Time-Slips Aweigh

TIME-SLIPS AWEIGH, A Quasi Time Travel Romance:

If 42-year-old math professor Phil Schuster had a do-over, he'd be a better friend to his brother-in-law, Ray Claymore after Ray's wife (Phil's sister) and son tragically die. Suffering his own grief over his sister and nephew, Phil withdraws instead, leaving Ray to tinker with mythical technology to restore his family. Eventually, melancholy Phil's wife divorces him. Two years later, when Ray unexpectedly sends Phil an advanced AI tablet named Ava and an invitation to meet on a reunion cruise, Phil hopes to rekindle his friendship with his estranged Best Friend Forever.

The cruise is a bust: Ray misses the Sunday departure, and burglars ransack Phil's cabin. With only Ava for company, Phil plans to sulk for the next seven days until Ray can join him in Portugal, but meeting Elaine Sanchez changes Phil's strategy. She's smart, beautiful, and for some mysterious reason, likes Phil. Phil, smitten but out of practice, offends Elaine on Tuesday. When Phil confides in Ava that he wishes he could correct his mistakes. Ava astonishes Phil by Time-Slipping him to repeat Tuesday. 

While testing Ava's Time-Slipping capabilities, Phil discovers that his cabin break-in links to Ray missing the ship's departure. Bad guys onboard will kill for Ray's technology. Only Ava's Time-Slips keep Phil and Elaine ahead of the villains. As they fall deeper in love, they're forced to repeatedly Time-Slip to foil Phil's execution, to negate Elaine's murder, and to reverse Ray's calamitous failures to board the ship. Each Time-Slip entangles multiple timelines into a Gordian Knot with the side-effects that the personalities in the alternate timelines change, often for the worse. Phil realizes that destroying the Gordian Knot is the only way to keep Ray from going to jail as a villain. But saving his BFF means he must sacrifice meeting Elaine, the love of his life. (PG13)