Page 46 of Love and Other Paradoxes

They kept watching. “So she’s just going to stay with him in 1876?”

“Looks like it.”

“What’s she going to do? I thought she was this high-powered career woman!”

“What’s shenotgoing to do? Think about it. She could inventeverything a hundred years early. Move the future onto a better path.”

He looked at her fondly. “Of course you’d say that.” For a moment, the tension of the real argument between them hung in the air.

She gave a tiny shrug. “Or, you know. Maybe she decided the past has some good points.”

He smiled and looked back at the screen.

“Okay,” he said as the film ended. “I’m sorry to say it, but my level of respect for your mum has dropped substantially.”

“Come on. This came out when she was—” She flipped the box and counted. “Sixteen. No one has good taste when they’re sixteen. I mean, judging by that poster in your bedroom, you were into movies about zombie rabbits.”

He was indignant. “Donnie Darkois not a film about zombie rabbits.”

“Prove it.”

They watchedDonnie Darko. Esi sat in silence, a delicate furrow on her brow, until the credits rolled. “Okay, that made no sense.”

“I know, right? I didn’t get it till the fifth time I watched it.” He swivelled to face her. “So. Donnie realises he was supposed to die when the plane engine fell in his room. He didn’t die, and that’s created a divergent universe, which is causing a paradox and breaking reality. So he goes back through a wormhole into the original universe and makes sure he’s in his room when the plane engine falls, so he can die like he’s meant to and set things right.”

She was staring at the screen. “Why do time travel stories always end with putting things back how they were?”

He shrugged. “Maybe it’s comforting. The idea that there’s one way things are meant to be.” He felt her stiffen. Too late, he realised how it sounded. “Sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“You did, though.” She turned to him, serious in the screen’s muted glow. “And I get why you want it to be that way. You’re meant to end up with everything you ever wanted.”

He tipped his head back against the sofa. “And I get why you want the past to change.Needit to change.”

“We don’t have to change your future, though.”

He stared up at the ceiling, fear wound tight inside him. “I just—I still don’t really believe it’s possible unless it’s inevitable. Does that make sense? Me succeeding—it feels so unlikely that if it doesn’t happen the exact way it always did, it won’t happen at all.”

She didn’t reply. He heard her breathing, and felt her warmth against him, but he didn’t dare to look at her. He had known since the start that they had different ideas about how time travel worked, but he had never let it bother him. Now, for some reason, he desperately wanted them to be on the same side.

He tilted his head towards her. “Maybe we’re both wrong. I mean, Rob’s always telling me physics is much weirder than we can imagine. Time travel could work differently from how either of us thinks it does.”

She met his eyes. “It doesn’t matter how it works,” she said softly. “There’s no way both of us get what we want.”

He tried to think around it, like a tricky essay question, but she was right. There was no world where his future was fixed and her mum’s past could change. They would have to keep on as they were, working together but apart, in parallel but untouching universes.

She got up, dislodging Jeely Piece. Her warmth against his side was gone. “Night, Joseph Greene.”

“Night,” he said, and watched her disappear into the dark.

Chapter Sixteen

Three weeks slid away like sand through his fingers. Too soon, he was at the kitchen table on their last evening, and his dad was raising a glass to Esi. “Thank you for coming to the ends of the earth.”

“It’s been lovely to have you,” said his mum. With a conspiratorial smile at his dad, she added, “It’s great to see Joe so happy.”

“Mum,” he protested.

She beamed at him, watery-eyed. He recognised that look: it meant she was tipsy enough to sincerely express her feelings. “We’re just so proud of you. And, Esi, you should be proud too. Getting into Cambridge, staying the course—it’s a huge achievement.”

---