn’t over yet. She’s still here, in the deep past, still with things to do, to solve, and to understand.”

Jen’s mission is not merely to stop a murder or even to assuage her guilt over what she sees as her bad parenting. She ensures that her son will find his way to love by preventing Eve’s kidnapping.

“‘I like the people. I want to help people.’”

Ryan’s admission during his first date with Jen echoes a key theme in the novel, The Power of Love. The need to help others compels Ryan to become a cop and Jen to become a lawyer. The above lines use repetition for emphasis, with each sentence beginning with “I” and ending with “people.”

“It is a kindness. Kelly kept his identity, his transformation, secret from her. Because he loves her.”

Jen finally understands that Ryan pretended to be someone he wasn’t for 20 years as an act of love. Jen discovers that Kelly is not only Ryan Hiles, but that he loves Jen much more than she knew.