‘All right?’ Todd says to her on the landing as she pulls a dressing gown around her. ‘You okay?’
‘Sure?’ Jen says. She has a headache, but that’s about it. She can smell cooking downstairs. Ryan must have started breakfast.
‘You said some weird shit last night. Thought I had a girlfriend called Clio?’
‘Who’s Clio?’ Jen says.
Epilogue:
Day Minus One
The Unintended Consequence
For the first few minutes after she wakes up, Pauline has forgotten.
And then she remembers. Dread descends as she does, and she shoots out of bed like a firework. Connor.
She’d known this was going to happen for months. He’s been secretive, rude, sullen. She’s been waiting up for him, all hours. There’s been a series of escalating behaviours. And now this.
It began with the déjà vu. Last night. And then, right after that, Connor was arrested. The police said he’d committed all sorts of offences: drugs, thefts, the lot. He’s been involved recently, over the past few years, with somebody called Joseph. He’s supposed to have the rest of his life in front of him, and here he is, ruining it.
She needs to call a solicitor. She needs to fix it. She needs to do so many things. She needs to get to the bottom of why he did this.
She heads out onto the landing, ready to fire up the computer and find a solicitor. But there he is, her boy, on the landing. ‘Er?’ she says to him. ‘Did they let you go?’
‘Who?’
‘The police?’
‘What police?’ he says, with a laugh. And that’s when Pauline sees it. The date, flashing up on BBC News, blaring from inside his room. It’s October the thirtieth. Wasn’t yesterday the thirtieth? She’s sure of it.
HYSTERICAL STRENGTH
Hysterical strength is a display of extreme strength by humans, beyond what is believed to be normal, usually occurring in life-or-death situations, particularly involving mothers. Anecdotal reports are of women lifting cars to rescue newborn babies, sometimes creating a huge force field of energy. Indeed, more supernatural reports have also been noted, such as time loops, though none has been proven to date. Sufferers often report déjà vu alongside episodes of hysterical strength.
Acknowledgements
I remember the exact moment I had the idea for this novel. My text history with my author friend Holly tells me it was 27 November, 2019.
Me, 18:32: I want to write a book like Russian Doll but about knife crime.
Holly Seddon, 18:37: OMG the dream.
Holly, 18:38: How would you do it? Would someone keep getting stabbed?
Me, 18:38: Yes, I think so. And the guy has to go further and further back through when he joined a gang maybe, to the point where it doesn’t begin. OMG so told backwards?
Holly, 18:38: OMG
Me, 18:38: Have I just invented something?
Just like that.
I’d watched Russian Doll recently, then sat down to watch the news, and a section on knife crime caught my attention. This is how it happens for writers. Never at the desk, never at the right time, but always, inevitably, the ideas come, and I think this is my best one yet. It’s been an honour to write it, to spend the year with Jen and Todd, and to fall in love with them as I hope you did too.
Of course, the idea changed so much in the planning and the writing of it, but here remains the core: a crime novel where you must stop the ending, told backwards. It makes a simplistic kind of sense to me – doesn’t every crime have its inception in the past, buried deep in history?
I wrote this book from July 2020 to May 2021, across two lockdowns, one lasting almost five months. It was all I did over the pandemic. I figured, if I could produce a great book, then something good came out of the gloom. （My boyfriend proposed during the January lockdown and I still hit my wordcount that day.）
I’ve dedicated this novel to my agents, Felicity Blunt and Lucy Morris. It’s hard for an author to overstate the effect two great agents can have on their career. They counsel, they edit, they hand-hold, they sell and, most of all, they make me a better writer. They were never worried by this idea, never thought it was too ambitious, and for that I am forever thankful.
It is not hyperbole, either, to say that my editors, Maxine Hitchcock and Rebecca Hilsdon at Penguin Michael Joseph, have totally changed my life. I count this up in every acknowledgement, but that’s because it’s true: I have now written six bestsellers, and it’s because of the dream team that is PMJ: Max, Rebecca, Ellie Hughes, Sriya Varadharajan, Jen Breslin （the genius） and all in Sales, plus my super copy-editor Sarah Day. Six Sunday Times bestsellers, one Richard and Judy pick, an eBook number-one bestseller … almost half a million sold: the list of the things they have achieved with my books goes on.
Thanks, too, to my brand-new US editor, Lyssa Keusch, and the team at William Morrow, HarperCollins. I can’t wait to get started!
I consulted a few experts during my time writing this novel. Richard Price （who does indeed have a J. D. Salinger T-shirt）， for his physics and closed timelike curve expertise. Neil Greenough for the ongoing police procedure help. I can’t even tell you how valuable it is to know someone who can help with procedure, and Neil is endlessly generous with his time and my strange questions （any errors are my own, indeed, deliberately so: an undercover unit would never work out of the main station, of course）。
Paul Wade, for talking multiverses with me. Tyler Thomas, for being so great and Todd-like. Thanks, too, to my Liverpool gurus, John Gibbons and Neil Atkinson.
And my father, of course, for the many chats, invaluable suggestions, and for being my first reader, always.
Thanks, too, to Jo Zamo for dedicating her name, and to Kenneth Eagles and Kacie for letting me borrow their family lore.
The deeper into my thirties I get, the more I realize I wouldn’t be much of anything without my many and varied best friendships. For Lia Louis, Holly Seddon, Beth O’Leary, Lucy Blackburn, Phil Rolls and the Wades: you are my therapists, comedians and the holders of my dearest secrets.
And finally, thanks, too, to David. He is, as I write these acknowledgements, due to become my husband in twenty hours’ time （ah, marrying writers: who else would do their acknowledgements on a Sunday afternoon when they’re getting married tomorrow?）。 In whatever universe, whatever timeline, whatever your name, I will love you to Day Minus Five Thousand Three Hundred and Seventy-Two （and back）。
Prologue
Julia knew from the way Cal closed the front door that something was wrong. A hasty, chaotic kind of slam. She sat upright in bed, heart thrumming. She could feel her pulse right down through her arms and legs as she listened intently, like an animal in the wild.
And then she heard it. An intake of breath. All of Julia’s instincts were trained on it, on him.
And then it came: a cry for help.
‘Mum?’ he called urgently up the stairs. ‘Mum? Something’s happened.’
First Day Missing
1
Julia
Julia has always been too soft to be a police officer. She is thinking this as she stands in the custody suite of the station, coat on, apparently ready to leave, but really staring at an old informant of hers who is sitting on one of the benches.
It’s seven o’clock. The family WhatsApp group is trilling with dinner plans. Julia catches a glimpse of a message from her daughter saying, ‘Okay to Nando’s. But know that I think it is passé.’ Julia smiles at her arch first born, then looks back at the informant, Price. She fails to resist the urge to ask him what he’s doing here, even though she knows it’ll keep her from that Nando’s. She can’t help it. Curiosity. It’s shot through her, imprinted onto her body and mind. It’s why she’s here, double-checking on an arrest. Only she didn’t expect to see Price.