Mark dropped Dinah off after a full day. They worked in what had been their father’s office, so they spent almost as much time together as married folks. In fact, they’d been taken for a couple a number of times, by people who noticed them on the streets or in local restaurants, and they’d been commended for appearing to be one of the happiest pairs around. “You two are always laughing,” was a typical comment, sometimes followed by a statement like “You obviously enjoy one another. You’re like my model of marital happiness.”

The speaker was always surprised and then pleased/relieved to learn that Mark and Dinah are siblings. The statement might be “Oh, that explains it!” The thought was likely “Whew – now I feel better about my own home scene.”

They were like a platonic couple. They spent weekdays together, traveled on business, and didn’t mind socializing away from work, with each other and their extended family. So they heard each other’s stories a lot.

Like at lunch. They were dining alone so it’s not like Mark repeated himself because it would be new words for a guest’s ears. Once again he said it was just as well that he’d never had kids. This time Dinah didn’t argue with him. She didn’t agree with him either. She just shifted the subject back to the work issue that had sent them to a lunch with wine in the first place.

It wasn’t till sometime after he dropped her at her condo, transporting her with the food items they picked up after work instead of leaving her to her usual bus, that his retro-assessment recurred to her. She’d been thinking lately about the nature of ego and self-knowledge.

That started with a recent news item about how people consider their future selves. Dinah heard that some neuroscientists applied sensors to subjects’ heads and then showed the subjects pictures of loved ones and of people they didn’t know. The screens revealed that one part of the brain fired when looking at a familiar face, and another section was activated when gazing at a stranger.

Then the neuroscientists asked the subjects to envision themselves, ten years in the future. The stranger portion of their brains went to work.

Dinah was stunned. It made her realize that she’d never considered her future self. Like anyone else she’d had childhood aspirations about love, marriage, career, fame. Like most others she had a bucket list, and maybe that meant thinking about how she’d act in awhile. But she’d never asked herself how her future self was likely to be.

She had a couple of qualities rare among her peers. When her friends said “Well, you never know what you’d do if confronted with a challenge like so-and-so’s,” Dinah disagreed. She had a solid personality and a good idea of exactly what she’d do. That made her think she might be more able than many to forecast her future self. And she kept a journal regularly enough that she could do spot research about her past. She wondered if examining the self of ten years ago might lend perspective on the self to come.

So in spring of 2015, Dinah embarked on an investigation into Dinah-2025. She started one evening with the notes she found about 2005.

She’d been 55 then. Single for 15 years, her kids were launched and she was alone with a medically challenged dog. Her daughter was pregnant for most of the year.

That was the spring when Dinah fell on her ass on the brick walkway to her house. She didn’t know it then, but the impact would result in the herniated disk between L3 and L4 that presented itself the following year, and eliminated high-impact exercise from her life.

It was the summer when she first sought cosmetic dermatology. She’d seen the doctor before, about a few bumps that required removal and once about a cyst at the back of a knee, but ten years ago was when she had her first Botox injection (in the approved location, between her brows), bought her first miracle cream, subscribed to her first program of clinically-approved exfoliants. Why, she even attempted her own before-and-during shots, but a decade ago was a little before the explosion of smart phones and selfies, and Dinah wasn’t good enough with her digital SLR to capture the subtle improvements, if any, on her face.

It was that autumn when her fledgling nonprofit, in partnership with a bigger organization, cut the ribbon on the one inclusive housing project they were able to complete. Dinah had been involved in the project from before the beginning, and she was one of the speakers at the grand opening. She prepared a five-minute talk and even rehearsed it in front of her home mirror. As it turned out, she rocked. Hers was the speech best received. That experience made her conscious of being “on” when she was in public; she started paying more attention to how she walked and to her facial expressions.

And that was the winter when her first grandchild was born. Dinah promptly grew a heart chamber for Abby, and swore that she would never love another as much as she adored this grandbaby (she would be just as astounded two and then five years later, when Abby’s siblings arrived, and each of them immediately excavated a new room in Dinah).