Page 79 of Love and Other Paradoxes

He looked at her, puzzled. She sighed and pointed to the huge diamond that he had failed to notice adorning her ring finger. “I’m engaged.”

He still didn’t understand. “To who?”

“The Duke of Devonshire,” she said, in such perfect deadpan that for a confusing moment, he believed her. She rolled her eyes. “Crispin, you loon.”

“Why?” He stared at her, appalled. “You don’t have to marry him. Surely that’s one good thing to come out of all this mess.”

“Of course I have to marry him. Because I do.” She tookMeant to Beout of her bag and laid it on the jetty between them. “It happens. On the way to where I’m going.”

He looked down at the book, then up at her, the frozen black-and-white face and the living one, shade-dappled and intent. “But—none of that has to happen now.” He drew his feet out of the water and swivelled to face her. “You can do anything. You can be with someone else, or not be with anyone, or you can have a harem of guys you see on a rota. You can move to Borneo, or become a lion tamer, or—or freeze yourself in a cryogenic tank and wake up in the future.” He laughed in hoarse desperation. “The possibilities are infinite. I know that’s scary, and I know you’ve built yourself around one idea of who you’re supposed to be. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only version of you that could ever exist.”

She looked at him steadily. “Joseph. I’ve been perfectly clear with you who I am, and what I want. Did you think I was lying? Or did you think I wasn’t sure?” She shook her head, throwing atwig into the water. “My whole life, I’ve been sure about exactly one thing. Other possibilities don’t interest me.”

He watched the twig float in place, pushed and pulled by invisible forces. “But—think of everything we changed. We’re on a different path now, for better or worse.” He tried to say it gently. “Diana, your future inMeant to Be—it might not even be possible anymore.”

“I know that,” she snapped. “I’m not an idiot. But given that I still want it, what should I do? Pretend I’m walking blind, stumbling through the rest of my life? Or use what I know”—she laid her palm on the book—“to make sure I don’t change anything else?”

His mouth moved helplessly. “But Crispin—he doesn’t have to be part of that future. He’s not the reason for your success.”

“Do you know that for certain?” She held his gaze, challenging, until he looked away. “Wanting to be an actor is an insane dream, Joseph. Success is balanced on the slimmest knife-edge. If I do succeed, a lot of it will be down to luck.” She frowned into the deep water. “I can’t be sure that Crispin is part of that luck. But I can’t be sure he isn’t. Maybe he introduces me to someone. Maybe the experience of being married to him turns me into the right person to play some crucial role. I don’t know. But the best way of reaching that future is to follow the path that already led me there.”

It sounded like what he had said to Esi, huddled on the sofa in his parents’ house, before his life had been upended by a bike crash and a kiss. He wanted to tell Diana that she was wrong, that he knew better now, but she wasn’t him: she hadn’t been through what he had been through, and even if she had, she might have learned something completely different.

She tapped his arm. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I never wanted tobe a person, remember? Much less a happy one. My sights are set elsewhere.”

He stared out at the river. He imagined Byron on his back, weeds tangling his feet, something tugging him down to the green depths.I’ll choose my art. Every time.It made sense, in a twisted way he wished he didn’t understand. It was a choice he might have made himself, once upon a time. In another universe, perhaps he had. An image transfixed him, sudden and dizzying: the two of them sitting by the river, overlaid a hundredfold, a thousandfold, their outlines trembling with a million potentials.

She held out the book. “Here you go. It’s yours, after all.”

He took it. He ran his hand over the cover, thinking of the first time he had seen it, falling out of Esi’s bag onto the street; of the uncloseable gap between then and now. “It’s not mine,” he said. “I stole it. But the person I stole it from doesn’t want it.” He handed it back. “And I don’t need it anymore.”

“They’re very beautiful. The poems.” She looked down at her own face, austere in black and white. “When I read them, I see her. The me I want to be.”

Her words should have made him feel something: joy, pride, satisfaction. But he didn’t feel any of those things, because it wasn’t about him. He had no more ownership over the poems than he had over Diana herself. “So keep them.” He shrugged. “It’s you I would have written them for.”

“All right.” She tucked the book into her bag. With a wry smile, she added, “You can keep the photo.”

He didn’t understand. “What photo?”

“The one of Efua and me.”

Everything rearranged in his mind, an optical illusion flipping from one state to another. “You do know her.”

“We were friends in first year. No dramatic bust-up, if that’s what you’re thinking. We just grew apart. Different priorities, you know.”

He thought of what Esi had told him about her mum: academic to the exclusion of all else. Meanwhile, Diana never read anything she wasn’t about to perform. It made sense. “So why did you lie?”

“She has her reasons for not wanting to be found. I might not understand those reasons, but I try to respect them.” She got to her feet. “If I’d known it was her daughter looking for her, I might have made an exception.”

He felt ashamed; she was more perceptive than he’d given her credit for. He was running through the reasons Efua might not want to be found—that she had a stalker, that she was in witness protection—when Diana cleared her throat. “Well. See you in twelve years, I suppose.”

He stared up at her. “What are you talking about?”

“Our fateful meeting. Our great love.” She tilted her head. “Are you saying it’s not going to happen?”

“It can’t. Not anymore.” He laughed. “I’ve spent the past seven months trying to live up to those poems, and it’s impossible. If we’d met like we were supposed to, if our lives had come first and the art had come second...” He shook his head. “But it can’t work the other way around.”

“Maybe that’s how you feel right now.” She looked down into the opaque depths. “But in twelve years, you might change your mind.”

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