How dangerous! What a fool he was, how short-sighted, how little-lived he’d been not to feel her fear as she felt it. For her it was an informed terror, re-entering a haunted house, replaying an old and frequent death. She kissed him; Sorry about your stupidity. She wanted to tell him, to teach him: Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else. It seems like it’s the right shape but it’s slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are transformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don’t even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones.
He smiled at her like: Isn’t it great?
Yes, she thought, pained. Yes, it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.
She had thought of him as a sort of nomad-adjacent person with meandering habits, but that wasn’t true, not really. He worked hard, worked diligently, worked often. He went to class to learn and to teach, had meetings constantly with professors and colleagues, worked tirelessly on his dissertation. His work, unlike hers （hers was the opposite） was almost entirely inside his head. She came to understand that he could sit relatively still for an hour and only write down one, maybe two things when he was done.
She joined him in his rituals, sitting next to him with her shoulder pressed to his, coaxing him to tell her what he was thinking about as he toyed with a joint between his teeth.
“What’s your dissertation about?”
His response was practiced. “The math behind quantum physics.”
“Which is?”
“Dimensions, functions of reality. Time. Uncertainty; the math behind Heisenberg, Schr?dinger—”
“The cat?”
“Not so much that. But sure, also the cat.”
“Is it dead or alive?”
“Both.”
“And that makes sense to you?”
“It’s just a thought experiment. And my job is to make things make sense.”
Said playfully, “Well, you’re not doing a very good job.”
Said with agreement, “Probably why they haven’t given me a degree yet.”
“What does any of this have to do with time travel?”
“Everything—most things—fit within the parameters of time. If we understood how time worked, then maybe we could use it.”
“Do you love it?”
“Love what?”
“What you do, what you study.”
He paused for a moment before answering.
“Math comes very easily to me,” he eventually said.
“What if it didn’t?”
“What?”
“What if it didn’t come easily? Would you still do it?”
Only then did he seem to understand the question.
“Math is a difficult thing to love,” he said. “It’s precise and unforgiving, it’s evasive and it will never love me back, but I don’t have much of a choice, do I? It’s the thing that I can do that other people can’t, or that other people lack the patience for. Are there worthier things, more rewarding things? Yes, probably. But I don’t know what they are, they never showed themselves to me. Only math did.”
“How unromantic,” Regan said, and it was meant to be a joke, but she thought for a moment she meant it.
“Not entirely,” he said, and she recalled suddenly that while he believed himself securely fixed, it was really math that saved his life. His answer, which had not seemed like an answer at all at first, was that he had devoted himself to math because it had found him. He couldn’t imagine another life for himself because for him, this was not choice, it was simply destiny.
Ah, so fate, Regan thought. So it is romance, after all.
“Charlotte,” the doctor said, “are you listening?”
Regan dragged her attention back to the doctor, who was sitting across from her.
“Sorry,” she said, and the doctor’s expression tightened.
“You realize these sessions are court-ordered,” the doctor said. “If I reported to the judge that you were no longer complying with the terms of your sentence—”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“You aren’t here in any way that matters,” the doctor said. “You do not participate in our sessions.”
“What exactly do you want from me?”
“Something, Charlotte, anything.”
Regan glanced moodily at her hands.
“I moved in with my boyfriend,” she said.