Page 47 of Love and Other Paradoxes

It was the cover story they’d decided on. He hadn’t questioned whether it was a good idea until he saw the way she was looking at his mum, with fragile intensity. “Thanks. I...” Her voice wobbled. “Sorry. I have to—” She got up, her face a mask of tears.

He followed her out to the hall, where she was pulling on her borrowed boots. “Where are you going?”

Her voice was choked. “I need to be alone.” She walked out, closing the door behind her.

He went back to the kitchen. “She’s fine,” he said, rubbing his face. “She just needs some time.”

His mum and dad looked at each other. He knew what they were thinking: that this was some kind of lovers’ tiff. The thought made him irrationally angry.

“It’s starting to rain,” his mum said, looking anxiously out of the window. “Did she take a waterproof?”

“No.” He tried to ignore her reproachful look. “Mum, she’ll be fine. She’s from London, she’s not soluble.”

His mum steered him to the door and put a spare raincoat in his arms. “Find her,” she said, and pushed him outside.

He pulled up his hood against the smirr of rain and headed down the street. He was too late to follow her, but there weren’t many places she could have gone. His feet led him, as they always did, down to the sea.

He found her on a bench beside the harbour, looking out into the rolling grey dark. Her hoodie was soaked, clinging in wet patches to her skin. Wordlessly, he handed her the spare waterproof. She pulled off the hoodie and slid her shivering arms into the sleeves.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you wanted to be alone, but Mum was about to disown me if I didn’t come and check on you.”

Her face crumpled. “It’s just hard. Seeing you with them, both of them. How much they love you. How proud they are of you. It’s like you’ve got everything I lost.”

“Your dad’s proud of you. And your mum would be too, if she could see you.”

A sob shook her. “No, she wouldn’t. She’d be so disappointed in me. She was so smart, so successful, and I—I’m nothing. I’m going nowhere.”

He finally understood: the real reason why she was so afraid of her mum seeing her, why she wanted to intervene without leaving a mark. “What are you talking about? You’re literally trying tochange the world. That’s more impressive than anything I’ve ever done.” He leaned towards her. “Not to mention, you’ve also managed to do the impossible and impress my parents.”

Her voice wobbled. “Only because they think I go to Cambridge.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it. Trust me, they’ve complained about plenty of my uni friends. But they love you.” His heart thudded strangely as he went on, “They’d want me to marry you tomorrow, if it wasn’t obvious that you’re way out of my league.”

She huffed out a laugh. “I’m not out of your league. You’re out of my league. You’re”—she cast him a sideways glance—“surprisingly hot, and you’re funny, and you’re kind, and you’re destined to be with a gorgeous famous actor.” She shrugged violently. “I’m just—broken.”

He tried not to focus on thesurprisingly hot, which was making him feel all kinds of things, and stuck to what was important. “Has anyone ever said that to you?” he asked gently. “That you’re broken?”

“Nottome.” She took in a great sniff of the sea air. “But I heard my dad talking to one of my aunties, not long after it happened. He said...” She swallowed. “He said when he looked at me, he couldn’t see his little girl anymore. It was—it was like he’d lost her.”

He reached for her. He couldn’t help it: he wrapped his arm around her shaking body, as if he could hold her together. “Esi, no. He was worried about you. He wasn’t saying—he didn’t mean—”

She shook him off, eyes flashing. “What do you know about it? You weren’t there! You were an old man in a mansion somewhere. And when I go back, that’s all you’ll be again.”

He shifted along the bench. He felt the distance between them, inches and decades and the incommensurable gap between onesoul and another. “How’s it going to work?” he said quietly. “When you go back.”

“I told you, I don’t know—”

“How do you hope it’s going to work?”

“I guess...” She stared ahead at the dark ocean. “I’ll go to the wormhole. I’ll step through. And—I won’t be me anymore. Or, not this me. I’ll be the new me. The one I was meant to be.”

He took in her face, familiar to him after these weeks of spending every moment together: the curve of her cheekbone, her generous mouth, her curious eyes that lit up when an idea struck her. He couldn’t imagine another Esi. She was so specific, so herself, that any alternative version of her dissolved into nonexistence. What part of her would change? Her wide-eyed enthusiasm? Her flashes of sarcasm, like sparks flying out from a low fire? Her quiet moments, when she seemed to go somewhere else, arriving back with a self-conscious shiver and a smile? To him, in that moment, the loss of any of those seemed like a tragedy.

“Someone’s going to step out of that river,” he said, remembering her dad’s story.

She gave him a strange, heartfelt look. “But it won’t be me.”

“So, if you’re right, then once you go back—you won’t remember any of this. Your time in Cambridge. Me. This conversation. It’ll be like none of it ever happened.”

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