More snippets where an element from a previously-written story changes. These ones deal with longer stand-alone stories. (May contain spoilers.)
“Just tell me what this is all about!” Di cried, with tears pouring down her face. “Please!”
Mart hesitated for a moment. “Wait here,” he requested. He ran up the stairs and out of sight, returning a short time later with a strange card. “Uh, there’s an old lady near here who sends these to guys when they’re about to make a fool of themselves,” he explained. “And when I got this… well, I went and saw her and she told me exactly what it meant and… look, I’m sorry, Di, but I can’t go through with it.”
“You mean the wedding?”
He nodded. “Please forgive me. She started naming these flowers and telling their meanings and all I could think of was how horrible it would be if I messed everything up by rushing into something that we’re not ready for. And I’m not ready for this.”
She took a calming breath, but it didn’t help. “You asked me,” she reminded him.
His face reddened. “I had… other things in mind.”
She laughed, in spite of her still-falling tears. “You mean, you thought that since I wouldn’t sleep with you as things were, you could get around that by us getting married.”
He nodded. “I’m really sorry, Di, and I hope that you’ll forgive me, one day.”
“Fine!” Sally’s chest heaved with her uneven breaths. “I don’t actually know who the baby’s father is. Are you satisfied, now? I thought it was Brian, but I was drunk and maybe that was just wishful thinking.”
“It really wasn’t me,” Brian told her, in a low voice.
“Well, maybe we can figure it out, if we compare the things we saw that night,” Trixie suggested. “What do you remember that could help us, Sally?”
The other girl covered her face. “Nothing! It’s all a haze.”
But with a little bit of coaxing and some calls to other people who had been there that night, they came to an uncomfortable conclusion.
“Moms, can we call the Idaho Beldens?” Trixie asked. “We need to ask them some questions.”
“You most certainly may not,” her mother replied. “But I will do it for you.”
She took Sally with her to the extension in the den to make the call in private. Some minutes later, the question was settled to Helen’s satisfaction: the baby’s father was most probably Knut.
“At least I know, now,” Sally concluded, as fresh tears coursed down her face.
Helen gathered the unhappy girl into her arms.
What if Mart had explained himself, rather than leaving Di almost at the altar and never speaking of the matter again?
What if Sally had admitted that she didn’t remember what had happened that night?
“Vanda! It’s good to see you again,” Trixie greeted. “What brings you here?”
“I wanted your help with something,” the Traveller answered. “We’ve discovered a paradox in this location and we need to correct it right away, before it causes bigger problems.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“Do you know anyone who’s very old, but… how can I put it… acts even older still?”
Trixie frowned a moment. “There’s Old Brom, I guess.”
“Can you take me to see him?” she asked.
“Sure,” Trixie replied, leading the way.
Some time later, they tapped on the door to the tiny cottage in the heart of the Preserve.
“Ah,” the old man observed, with a knowing look on his face. “You’ve come, at last.”
“I’m so very sorry,” Vanda told him. “This should never have been allowed to happen to you.”
He shook his head, not speaking, but his forgiveness of any who had wronged him clear nonetheless. “So be it,” he murmured, at last.
She pressed an object into his hands and moments later he disappeared in a golden flash of light.
“He’s gone back to his own time,” Vanda explained, “to say his goodbyes.”
“Ignore them,” Di advised Brian, with her hand on his chest.
“But…” His gaze trailed after his sister and her boyfriend.
“Are you seriously suggesting to me that you’re more interested in what they’re doing than in what we’re going to do?”
He opened his mouth to speak, then her words sank in. “Excuse me?”
“I’m telling you to forget about them, okay? Focus on the moment.”
His brow creased. “She’s my sister and I’m supposed to protect her.”
Di laughed and he felt his insides jolt.
“She’s older than me,” Di pointed out, “and more innocent.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better? Because it doesn’t, really.”
“Then forget them,” she repeated. “Forget them and let me make you feel better.”
She reached up and caressed his face before kissing him, slowly and full of promise.
“You know, that does make me feel a little better,” he admitted. “Maybe you could do it again.”
She was only too happy to comply.
“Kelly?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you regret it? Moving to Sleepyside, I mean.”
In the darkness of their bedroom, she sighed. “Yes and no, but mostly no.” She ran a hand across his chest. “I couldn’t stay where we were and I wanted you and I to be together, but I don’t know whether it was the right decision for Ripley.”
“Just him?” Dan wondered.
She nodded against him. “Kaydee will be happy wherever she goes; she always has. But Ripley has always hated moving. I didn’t want to do it to him again, and I’m not sure whether he’ll forgive me for it, this time, but what else could I do?”
“Yeah, I know.” He squeezed her tighter. “I wonder, too, whether I handled things the right way.”
“I feel like I’m losing him,” she admitted, in a whisper. “I’m losing him and I can’t make it stop and it’s partly my fault, because I didn’t do enough to help him when he was younger, but I didn’t even know what I was supposed to do.”
“We’ll get some help for him,” Dan promised her. “Whatever he needs, we’ll do it; even if it means leaving Sleepyside again.”
A future moment. What if Vanda was not the first Traveller to visit Sleepyside?
A tiny missing scene.
Maybe a missing scene, or maybe an alternate version.
One minute, Dan was standing in her way, in the most infuriating manner. The next, he was kissing her with a passion that made her toes curl. Trixie spent the first few moments too surprised at the shock development to react. Then, before she could decide whether to melt into him or push him away, it ended.
“What did you do that for?” she asked, what seemed like an eternity later.
He looked down at her with that faint smirk that riled her so much and shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Well, maybe you should keep those kinds of ideas to yourself,” she retorted.
Dan only laughed.
“Now, let me through, okay?”
Still, he blocked the path.
“Dan!”
He reached out and brushed a curl back from her face.
“What are you doing now?” she demanded.
“You’re feisty,” he told her. “I kind of like it.”
“Yes, well, you irritate me.”
He laughed and the sound of it caused her to shiver. “That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, does it?”
She didn’t see Jim slip away.
“Oops.”
“Diana?” Regan asked, with an underlying tension in his voice. “What have you done?”
She stepped into the hallway, closed the door behind herself and squeezed her eyes shut. “I may, accidentally, have kind of, almost, nearly given the impression that I might just be willing to consider, under certain circumstances, which I might possibly–”
“No,” he interrupted, when her sentence appeared to be going on forever. “I don’t think there’s any almost about it.”
“You seem very calm, Uncle Bill,” Dan commented, with an expression of high alarm on his face.
“Oh, I’ve gone past angry and out the other side,” Bill Regan answered, in that same even tone.
“I’m really sorry!” Di turned from one person to another. “It was so easy and I didn’t even realise that I was doing it until it was done.”
“I don’t blame you at all,” Honey told her, giving her a small hug. “And I’m sure that Regan and Dan will have some sort of idea of what to do next, which they will tell us any minute now, as soon as they’ve had a moment to think about it.”
“There was a specific reason why I gave you that very specific instruction,” Regan pointed out, “and that was that there isn’t a clear answer to this problem.”
A sharp tapping sounded on the door and the doorknob rattled. “Hello? Can shomeone open the door, pleashe, sho that I can inshpect my new home?”
Regan groaned. “This is why you should never invite a vampire inside!”
An alternate imagining of one scene in the story. But how much would change after that point? Would it scuttle Honey’s plan to make peace among the Bob-Whites?
What if Di had gotten it wrong during her conversation with Kevin the vegan vampire?
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