Page 85 of Love and Other Paradoxes

“Jesus. Really?” Once upon a time, the image would have thrilled him. He remembered a young man in a library, staring up at a poet made of stone. It made him feel ashamed, and relieved, and a little sad.

They turned left down the grey concrete alley of King’s Lane. Esi stopped opposite a blank patch of wall. He squinted. “Is it invisible?”

She smiled sadly. “I told you. There’s a password.”

He was desperate to delay her. “Do Shola and your housemates know you’re leaving?”

She shook her head. “They think I’m going on holiday. I booked leave from work and everything.”

The silence of the unspoken descended. Too much to say, and too little time left to say it. She let go of his hand. “This is where I walk away.”

The words weren’t new. His vision doubled. A different Esi, anxious and unrooted, facing him on a crowded street. He knew what he had said then, what he was supposed to say now.Okay.But the new version of Esi overlaid her, a hundred times more familiar and complicated and beloved, and he refused to let her go.

With his heart in his throat, he said, “You don’t really want to leave.”

A smile of recognition trembled on her face. “What are you talking about?”

Another echo: the two of them in his college bar, her storming out, him asking her to stay. He began to understand. There was no past that was separate from the present. All their momentscollided into this one, forming their path as they walked it. He smiled back at her. “You didn’t saythreshold.”

A hole opened up in the universe.

He saw it out of the corner of his eye: a gap in reality, wrong as a galaxy trickling through an hourglass. Slowly, he turned his head to look at it. His eyes refused to focus: whatever the wormhole really looked like was beyond his mortal senses to process. What he saw was a fractal disc, radiant with silver light, that was both sinking into and surging out of the wall. If he shifted his head an inch to the left or right, it disappeared.

“Fuck me,” he breathed.

“You guessed the password.” Esi was gazing through the portal, as if she could already see herself on the other side.

The door was open: all she had to do was step through. Urgency gripped him. “Esi. Wait.” He touched her arm, drawing her attention back to him. “Listen to me. I mean it. I don’t think you want to do this.”

Her expression was indefinable: hope and longing and fear, all woven together until he couldn’t tell which one was uppermost. “But this is the whole reason I came here,” she protested. “To fix my future. To fix myself.”

“No. You came here to save your mum, and you’ve done that.” He stepped forward, taking her hands. “And you’re not the same person you were when you arrived. I’ve seen you start to let people in. I’ve seen you start to take up space. Is that why you didn’t say goodbye to Shola? Is there part of you that’s maybe thinking about changing your mind?” He barely dared to ask the question, so afraid of what the answer might be. “Do you really still want to be someone else?”

Her eyes pinched shut. He could almost see the decision tugging her in opposite directions, towards a long-cherished dream or an uncertain future. He had no right to tip the scales: he was afraid of saying too much, of inviting a rejection that would hurt worse than any he had experienced in his life. Maybe he should hide his feelings, let her do what she would have done if they had never met. But theyhadmet, and made a million tiny changes to each other, and she deserved to know how he felt about her, regardless of what she decided to do with it.

He cleared his throat. “Also, and this really shouldn’t sway your decision either way, but—I’m completely in love with you.”

It was amazing, how easy it was to say. No need to agonise over the right words, to hide behind the constructed facade of a poem. He was just sure, as he had never been before.

Joy flooded her face. Then doubt moved in to replace it. Her mouth moved wordlessly. “But you and Diana—you’re meant to be.”

“Maybe. But you know what? I’ve had it withmeant to be. You and me, we’re the opposite of meant to be. We’re barely even supposed to breathe at the same time. But here we are.” He caressed her face, trying not to hang the universe on how she leaned in to his touch. “And I know, I’m being selfish. ‘Hey, I love you, give up your dreams and stay with me in the nineteenth century, where phones still have physical buttons and you have to look at the internet on a computer.’” She laughed, bowing her head. He tilted her chin up until she met his eyes. “But the truth is—I don’t want you to forget me.”

“I don’t want to forget you either. I want to remember it all. How I fought so hard to save her, and I did it. How I made a life here.” She shook her head wildly. “I don’t want someone else to come out of the river. I want it to be me.”

His heart kindled with hope. “So stay.”

“I can’t.”

The two words he had least wanted to hear. The ground dropped out from under him. “You don’t feel the same.”

“It’s not that! Fuck, I love you, I’ve loved you for an embarrassingly long time, but—Joe, my whole family is through there. I can’t just abandon them.” She buried her face in her hands. “I can’t stay. And I can’t go.”

“Listen,” he said, simultaneously trying to process that she had said she loved him. “We’ve never really known how this works. All this time, we’ve just been hoping. Imagining what we want to be true. The only way to really find out is to walk through.” He offered his hand. “Together.”

She gazed at him, terror written on her face. “What if I forget you? Or—what if you can’t even go into the future? What if it causes some kind of paradox and you disappear?”

He contemplated the weight of what she was saying. Not to be the famous poet Joseph Greene. Not to be any Joseph Greene at all: to vanish from existence, hand in hand with the woman he loved. He shook his head wordlessly. “I don’t care. I’m not letting you do this alone.”

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