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‘So,’ he says to her, a sentence as loaded as a gun. ‘Who is Jen?’ His knee is warm against hers, his elegant hands plucking at the same sugar packets she was just messing with. He’s always done this to her. She can’t think clearly around him.
She stares down at the table. He is undercover. His name isn’t Kelly. Why does he never, ever tell her, not in twenty years? That’s what she can’t figure out. The answer must be out there, somewhere, beyond those fairy lights, but she can’t yet find it. She wonders if, when she does, the time loop will end. And, if not, what it’ll take to stop it.
‘Not much to tell,’ she says, still looking at the street outside, at the 2003 world. Thinking, too, about the glaring truth that she’s been trying to ignore: unless Jen and Kelly fall in love, Todd won’t exist at all.
‘Who is Kelly?’ she says back. She thinks, out of nowhere, of the way he bought that pumpkin for her, because she wanted it. The Belfast sink he got her. The lack of fucks he gives to the whole world, in the future. Both inspirational and slightly dangerous. He excites her. They were good together. They are good together. But the foundation of it is this: lies. A crumbling cliff edge.
He lets his smile spread across his features as he looks at her, biting his bottom lip. ‘Kelly is a pretty boring guy on a date with a pretty hot woman.’
‘Only pretty hot.’
‘Trying to keep my cool.’
‘Failing.’
He holds his hands up and laughs. ‘True. I left my cool at the law-firm door.’
‘The painting then – it was a ruse.’
Something dark passes across his expression. ‘No … but I don’t give a fuck about decorating your dad’s law firm any more.’
‘How did you get into that then?’
‘You know, I just never wanted to be of the establishment,’ he says, and Jen remembers this exact sentence, the effect it had on her, on of-the-establishment her. She’d found it thrilling. Now, she’s jaded by it, confused. She doesn’t understand where Ryan ends and Kelly begins. Whether the things she fell in love with are the real him.
‘Which area of law do you practise?’
‘I’m a trainee – so everything. Dogsbody stuff.’
Kelly nods, just once. ‘Photocopying?’
‘Photocopying. Tea-making. Form-filling.’
Another sip of his coffee, yet more eye contact. ‘You like it?’
‘I like the people. I want to help people.’
His eyes catch the light at that. ‘Me too,’ he says softly. Something seems to shift between them. ‘I like that,’ he adds. ‘You have much to do with the running of it or …?’
‘Hardly anything.’ Jen remembers being flattered by these questions, at his ability to sit and listen, unusual among young men, but she feels differently about it, today.
Kelly crosses his legs at the ankles, his knee leaving hers. She’s cold with the absence of it, despite everything. ‘That’s good,’ he says quietly.
She looks across at him. Sparks fly between them, like embers spitting out from a fire that only they can see.
‘I never wanted the big job, big house, all that,’ he adds.
She glances down at the table, smiling. It is such a Kelly thing to say, the attitude, the confidence, the edge, she finds herself tumbling. And, for much of their marriage, they were poor but happy.
‘Tell me about the most interesting case you have on,’ he says. And she remembers this, too. She’d confided in him about some divorce or another. He’d listened for so long, genuinely interested. So she’d thought.
‘Oh, I won’t bore you with that.’
‘Okay – tell me where you want to be in ten years.’
She looks at him, hypnotized by him. With you, she thinks simply. The old you.
But hasn’t he always – God, what is she thinking? – but hasn’t he always been a good husband to her? Loyal, straight-up, sexy, funny, attentive. He has.
