Wyn had known all this before he left. He had gone, not just to avoid seeing his wife revert to childhood before his eyes, but to delve into studies on the nature of time itself. Where he had been, how he had supported himself I didn't know. I still don't know.
Summer, her age now about thirteen, was old enough to understand that she was Wyn's wife, but he did not resume his position as husband to her. Instead, he acted toward her and Mark both as a father. Me? I suppose I was something in the nature of a benevolent uncle now.
As a matter of fact, Wyn plunged so deeply into work that the task devolved upon me to be both father and mother to Summer and her child. Mark, developing apace into a vigorous young specimen, looked like both his parents—since their features were so much alike, he could not be said to resemble one more than the other.
Wyn did not return with his family to the house at 138 March Street. It had long been occupied by someone else. He moved in with us and, with my tacit consent, made my home both his home and the headquarters for his work.
His work actually was double. He got a good job, this time as engineer at the Allertown Mill Industries. During all his spare time, he worked at converting my precious den and my basement into something completely beyond my understanding.
There are some people who accept misfortune and live with it—or die with it. Others battle it angrily to the bitter end, even when there is no evidence that anyone ever conquered their particular misfortune before. Admittedly, there was little precedent for Summer's case; and this made the prognosis even less optimistic. Still, Wyn was constitutionally the latter type of person.
"I don't know how much longer she lived in the past before you found us," he told me. "Nothing I could do has helped my amnesia for that period. She may have lived to a ripe old age, for all I know.
"But we know that she has only a few years to live, the way she is now—perhaps twelve or thirteen. That's her physical age, and she is living backwards toward babyhood."
"What will she do?" I asked curiously. "Just fade away?"
"She has to be born," he answered solemnly. "My guess is that, a few years in the future, there will occur the most unique birth ever known to man—a birth in reverse. Some couple, somewhere—perhaps someone we know here in Allertown—will live through the experience of the daughter they never knew reentering the mother's womb and retracing her steps through the embryo stage to the moment of conception."