Will didn’t go to Mexico.
At no point in our original timeline did Will go to the Gulf of California to film whatever a vaquita is: I’m pretty sure I’d have noticed him disappearing at the start of our budding relationship for an entire fortnight. And now I know for sure: it’s happening. The loop is over. We’re at the end.
It’s more than three months early, and our time is up.
‘Cassie.’
The restaurant is completely empty.
‘Cassie.’
Everything is silent.
‘Cassie, please put your phone down. I’m trying to talk to you about something.’
Blinking, I look up from the Wikipedia entry on vaquitas. Apparently they are a form of porpoise and the world’s rarest marine mammal, and they’re almost surreally cute: like a child tried to draw a dolphin, and then finished it with a little smiley face. Which I appreciate isn’t really relevant right now, but I was hoping additional information might trigger some kind of memory and it doesn’t.
‘Hey.’ Will takes one of my hands and holds it. ‘Cassie, the thing is, I’ve had such a great time with you, I really have, but we’ve only just met …’
There are only two logical explanations I can see.
One: that Will wasn’t offered the job in the first timeline, but something, somewhere, shifted that reality. Maybe he picked up the phone when he didn’t originally; maybe something I did broke another cameraman’s leg, and he’s the replacement. Except that means the impact of my time hopping has spiralled out of control, and way, way out of my reach. In which case, what else could I be responsible for? What tiny decision have I made – to clean up a coffee spill, to rewind a TV show – that could have changed somebody else’s life immeasurably? The scope of it is too massive: I can’t even think about it.
The other, only slightly more reassuring explanation is that Will was offered exactly the same opportunity on our first run, but he turned it down to spend more time with me and didn’t let me know.
Which is incredibly sweet and absolutely gutting in equal measure.
Mainly because this time he’s decided not to bother.
‘I don’t feel very good,’ I say abruptly, standing up and knocking over the water jug for the third bloody time. ‘I think I’ll go home now, please.’
Lap dripping, I lurch abruptly from the table.
Except, now I don’t know if I’m back in the old loop or if I’m creating a new, different one, and if it’s me that’s making it repeat. I just know that everything I’ve done over the last few weeks – every hop, every effort, every tiny tweak or edit – has been for literally nothing. Worse than nothing. All I’ve done is speed up my dumping.
‘OK.’ Will grabs a handful of sopping napkins. ‘Sure.’
As I stagger outside, I can’t help noticing that he didn’t ask me to stay, didn’t ask if we could finish our meal; he didn’t seem particularly surprised or upset. Will can change. Will doesn’t have a destiny, or a fate, or a predestined life already laid out for him. Will is capable of breaking the pattern and striking out on a different path.
It’s only me who keeps constantly repeating.
Breathing hard, I stand outside the shipping container with my thumbs held tightly in my fists.
‘Cassandra?’ Will emerges behind me and I realise with a pang that he doesn’t even know me well enough yet to call me Cass. ‘I’ve paid. I’m so sorry this has upset you so much. But this is only our fourth date, so I thought …’
This time his only is justified: it’s only been thirty-one dates in my world.
‘Can we go home?’ Swallowing, I look up and down the street, scrabbling to gather my thoughts. I don’t understand. This isn’t how time works. It can’t be. It doesn’t have wormholes that just zoom you forwards or backwards like a giant, cosmic game of snakes and ladders.
‘Home?’ Will frowns. ‘To … your house?’
‘Oh. Sorry.’ I shake my head in confusion, realising I’ve accidentally slipped back into our old script and now it makes no narrative sense. ‘It’s just … I live nearby. Unless you don’t want to? That’s fine, too. Obviously.’
Something gentle in Will’s face shifts. ‘Of course I want to, Cassie.’
A tiny flicker of hope lights inside me.
Maybe I’m ‘reading it all wrong’ after all. Maybe I’m just jumping ahead again, making assumptions, preparing for my own heartbreak, planning for rejection. Creating a schedule for a future that isn’t going to happen. Will hasn’t actually broken up with me. He hasn’t even hinted that he’s going to. All he has done is take a job five thousand miles away that he didn’t take the first time round.
‘Are you sure?’ I study his face, trying to read it. ‘Really?’
‘Yes.’ Will nods, kisses my cheek. ‘Let’s go back to yours. We can talk about it there.’
We don’t speak the whole way back and all I want is to loop time so we never actually get there, but I’m too scared to do it now in case I screw everything up even more than I have already. All the way home, something blue is arching out of him, and I know most people think blue is sadness, but this isn’t.
It feels like Will is waiting for something.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, automatically taking off my white Friday jumpsuit and hanging it carefully on the hook. That was a mistake: now I’m randomly standing here in my underwear. ‘I don’t know why I ran out like that. I’m not quite sure what is going on with me.’
