She presses the spongy button on the front of the machine and waits for it to power up, shower water dripping from the end of her nose and on to her carpet as she sits.
She watches the monitor spring to life and thinks. She had a best friend when she was a trainee, called Alison. Jen wonders if this is why that alias tripped off her tongue so easily, weeks ago. Alison worked at a nearby corporate firm. They used to meet every lunchtime, buy a Pret lunch. Alison would slag off the law. Later, she cross-qualified as a company secretary, and Jen had stayed where she was, divorcing couples, and they had lost touch, the way you sometimes do when a friendship is born out of a common interest only.
It’s so strange to be here again. To know she could dial Alison’s number, now, and catch up. How segmented life is. It splits so easily into friendships and addresses and life phases that feel endless but never, never last. Wearing suits. Dragging a changing bag around. Falling in love.
She blinks as Windows XP loads in front of her. Jesus Christ, it looks like something from an ancient hacker movie. She finds Explorer with difficulty. Her internet is dial-up, and she has to connect. Finally, she goes to Ask Jeeves and types it in: Missing baby, Liverpool.
And there it is. Eve Green. Taken in the back of a stolen car a couple of months ago. So this is why the personal investigator couldn’t find her: she was missing twenty years in the past. Kelly was involved in catching the ring that stole her, but they never found the baby. Kelly kept the poster. He must have shown Todd when he told him about it. That’s why the burner phone, the poster and the badge ended up in Todd’s room. And Kelly discussed it with Nicola, that she was never found.
Jen’s stomach rolls over. A lost baby, lost for twenty years.
She gazes out of the window at Liverpool, hazy in the low, winter-morning sun, trying to understand it. Her father is alive. Her best friend is Alison. In the future, she marries Kelly, the man she will have her first date with tonight and will have a child with, named Todd.
She thinks about the missing baby, Todd, Kelly, a crime ring made up of bad people and undercover people who are sometimes both. And, more than all that: she thinks about how to stop it.
The puzzle isn’t yet complete. Clearly, it isn’t over yet. She’s still here, in the deep past, still with things to do, to solve, and to understand.
In need of some light relief, Jen heads to the mirror and drops her towel, unable to resist looking at her twenty-four-year-old body. Damn, she thinks, two decades too late. She was a ten! But, like everyone, she didn’t appreciate it until it was too late.
At five forty, fashionably late, Kelly arrives in the café. Jen can tell, now that she has known him for twenty years, that he is nervous. He is wearing double denim, light and dark, effortlessly cool, the way he’s always been, that hair turned up at the front. But his gaze is skittish, like a deer’s, and he wipes his hand on his jeans before he comes over.
She stands to greet him. Her body is so slim, it’s so lightweight, like she’s been underwater and just got out. She bumps into fewer things. There is just … less of her. And she’s so supple, so boundlessly energetic, the hangover burned off in minutes, cured with coffee and sunshine.
Kelly leans to kiss her cheek. He smells of tree sap. That smell, that smell, that smell. She’d forgotten. An old aftershave, deodorant, laundry detergent – something. She’d forgotten his smell, and suddenly, she is here, in 2003, in a café, with him, the man she falls in love with.
She looks at him, her young eyes meeting his, and she finds she has to cover up a wave of tears. We do it, she wants to say. Once. In one universe, we make it all the way to 2022, still having sex, still having dates. We have a wonderful, funny, nerdy kid called Todd.
But, first, you lie to me.
Kelly says nothing in greeting to her. Typically him. She understands, now, the need to be guarded. Because he is a liar. But his eyes flick up and down her body and, nevertheless, her stomach rolls over.
‘Coffee?’
‘Sure.’
She messes with the sugar packets on the table. Pink Sweet ’n Lows. The menu contains coffee, tea, peppermint tea and orange squash. Nothing like 2022’s macchiatos. The front window is illuminated with fairy lights, even though it’s late March. The rest is pretty mundane. Formica tables, linoleum floors. The smell of fried food and cigarettes, the sound of a till ringing up. People signing receipts for card payments. Two thousand and three lacks the flair of 2022. There’s nothing, except the fairy lights, that is there just because it’s nice. No picture walls or hanging plants. Just these tables and those blank walls, and him.
He’s in the queue, weight on one hip, slim frame, his face inscrutable, an enigma.
‘Sorry,’ he says, bringing over two old-fashioned cups and saucers. He sits down opposite her and, bold as that, her future husband knocks his knee against hers, as if by accident, but then lets it settle there. It has exactly the same effect on her the second time as the first, even though she knows in precise detail what it’s like to kiss him, to love him, to fuck him, to make a child with him. Kelly has never failed to turn her on.
‘So,’ he says to her, a sentence as loaded as a gun. ‘Who is Jen?’ His knee is warm against hers, his elegant hands plucking at the same sugar packets she was just messing with. He’s always done this to her. She can’t think clearly around him.
She stares down at the table. He is undercover. His name isn’t Kelly. Why does he never, ever tell her, not in twenty years? That’s what she can’t figure out. The answer must be out there, somewhere, beyond those fairy lights, but she can’t yet find it. She wonders if, when she does, the time loop will end. And, if not, what it’ll take to stop it.
‘Not much to tell,’ she says, still looking at the street outside, at the 2003 world. Thinking, too, about the glaring truth that she’s been trying to ignore: unless Jen and Kelly fall in love, Todd won’t exist at all.
‘Who is Kelly?’ she says back. She thinks, out of nowhere, of the way he bought that pumpkin for her, because she wanted it. The Belfast sink he got her. The lack of fucks he gives to the whole world, in the future. Both inspirational and slightly dangerous. He excites her. They were good together. They are good together. But the foundation of it is this: lies. A crumbling cliff edge.
He lets his smile spread across his features as he looks at her, biting his bottom lip. ‘Kelly is a pretty boring guy on a date with a pretty hot woman.’
‘Only pretty hot.’
‘Trying to keep my cool.’
‘Failing.’
He holds his hands up and laughs. ‘True. I left my cool at the law-firm door.’
‘The painting then – it was a ruse.’
Something dark passes across his expression. ‘No … but I don’t give a fuck about decorating your dad’s law firm any more.’
‘How did you get into that then?’
‘You know, I just never wanted to be of the establishment,’ he says, and Jen remembers this exact sentence, the effect it had on her, on of-the-establishment her. She’d found it thrilling. Now, she’s jaded by it, confused. She doesn’t understand where Ryan ends and Kelly begins. Whether the things she fell in love with are the real him.