Twice

In August 1978, Philadelphia buckles under what they are calling the storm of the year.

In August 1978, Philadelphia buckles under what they are calling the storm of the year. A young dark-haired woman materializes on Market Street, rain-soaked and disoriented, as if the chaos around her is unexpected. She opens her handbag, examines a small object inside, then tucks it away. Ahead, through the sheeting rain, she spots the revolving doors of Gimbels department store and a young man at the window, windmilling his arms. Something catches in her chest. She begins walking toward him—steadily, deliberately, as though she has walked this path before.

A dying man in a Bahamas jail offers his love story as alibi

Detective LaPorta, a casino-cheat investigator stationed in the Bahamas, sits across from a gray-haired man named Alfie Logan who seems almost amused to be there. Alfie placed single-number bets on three consecutive roulette spins—an act LaPorta calls impossible without rigging—and walked out with over two million dollars, which he immediately wired to a woman named Gianna Rule. The next morning, police caught him buying plane tickets to Africa. From a faded leather satchel, Alfie produces a composition notebook addressed to his boss, marked to be read upon his death. He is dying of a neurological disease, he says. Rather than confess to a crime, he insists LaPorta hear what he calls a love story. Stranded without hard evidence, the detective agrees.

A boy's grief in Kenya unlocks a power to redo the past

In 1966, Alfie was an eight-year-old missionary's son in Kenya who slept every night in a Superman cape. When his mother fell ill, his father ordered him to sit with her. He ran outside instead, sprinting across a cinnamon-dirt soccer field, cape flapping, pretending to fly. She died of a pulmonary embolism while he played. That night he flung the cape from his window and sobbed himself to sleep. When he woke, the cape was draped around him again. The entire day was repeating. His mother, alive behind the mosquito netting, recognized what was happening—she shared the same gift, inherited through their family. She explained he could redo any moment, once. She listed the things she loved about him. Then she died again, this time in his arms.

Alfie reroutes Wesley from Cambodia—fate finds him anyway Wesley, Alfie's closest friend since childhood—a sharp, quiet Black kid who wore horn-rimmed glasses and built model rockets—enlisted in the Marines at eighteen. Months later, Alfie learned Wesley's unit was headed into a doomed rescue operation off the Cambodian coast. He jumped back five months to a meal they had shared and, for the first time, told another human being about his power.…