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‘I – I … it’s not good, Todd. In four days’ time, you kill someone,’ she says. This time, it’s like lighting a bonfire. A tiny spark and then a rush. Todd’s head snaps up to look at her. Jen goes as hot as if she’s standing right by it. What if she makes this happen, by telling him? Surely the knowledge that you can kill is damaging to a person?
No. She has decided to do this and she needs to see it through. He can take it, her son. He likes facts. He likes people to be straight with him.
He doesn’t speak for over a minute. ‘Who?’ he says, the same question he asked the last time.
‘He was a stranger to me. You seemed to know him.’
He doesn’t react. They reach the lit-up shop, next door to a Chinese takeaway, and they stand outside it. Eventually, his eyes meet hers. She’s surprised to see that they’re wet. Just the slightest damp covering. It could be nothing. It could just be the lights of the shops, the cold air. ‘Well, I’d never kill anyone,’ he says, not making eye contact with her. She spreads her arms wide.
‘But you do. He’s called Joseph Jones.’ Her eyes are wet, too, now. Todd runs his gaze over her face, holds a finger up, and goes into the shop. He’s right, of course, he wouldn’t kill someone, unless he had no other choice. She knows him: he would ameliorate, confess. He would do a whole long list of things before killing. This is perhaps the most useful piece of information Jen has landed on.
Seconds later, he’s out, and his body language has completely changed. It’s infinitesimal. As though somebody momentarily pressed pause on his movements, then started him up again. Only a stutter.
‘Trilby,’ he says. A beat. ‘Present and correct.’
‘So you believe me now?’
‘You saw the trilby from down the street, I assume.’
‘I didn’t – Todd, you know that I didn’t.’
‘I would never kill someone. Never, never, never.’ His eyes look up, to the heavens, and Jen is sure – as sure as she can be – that she sees disappointment but also understanding cross his features. Like somebody who’s been told something. Like somebody who’s been told the ending, when they’re right at the beginning. She is blindsided by his reaction. It isn’t time travel that has outsmarted her: it is parenting.
He turns away from her. Jen knows him. He closed up as soon as she told him the details. ‘Why’d you break up with Clio?’
‘None of your business. Back together now, anyway.’
Jen sighs. They walk back in stony silence.
Kelly answers the door before Jen can get out a key. Todd brushes past him without speaking to him, going upstairs. Interestingly, he doesn’t tell Kelly what Jen just told him. Ordinarily, she’s sure they would take the piss together.
Kelly is cooking a pie. When she sits down at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, he pours the sauce into the pastry-lined dish and opens the oven. The heat and the steam from the oven shimmer so violently he seems to disappear right in front of her.
That night, Jen googles how to send a timed email and then fires it off, hopeful, into the ether. As she falls asleep, she prays it works. She prays a future her, somewhere, stops the crime, and breaks the time loop.
Day Minus Eight, 08:00
The email didn’t work. The cut she made with the knife is gone.
And, for the first time, Jen has skipped back more than one day. She’s moved four days. It is the twenty-first. She sits up in bed and thinks about Andy. It seems he was right.
Or perhaps it’s speeding up and, soon, she will leap back years at a time, and then cease to exist entirely.
No. Don’t think this way. Concentrate on Todd.
As if on cue, she hears him slam his bedroom door. ‘Where are you going?’ she calls out to him.
She hears him ascend the stairs to the top floor where Jen and Kelly’s bedroom is, and then he appears, a wide smile across his face. He looks full of the lols, as he would say. ‘Dad is making me come running,’ he says. ‘Pray for me.’
‘You’re in my thoughts,’ Jen says as she listens to them go. She’s glad to see him like this. Pink-cheeked and happy.
Within minutes, still in her dressing gown, she’s back in Todd’s room. Searching his desk drawers again, the ones in his bedside tables, under his mattress. Under his bed.
As she searches, she recites to herself what she knows. ‘Todd meets Clio in late summer. Kelly said, He’s still seeing Clio? I thought he said he wasn’t, in the days before the crime. Todd confirmed a few days earlier that they broke up and got back together.’
Plates, cups, reams and reams of school stuff printed from the internet. Behind the wardrobe, a piece of paper about astrophysics.
‘Clio is frightened to speak to me,’ she adds, thinking it must be significant. ‘Plus – that weird circling police car.’
