‘Only the déjà vu.’
‘How curious. The panic you felt for your son … do you think it caused that feeling?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jen says softly, almost to herself. ‘It’s mad. It’s so mad. I don’t understand it. I haven’t yet telephoned you. I do – later in the week. I leave loads of messages.’
‘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.
She looks at the sky and thinks, Well, I’ll see. She might see August before November. But she’ll get to the beginning of the problem, whenever that is.
The moon is out, an early lunchtime moon, hanging above both of them, whichever versions of themselves they are. She, in the past. And Todd, undergoing whatever changes that lead to him killing somebody in four days’ time.
‘I’ll be home soon,’ she says.
‘Where are you?’
‘The universe,’ she says, and he laughs, a noise so perfect to her it may as well be music.
Jen is back at Eshe Road North, hoping to find Clio. She assumes she doesn’t live with her uncle, but perhaps he can direct her to Clio’s address.
Jen believes the key rests with Clio. Todd met her a couple of months ago – as far as Jen knows, but you can add at least a few weeks for teenage secrecy. It can’t be a coincidence that that is when it began, along with his friendship with Connor. It being an amorphous, hard-to-describe change. Sullenness, secrecy, that strange pallor he has at times.
And so here she is, knocking. Almost immediately, a female form appears in the frosted glass. Jen’s heart rises up in her chest.
The door opens, and Jen can’t help but marvel at Clio’s beauty. That short, chic fringe, her close-together eyes. Her hair is snarled, undone, but it looks good for it, rather than the insane way Jen would look if she tried the same.
‘Hi,’ Jen says.
Clio glances over her shoulder, a quick, automatic move, but Jen spots it and wonders what it means.
‘Todd’s mum,’ Jen says, realizing after a second’s hesitation that although Jen has met Clio, Clio has not met Jen.
‘Oh,’ Clio says, her striking features slackening in surprise.
‘I just wondered …’ Jen says. She glances down. Clio has stepped back slightly. Not to let Jen in, but as if she is about to close the door. Jen thinks of her open, curious expression the first time she saw her, when she was in those ripped jeans at the end of this same hallway. Clio’s face now, when Todd isn’t here, is totally different. ‘I just wondered if we might have a bit of a chat?’ She gestures to Clio. ‘It’s nothing to do with – it’s nothing to do with you, really. I’m fine with your – with your relationship. Can I come in … just for a sec? Is this where you live?’ she gabbles.
‘Look – I can’t …’ Clio says. Jen looks around the hallway. Clio’s coat is hanging up, thrown over the door to the cupboard that Ezra closed. Over the coat is a Chanel handbag, Jen thinks a real one. They’re worth at least five thousand pounds, aren’t they? How can she afford one? Unless it’s a fake?
‘It’s nothing bad,’ Jen says, her eyes still on that bag.
Clio’s brows knit together. Her mouth begins to scrunch up into a delicate kind of apology. ‘I really …’ she says, her hands wringing together. She takes another step back. ‘I’m so, so sorry. I really – I just really can’t …’
‘You can’t what?’ Jen says, totally bewildered.