“Regan,” Marc said, having returned, at which point she accepted the hand he offered her. Likely they’d grind a little on the dance floor, stay out too late, wake up partway through the afternoon. This was a life of no expectations, which was the safest kind of life. Regan always felt most secure in the hands of a man with no misconceptions of her flaws, because for better or worse, he would not be swayed by the possibility of their resurgence.
Regan suspected that Marc liked her a little broken; he liked expressing concern for her health, because caring for her made her grateful to him and therefore secured her as one of his treasures. She didn’t see herself and Marc in their matching rocking chairs when they were old and grey, no—but she did see them having polite affairs with other people at some point in their forties, bribing a waitress to come home with them after yoga had kept Regan fit and money kept Marc advantageous.
It wasn’t not love. She didn’t not love him, and he was enamored with her precisely the way she liked: no rousing speeches, no undue pedestals, and nothing promised beyond what he could keep. He was a perfect complement to her—something as difficult to find as a match—which was why, curiosity or not, Regan had no plans to speak to Aldo Damiani again.
THE NARRATOR, CHARLOTTE REGAN: Though if he speaks to me first, it would probably be rude to refuse.
part two, conversations.
IT WASN’T THAT ALDO WAS LOOKING for Charlotte Regan, because he wasn’t. Not that he spared much consideration for the imprecision of statistics （truly, the con artist of math） but as a matter of probability, it wasn’t inconceivable their paths might cross a second time. They’d already established that their lives intersected in at least one place: the art museum.
So really, this was purely coincidental.
“Regan,” he said, and she looked up the way strangers do; with surprise, and then a brief sense of dislocation. She had just finished a tour, and she glanced down at her watch before making her way over to him.
“Aldo,” she said, and then, “right?”
He suspected the addendum had been for her benefit, not his.
“Yes,” he said, indulging her. “How was the tour?”
“Oh, you know.” She waved a hand. “I’d say about half the people on any given tour are there against their will, so it’s mostly about playing to the most enthusiastic audience.”
“Makes sense.” Teaching was a similar experience.
“Yeah.” She tucked her hair behind her ear, which was a girlish sort of motion. She had a definite doe-like quality to her; wide almond eyes, a narrow tulip nose, with a heart-shaped face and a sense of tremulous vulnerability to the shape of her mouth. Her eye contact, though, was hawkish and exacting. Because she was so close to his height, it was impossible to miss.
“How’s your quest for time travel going?” she asked, and he shrugged.
“Depends how you look at it.”
“Poorly, I’m guessing, seeing as you’re still here.”
“Who says I’d want to use it if I solved it?”
Half a laugh slipped from Regan’s lips. “True, then you’d have to pick up some new hobby. Curing cancer,” she suggested. “Knitting. Crochet.”
“Maybe the other two, but I certainly can’t cure cancer,” Aldo said. “I don’t know anything about it. It’s a mutative cell degeneration, and those can’t be predicted with math.”
“Well, I guess we’re fucked, then,” she said.
“Something has to kill us,” he agreed. “We already live far longer than our peak reproductive years. After a certain point we’re just overusing resources.”
“That’s—” She fought a smile, or a grimace. “Bleak.”
Was it? Probably. “I guess.”
Regan glanced over her shoulder and then looked back at him. “I’ve been thinking about that thing you said, actually.”
“Which thing?”
“About perfect circles not occurring in nature.” She paused, and then, “I feel like that can’t possibly be true.”
“Have you thought of one?”
“Well that’s the thing,” she said, brow furrowing, “I haven’t. Planets aren’t circular, and neither are their orbits.” She tilted her head, considering it. “Eyes, maybe?”
“Spheres are different than circles. And eyes aren’t perfectly spherical, either. Plus insect eyes are packed hexagonally, which only further proves my point.”