“So, I’m … cursed?” he asked her, and she laughed again, then sobered quickly.
“You have to take back your life, Aldo,” she said, suddenly admonishing. “You can’t just live in your past lives.”
“I wasn’t aware that I was.”
“Of course you are. Don’t you see, if you make the trajectory even a little bit longer, everything’s a little different? Happiness,” she told him, “maybe it’s something you’ve been earning slowly, over several lifetimes, and now it’s something you get to have. Maybe all this math you know, maybe it was a little seed of something before and now it’s finally bearing fruit. Maybe you weren’t made this way, you became this way,” she finished triumphantly, and then he understood.
I’m made like this, he had told her before, and so now she was setting him free, casting off the restrictions of a dull reality. She made his life magic as a favor to him, without his asking, and he understood now, too, what she’d meant: I don’t believe it, but maybe I do. It isn’t real, but maybe it is. Because maybe she needed to relinquish him from something and maybe she didn’t, but wasn’t his burden lighter now, either way?
He loved her fiercely for that.
He didn’t see the problem in loving her that way, with a savagery that felt as ancient as his sorrows, until he realized that he could no longer recall a life without her. It was as if the older versions of him had been erased and could no longer exist. He realized that his relationship with time, whatever it was before, was now forever altered.
It brought him back to memories of his grandmother, his nonna, who had died of a blood clot when Aldo was in his early twenties. He and his father had sat there through the night, silent except for the prayers she requested. I hope she’ll wake up, Masso said hoarsely, his eyes red-rimmed and swollen, and Aldo, a scientist—a mathematician—pondered how to explain it to him. You see, Dad, he said gently, she’s lost so much blood already, irreparable damage has been done, the human body is fragile. Even a minute, even a second without that which it needs to survive leaves it crippled, weak, uncertain how to proceed as it has always done. Yes, she could open her eyes, she could begin breathing on her own, miracles are not unheard of. But the body cannot come back, it cannot rebuild itself. It cannot suffer a loss and become what it was before, no, it doesn’t work that way. If she comes back, Aldo told his father, she will be different. Will she be less? Who’s to say （yes, definitely, but this was his Nonna, and Masso wouldn’t want to hear it） but either way, she will not be the person you remember. She cannot be, even in resurrection, what she was in life.
This was what Regan did to Aldo: irreparable damage to his former self. Regan was Regan, but she was also the loss of a former life to which he could never return. Of course he didn’t wish to, but that wasn’t the point. It could never exist a second time. He considered what she’d said—if it all fails, Aldo, go back and erase us, make it like we never happened—and he understood that while it would be a cruelty, it would be a kindness in equal measures. Because the old him was dead, and what existed of him now could die, too, a painful death, if he were capable of doing what she asked. What he was now, some toddler of a man learning how to breathe again, would be gone. His life before her, his life without her, the Parthenon, they would all be ancient rubble. Only stories would remain to give them value. Charlotte Regan had killed him once and she could kill him again, easily. She could kill him, and that was what Masso had feared, even if he didn’t know it. She could kill him, and now Aldo understood.
So this is what it is to love something you cannot control, he thought. It felt precisely like terror.
He studied her, as that was in his nature. For Aldo, to love something was to study it; to devote every spare thought to understanding it. He knew how to study and he’d been doing it for years; learning was more at the core of his being than teaching. He researched her, trying to identify her laws and constants, starting with how she looked at relationships.
“Why don’t you like your sister’s husband?”
“I don’t know, they’re just so conventional together.”
“That sounds like a dirty word for normal.”
“No, normal is a nice word for boring.”
“I suppose you’re better at words than I am.”
“Well, that’s part of it, isn’t it? Carter is so unspecial and Madeline isn’t. It seems like a waste.”