Page 86 of Love and Other Paradoxes

She made a strange sound, between a squeak and a hum. Then she leapt into his arms.

She kissed him with hot, bottled-up fury, like she had been waiting all this time to give herself permission. He staggered back against the wall, taking the warm, living weight of her, gasping into her mouth. He kissed her, and kissed her, and if this was the way his world would end, it was an ending he could live with.

They broke apart, staring at each other as if they could pour alifetime into the space of a moment. Hand in hand, they turned to face the wormhole. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you,” she said, and they walked together into the future.

Splintering light, and a magnetic hum in his ears. The universe stretched, shuddered, broke into kaleidoscopic fragments. For an instant, he saw the wormhole as it really was, and his mind flew open, like a gale blowing through a shattered window.

Then he was on the other side, under the soft glow of security lights, looking up at a statue of himself.

They had dressed him in a loose shirt and knee-length breeches, as if they couldn’t imagine a poet wearing modern clothes. The pose was exactly as Esi had shown him, down to the self-serious expression on the lifeless face. He had gazed up at the statue of Byron so many times, but he had never imagined what it would be like to see himself turned into a symbol of deathless art. It turned out the answer wasextremely uncomfortable. He averted his eyes, taking in the rest of the exhibition: panels with quotations in foot-high italics, photographs of him and Diana blown up to larger than life. A hologram of the two of them kissing, the same moment of tenderness repeated again and again until it became uncanny.

“You didn’t mention the hologram,” he murmured to Esi. Then he remembered. They were on the other side of the wormhole: she might not be his Esi anymore.

He turned to her in panic. She stood by his side in her shimmering dress, forget-me-nots studded in her hair. But her expression was blank, confused, as if what she was seeing made no sense to her.

“Esi.” She looked at him with glazed incomprehension. His heart froze. He didn’t know how to ask her. “Are you—did you—”

She shook her head. “I didn’t change.” Before he could processhis relief, she gestured at the exhibition. “None of it did. You’re still going to end up with her. Nothing you just said made any difference.” Her eyes shone with furious tears. “It means you were right all along. Any changes we think we’ve made, they don’t matter. Whatever we do, we end up in the same place.”

“No. No way.” His heart rebelled. He jabbed a finger up at the statue. “I’m not turning into that fucking nozz—” The words caught in his throat. He walked closer. There, on the right shin, subtle but undeniable: a scar.

Esi’s eyes followed his to the statue, then down to his left leg. Below the hem of his kilt, his own, fresh scar showed like a reversed reflection.

They looked at each other. Without speaking, they ran through the exhibition. All of it was familiar, like a story told and retold to death: the quotations from the poems inMeant to Be, the photograph of him and Diana on the day they met, the look in their eyes, the precise angle of their heads tilted towards each other.

“It’s all exactly the same as the book,” he said in disbelief. “It’s not like the changes don’t matter. It’s like they never happened.”

“But how?” Esi asked him, bewildered and terrified. “How can the past change and the future stay the same?”

Notthefuture. Afuture. Vera, shooting him an amused look. The Retroflex logo, the shadowy secondRbranching off from the first. Rob peering into a cardboard box, trying to explain Schrödinger’s cat.Under a many-worlds interpretation, reality splits in two.He looked back at Esi, revelation thundering through his veins. “Because it’s not the same future.”

“What?” Her eyes were wild. “What are you talking about?”

“Vera told me. She said Retroflex doesn’t change the future. They changeafuture.” He walked out of the exhibition, back tothe wormhole. Where it met reality, the edges splintered, warping the straight lines of the brickwork into forking paths. “Whenever I’ve asked Rob about time travel, he’s gone off on a tangent about parallel universes. Or, I thought it was a tangent. But this is what he was talking about.” He shook his head in wonder. “When you first went through the wormhole, you didn’t just step into the past. You stepped into a whole new universe. We can change the future of the new universe—we already have—but the future of the original universe stays the same.”

Her voice trembled. “So what does it mean?”

There were a hundred ways he could answer that question. But he knew what she needed to hear. “It means you saved your mum, in my universe. And it means you get to keep being yourself in this one.” She drew in a great, shuddering breath. He took her in his arms. As he held her close in that dark, glowing space, he realised it meant something else too. The Joseph Greene in this universe was a different Joseph Greene, one whose life was already written. None of this—the exhibition, the statue, the absurd, thrilling immensity of it all—was in his own future. He took it in, and with a bittersweet pang, he let it go. “And it means we were both wrong.” He stepped back, taking her hands. “There was never any one future, to break or be bound by. There’s infinite futures. All of them are real. All of them will happen. We just have to choose which one we want to happen to us.”

He hadn’t realised he was asking her a question until he found himself breathless, waiting for her answer. She looked like she was about to speak. Then a sound came out of the darkness behind her.

She turned, sliding close to him. “What was that?”

Behind the statue, a shadow was walking towards them. As it came out into the light, he was astonished to see that it was Vera, wearing a high-waisted dress that made her look like she’d just stepped out of a costume drama.

She stared at the two of them in utter confoundment. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Chapter Thirty

He looked her up and down, the rumpled muslin of her empire-line dress, the ringlets coming loose from her chignon. “What areyoudoing here?”

“This is my workplace, remember? I’m allowed to be here. Unlike you.” She marched towards him, nodding in passing at Esi. “Ms. Campbell. My October fugitive. You’re going to have quite the NDA to sign.” She took Joe by the shoulders and turned him round. “But first things first. Time to send Mr. Greene back where he belongs.”

“Wait!”

Vera turned back. She took in Esi’s outstretched hand, the look of anguish on her face. “No way.” She laughed aloud, looking between her and Joe. “You’re together?”

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