There’s a silence as Will gazes around my bedroom. I frown – what on earth is he doing? – then realise with a sense of vertigo that he’s never actually been here before: this is the first time Will has ever stayed with me.
‘I like it in here,’ he says finally, studying my shelf. ‘It’s cosy. Like a cocoon.’
‘Thank you.’ I throw on a T-shirt and perch warily on my bed.
With respect, touching nothing, Will continues to perambulate slowly, gazing with interest at my beautiful clothes, at my books, at my plants, at my collections. It’s strange how it’s almost exactly the same journey Derek took, just a couple of days ago, but I don’t feel invaded or sullied this time: I feel seen.
With a small smile, Will picks up the colour chart next to my bed.
He points at it. ‘Is this it?’
‘Yes.’ I nod, embarrassed. ‘It’s one of them, anyway. I have many.’
Will sits quietly down on the bed next to me and opens it, staring at it for a few seconds, peering closely at each of the little rectangles. ‘I just see colours,’ he says finally. ‘I thought maybe I might see what you were talking about, but to me, it’s just colour cards, something you pick up at a decorating shop.’
‘I know.’ Everything has gone very quiet. ‘I’m a bit odd sometimes.’
‘You’re not odd.’ Will points at it, curious. ‘So this one, here. This … pale green. What does that feel like to you?’
I lean towards the colour and feel a very specific wave of joy.
I’m not entirely sure what it is, though. That’s the thing I’ve never really understood about emotions. We’re given unhelpful words for them – sad, happy, angry, scared, disgusted – but they’re not accurate and there never seems to be anywhere near enough of them. How could there be? Emotions aren’t binary or finite: they change, shift, run into each other like coloured water. They are layered, three-dimensional and twisted; they don’t arrive in order, one by one, labelled neatly. They lie on top of each other, twisting like kaleidoscopes, like prisms, like spinning bird feathers lit with their own iridescence.
And then a therapist says How do you feel, Cassandra? and you’re supposed to somehow know, just like that.
As if grappling for a rainbow you can feel in your hands.
‘Well.’ I close my eyes and try to identify the feeling. ‘That particular pale green feels similar to the way I felt when I was about three years old and I got up in the morning before anyone else was awake, and I managed to open the back door for the first time on my own and it was cold and bright, but everything was whitened with frost and a wood pigeon was making that very particular sound and I walked into the grass and my feet got wet, I saw a frog, and then my mum said Good morning baby how did you get outside on your own you clever little monkey from her bedroom window and I realised she wasn’t asleep, she was there, she had been watching me the whole time. That’s what that green sort of feels like.’
Will is watching my face. ‘You remember being three that clearly?’
‘Three.’ I shrug. ‘Two, maybe. I remember pretty much everything, almost like it’s all kind of happening now. It gets … confusing.’
I suppose time doesn’t mean anything when you remember everything.
My throat suddenly hurts and the lights flicker.
Carefully, I fold up the colour card and put it back on my bedside table: all the colours are contained and organised so neatly in straight lines. I wish my colours were too. I try so hard to make them.
‘Shit,’ Will says suddenly, rubbing his hand over the stubble on his face with a crackly sound. ‘I’ve screwed up, Cassie. I’m so sorry. I think … maybe I’ve been reading you wrong this entire time.’
I blink at him, not understanding. Reading people wrong is my job.
‘In what way?’
‘I didn’t quite … get you.’ He gazes around my room again. ‘I think I was measuring you by me. I was assuming we’re the same, because that’s what humans do, isn’t it? Automatically. Without thinking. We see everyone through our own lens and assume it’s the only possible way of being.’
I blink. ‘Do we? I don’t think I do.’
‘Well, I definitely do.’ Will smiles wryly. ‘I forget that it’s not me looking through the lens, and sometimes it’s actually … a polar bear.’
Even more confused, I try to piece together what he’s trying to say.
‘I still don’t think I understand,’ I admit finally. ‘What does this have to do with my colour cards? I’m so sorry. If you could just run it by me again, a little more slowly, I’ll try harder. It takes me longer to process things than ideally I’d like it to.’
‘I thought you weren’t interested in me, Cassie.’ Will turns to face me properly, legs bunched up on my bed. ‘At all. I saw things through my lens. In my eyes, we had a couple of really lovely dates, then we slept together.’
‘Yes.’ I nod. So far, so accurate. ‘True.’
‘I asked if you wanted sex again, and you said absolutely not and fell asleep.’ Will grimaces slightly. ‘So I was a bit hurt, my ego was bruised, but I thought grow the hell up, William, get over your ego, let the poor girl go to sleep. But when I woke up the next morning, you were gone. No note. No text. Nothing. You didn’t text later in the morning, and I was too embarrassed to. But I swallowed my pride and texted again days later, and you seemed uninterested. A little cold, if anything. You didn’t even remember discussing the exhibition date. Then you cancelled it at the last minute, no mention of rearranging, and I thought, well. That’s that, then.’
