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‘It seems to me,’ Andy says, finishing his coffee, ‘that you do, actually, already understand the rules of the universe you are unwillingly in.’
‘It doesn’t feel like it,’ she says, and he allows a smile to escape again.
‘It’s theoretically possible for you to have somehow created such a force that you are stuck in a closed time-like curve.’
‘Theoretically possible. Right. So – how do I – get out of it?’
‘Physics aside, the obvious answer would be that you will reach the inception of the crime, wouldn’t it? Go back to what made Todd commit the crime?’
‘And then what? If you had to guess?’ She raises her hands in a gesture of non-confrontation. ‘Nothing at stake. Just a guess. What do you think would happen?’
Andy bites his bottom lip, eyes to the table, then looks at her. ‘You would stop the crime from happening.’
‘God, I so hope so,’ Jen says, her eyes wet.
‘Can I ask a question that might seem facetious?’ Andy says. The air seems to quieten around them as Andy’s gaze meets hers.
‘Why do you think this is happening to you?’
Jen hesitates, about to say – indeed, facetiously – that she doesn’t know: that is why she has forced him to meet her. But something stops her.
She thinks about time loops, about the butterfly effect, changing one tiny thing.
‘I wonder if I – alone – know something that can stop the murder,’ Jen says. ‘Deep in my subconscious.’
‘Knowledge,’ Andy says, nodding. ‘This isn’t time travel, or science or maths. Isn’t this just – you have the knowledge – and the love – to stop a crime?’
Jen thinks about the knife she found in Todd’s bag, and about Eshe Road North. ‘Like, on every day I have re-lived, so far, I’ve learned something, by doing something different … following someone or witnessing something I hadn’t the first time. Even just paying more attention to small things.’
Andy fiddles with his empty cup on the table, turning his mouth down, still thinking, eyes on the windows behind Jen. ‘Well, then, is it fair to say that each day you’re landing in is somehow significant to the crime?’
‘Maybe. Yes.’
‘So as you go backwards – maybe you’ll skip a day. Maybe you’ll skip a week.’
‘Perhaps. Then I should be looking for clues on each one?’
‘Yes, maybe,’ he says simply.
‘I hoped you’d – you know. Give me a hack. To get out. I don’t know, two sticks of dynamite and a code, or something.’
‘Dynamite,’ Andy says with a laugh. He rises to his feet and reaches out to shake her hand. Her eyes close as he does it, just for a second. It’s real. His hand is real. She is real.
‘Until we meet again,’ she says, opening her eyes.
‘Until then,’ Andy says.
Jen leaves the café after him, deep, deep in thought about what it might all mean. She calls Todd, wanting to know where he is. Wanting to know if there is something he is doing that she missed the first time she lived this day, feeling a renewed kind of vigour for working out how to change things, for saving him.
‘All right?’ he answers. It’s quiet in the background. Jen, caught in a Liverpool wind tunnel, turns her body away from the gust.
‘Just wondering where you are,’ she says to him.
‘Online,’ he says, and Jen can’t help but smile. At just him, lovely him.
‘Online – in our house?’ she says.
‘I have a free period. So I am in our house, on our VPN, on my bed in Crosby, Merseyside, UK,’ he says, a laugh in his voice.
