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Kin Stewart is a man with a barely-remembered secret. Though he lives a happy life in 2014 San Francisco with his wife and daughter, they reflect his effort to move on after his mission as an agent of the 22nd century's Temporal Corruption Bureau left him stranded in the past. But then a random connection brings his old life back — at the cost of his new one.

Now Kin Stewart is back in his home time, slowly reconnecting with a life from which he had been separated for years yet from which he had been absent for only a few weeks. Yet his old life remains in the past, and Kin soon discovers the damage his absence causes to his family. As he attempts to repair that damage and reconnect with the daughter he left behind, he threatens both his present and his future, forcing him to risk everything to save the person he loves the most.

As a longtime fan of stories involving time travel, I have come to appreciate just how difficult they are to write well. This is a problem on two levels, the first being the obvious one of the paradoxes and inconsistencies that often develop in plots that naturally fold upon themselves. Authors who can master these, though, then face the same challenge as every other fiction writer of crafting an engaging plot with interesting and believable characters. In this sense, Mike Chen's novel is no small achievement, as within it he provides readers a logically credible time travel tale that nonetheless doesn't let the science get in the way of the fiction. Like all good sci-fi novels, the science fiction serves as a plot device for exploring an important aspect of humanity, in this case the relationship between parents and children. Chen's employs the device of time travel to make some touching observations, with a plot that avoids the predictable outcome until the very end — though even then the outcome feels earned rather than forced. Anybody seeking a model of what a good time travel novel should be would be well advised to read this book, as Mike Chen shows how to do it right.