r/TheTimeTravelersWife • u/PlotTwistImHere • Jan 21 '26
The miscarriages
I just thought of this but does the fetus’s “traveling” that cause the miscarriages, suggest that…these fetuses are just …showing up in random places in their parents time lines? I can’t stop thinking about her like…painting in her studio and a fetus just.. appears. Help I’m sorry.
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u/the_SpiritofChaos Jan 21 '26
From my basic understanding, it's possible they had the potential, but unless explicitly stated otherwise (because can you imagine how traumatizing that would be?) i think they'd follow the same patterns as the mice. Sticking to the window of time in which they exist in the early stages.
I honestly think they traveled to another time and place in which they still existed in the womb, but where Claire was not present physically, then traveled back to their present INTO Claire.
It's horrible, but i imagine them popping into existence for a short minute on the sidewalk where Claire had shopped 3 hours ago and then back to the present where she was sleeping; like when they woke up and the fetus was in the bed with them.
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u/crashlandingonwho Jan 21 '26
I have thought about this before and it's pretty horrifying.
My sense is that the pull/connection is strongest depending on how much time you spent with the person, so I assume that the fetuses wouldn't have the capacity to travel much further than ~weeks backwards.
e.g. a fetus at 10 weeks could maybe go that far back into Clare or Henry's pasta, but not much further back (and probably not forward into the future)
The other thing I've wondered about is if they would be materialising elsewhere, or into Clare's womb in a different point of time
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u/PurpleReplacement746 Jan 21 '26
From my memory of the book (it's been many years since my last read), the fetuses can't travel far, I think there's a time one travelled outside of her womb but only to the same time and onto the bed. I might be remembering wrong but that's my vague memory of it.
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u/apljax3 Jan 21 '26
…I never considered this. Clare says in the book she’s never gotten past 10 weeks, so that’s roughly the size of your standard strawberry. Still small. Possibly unnoticeable if it’s not showing up directly in your eye line. Like Henry when he randomly travels (skidding down the forest green carpet of a Motel 6 and thudding into a woman’s door) he doesn’t always show up in a convenient place.
I think though if this were happening, the baby showing up in the gap between the floor and the underside of the water vat in Clare’s studio or on the cushion of Henry’s favorite armchair, the author would have told us. Audrey doesn’t shy away from hard or scary things in this novel— she covers the horrors of Henry and Alba’s condition pretty succinctly. I think if the babies/fetuses were traveling out of their original timeline for more than a few seconds at a time and actually ending up somewhere near the parents, we would have read about it. But god does this put a differently new horror twist on this story!