Page 66 of Love and Other Paradoxes

He was lost in the melody of a familiar song, his head buzzing with echoes. “Yes?”

She looked awkward, then annoyed. Her expression smoothed over with a practised sigh, like she spent a lot of time hiding how she was feeling. “No, I mean—excuse me. You’re in my way.”

“Oh. Sorry.” He moved abruptly to the side, forgetting his injured leg. He swore silently.

She shook her head and walked past him, laughing. “Bye, Backwards Boy.”

Her laughter followed him around the curve of the staircase. He lurched down, step by frantic, burning step, until he reached the entrance, the list of room numbers and names stark on the wall in white on black. There, belowF5: Diana Dartnell, an empty row he hadn’t noticed, the glare of his muse obscuring everything around her. He looked closer. Black tape, stuck carefully to the wall. He peeled it back. Underneath, there she was.F6: E. Eshun.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Oh,” he said aloud, feeling deeply, transcendently stupid.

He left Whewell’s Court and crossed the road, waiting by the Great Gate until a column of late-night revellers spilled out and he could slip inside. In the Porters’ Lodge, he went back to the column ofEs, the blank pigeonhole he’d passed over, assuming it belonged to a student who’d dropped out. For the second time, he peeled back the tape covering Efua’s name. Her pigeonhole was empty, except for a blank notelet that read,With Deepest Sympathy.

He staggered back, the pain in his leg surging with the rhythm of his pulse. Why was her name covered up? Clearly, she hadn’t dropped out; he’d just seen her in her staircase, carrying textbooks back to her room. He couldn’t shake the feeling that it meant someone didn’t want them to find her. His thoughts went to Vera, standing watch outside Whewell’s Court. Had she somehow figured out why Esi had come to the past, covered up Efua’s name to stop her changing the future?

He reeled in his spiralling thoughts. It didn’t matter. Vera was gone. What mattered was that he knew where Esi’s mum was, and he had to tell her.

He limped back to college in the frozen dark. He couldn’t face her directly, not with the things they’d said to each other still lying between them raw as open wounds. But there was no way he could keep this to himself. Even though he didn’t want her to leave; even though the thought of her overwriting herself made him feel sick to the stomach. This was more important than what he wanted.

He ripped a leaf from his notebook and sat down at his desk. At the top of the page, he wrote her mum’s room number:F6, Whewell’s Court.

He meant to leave it at that. But given her last words in the café, he doubted he’d get the chance to speak to her again. If he had something to say to her, he had to say it now.

He didn’t set out to write a poem. He just thought, and wrote, and the words turned gradually into a poem, because that was the only honest way to tell her what he was feeling. He wrote, without thinking about whether it would be good, about whether anyone other than Esi would ever read it. He thought only of her, and what he wanted her to understand: all the things he hadn’t been able to tell her, because his fear and his pride and his obsession with the future had got in the way.

When he was happy, when the shape of it was a close enough match to the shape of his heart, he tore a new sheet of paper from his notebook and copied it out clean.

F6, Whewell’s Court

I found her. And in her, I found

you:

your eyes,

your laugh,

your sometimes-wickedness,

your love of casual, accidental beauty,

your love of love, and your defensiveness

at being seen to love it—

you, alive

in her;

her, alive

in you.

That little girl was never lost.

She grew up, turned into

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