I feel my mouth go suddenly dry. ‘But—’
My memories are landing on top of each other now: jumbled up, in a strange order. I remember every single thing that happened, but they all seem equally real, equally solid, happening simultaneously. Panicking, I scan my memories and try to piece the right timeline together. To undo screaming at Barry about my mug, I must have also deleted the text I sent after Will and I slept together, explaining that I had to leave early for work. I never sent it again – I was too humiliated by my behaviour to remember – and I was too emotional and distracted to leave a proper excuse after running away from the exhibition, which made me look uninterested and cold.
Time is fragile; for every sweep of the broom there are consequences.
‘I left a coffee?’ I finish lamely. ‘On your bedside table?’
‘Look, it’s OK.’ Will takes both my hands. ‘Honestly. This happens. You like someone, and they’re not as into it. Nobody’s fault. It’s just … I’m starting to realise I may have read you wrong. You’re … very difficult to read, Cassie. Your face is so beautiful, but a lot of the time you look far away. Detached. I make jokes, and you stare at me as if I’m the most irritating person you’ve ever met. A lot of the time when I’m talking, you look bored. I can see you thinking, assessing, judging, and I guess it just felt a bit like you were weighing me up and … finding me lacking. I mean, when you laugh – the entire room lights up. You make me feel like I’ve won the lottery. But in between … it’s like you’re somewhere else.’
‘People in shops always think I work there,’ I say abruptly.
Will blinks. ‘Sorry?’
‘When I’m in shops. Any shop at all. Everyone always thinks I work there. Even if I’m not wearing anything that looks even faintly like a uniform, people will be like, excuse me, could you get me this in a size up, or could you tell me where the toilets are. Every single time I go into a shop.’
Will frowns. ‘I’m not sure I …’
‘There’s something distant and frozen in my face,’ I conclude. ‘I don’t look like a normal customer. A normal person. I look like I’ve worked somewhere for five decades and I’m about to hand in my notice. I look like I want to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Even when I don’t. Even when all my focus is matching the shade of a pair of red trousers to an orange shirt, and I’m enjoying it immensely. That’s just my face.’
‘I see.’ Will nods. ‘Yes, I’m starting to realise that.’
I’ve been so obsessed with chopping up time and stitching it back together, it didn’t occur to me that the final version wouldn’t be sewn together properly: that when I eventually tried it on the hem would unravel, the collar peel away, the arms fall off. In trying so hard to connect with Will, I forgot to make sure that the narrative I left did too. All the mistakes, the errors – the bits of myself I was too scared to leave behind – were pulled out before they could do any damage.
Mistakes were flaws in my tapestry, so I ripped them all out.
‘I’m never bored with you,’ I say, and my voice sounds so calm and flat when my insides are ridged with storms. ‘I’m amazed by you, Will. You are … spectacular to me. But I find being around people so hard. Any people. There’s all this noise and light and colour and sensation, all the time, and I don’t know how to read tone or emotions or jokes or sarcasm or flirting. It’s like all the things that everyone else can do automatically, I have to do manually. And I get overwhelmed. Constantly. That’s the face you’re seeing, Will. It’s me, trying to process everything at once.’
It’s true that I hate dirt and dog hair and lateness and mess and loud noises and crowds and being wet or muddy – and truthfully a lot of those things seem to come with Will – but it’s not a judgement. If I could choose, I’d roll around in mud and laugh easily and be covered in puppies and take the world in my stride, but I can’t – I have never been able to – and the judgement I feel about that has always been for me.
‘Yes.’ Will looks around my bedroom. ‘That all makes more sense to me now.’
There’s a long silence, and I can feel it: the end, like the knot at the bottom of a piece of string.
‘I thought this was done,’ Will says desperately. ‘She just … We had this instant … We’re just really similar, it was an immediate connection, and I think we want the same things. You’re spectacular to me too, Cassie, but when I’m honest with myself and I look into the future, I’m just not sure that we’re—’
With the tip of my finger, I gently trace the circular face of my old blue watch and wait for the world to collapse around me. And – as I wait – I think about how time, as it grows old, may teach all things, but that even when it doesn’t get a chance to, the lessons are probably there just the same.
‘I love you,’ I say, because now I know there won’t be another chance.
Then I close my eyes.
‘You’re spectacular to me too, Cassie, but when I’m honest with myself and I look into the future, I’m just not sure that we’re—’
‘You met someone else,’ I say calmly.
‘Yes,’ Will nods. ‘I met someone else.’