The Little Shop of Found Things
Xanthe Westlake and her mother are looking for a fresh start as owners of an antique shop
in the village of Marlborough when a 17th century silver chanelaine calls to Xanthe’s
psychic powers and eventually takes her on a quest to save a young servant girl in 1605
(and maybe, in the process, meet a handsome young architect with oddly modern views on
women).
— Michael Main
Had she somehow crucially alterted her own present by changing Alice’s future? The
thought that she might have started some terrible chain of events that she could not
possibly have foreseen, nor known about, worried her more and more. It was only in the
small hours of Wednesday night that an answer came to her that seemed to make sense. The
present that she knew, the way things were in her time, could only have come about if she
had traveled back to the past. Her finding the chatelaine, her
answering Alice’s call for help, those things were necessary to shape the past and
bring about the future as it was. She had to believe this. It did work. She was a part of
how things had turned out, not an alternative version, but the one she was meant to live
in. If she
hadn’t gone back, hadn’t taken the decision to help
Alice, well, that wouldhave resulted in a different future from the one she knew.
