01:59 becomes 01:00. Jen Hiles is on the landing.
The pumpkin is there. Everything is there. On her skin, she can still feel the phantom mist of the January night, still feel her husband’s eyes on hers.
Her husband emerges from the bedroom. ‘All right?’ he says.
‘Tell me about the day we met,’ she says to him, stepping into his warm embrace.
‘Huh?’ he says sleepily.
‘Tell me,’ she says, with all the urgency of somebody with everything on the line.
‘Er … you came into the station …’ Jen gapes in disbelief. She’s done it.
She’s lived it, these whole twenty years, with him, with Ryan. ‘Am I a lawyer?’ she asks him.
‘Er – yes? I need to sleep. I’m on shift tomorrow.’
He’s a policeman. Jen closes her eyes in pleasure. He will be happier. No longer so unfulfilled, no longer found wanting.
‘It’s so fucking late,’ he moans. But still him.
‘Is my dad alive?’ she says. ‘What’s happened to you?’ ‘Please – just tell me.’
‘… No,’ he says, and that’s when Jen understands it. The papercut, saving her father. Neither of them lasted. Andy was right: events played through from that rainy day in January almost twenty years ago, erasing all
the other changes she made along the way. Changes she only made because they gave her the information to go back to the right place, the right time, and solve it.
‘Hello?’ Todd calls.
Something lifts in Jen’s heart like a sunrise, dawn breaking over their lives. It’s Todd. He’s home. Home, calling up the stairs, not walking along the street, knife in hand.
‘You’re still up?’ Todd calls. ‘You’re in the window like a fucking rude picture!’
Kelly laughs loudly. ‘Hey – Ryan?’ Jen says.
‘Hmm?’ he says, as though it’s nothing at all, but, to her, his name
confirms everything. Jen stares at him. Same navy eyes. Same slim frame. A tattoo that says only Jen.
So Joseph didn’t get caught, but the baby never got stolen, either. Jen reflects on this, just for a second, in the picture window. Well, you win some, you lose some. Criminals will always trade in drugs, in arms, in
information. They will always steal and lie. You can’t catch everyone, but you can save the innocent. Did twenty years in prison teach Joseph anything, anyway?
She looks at her husband and at her son, coming up the stairs two at a time. Isn’t it a price worth paying?
Something niggles in the back of her mind. Something about how she will account for this, this strange period of her life spent reliving it.
‘All right?’ Todd says, interrupting her thoughts. ‘Where have you been – out with Clio?’
‘Who’s Clio?’ Todd says, staring down at his phone.
Of course. Joseph never comes to find Kelly, so Todd never meets Clio. Jen stares at her son. She has denied him his first love. Is that a price worth paying, too?
‘I had a dream you met somebody called Clio,’ she says, wanting to be sure.
‘Eve wouldn’t like that, would she?’ Todd says. ‘Eve?’ Jen says sharply. ‘Who?’
‘My …’ Todd’s eyes slide to Kelly, who shrugs. ‘Girlfriend?’ ‘What’s her surname?’
‘Green …?’
The baby. The stolen baby that was never stolen. Jen is standing at the edge of a hurricane, feeling just the breeze of it beginning to waft her hairline.
‘Can I see a photo?’
Todd looks at her like she is a total idiot and flicks through his camera roll on his phone. And there she is. It’s Clio. It’s fucking Clio. Clio was the stolen baby. No wonder she felt recognition when she saw the photo of the baby. Jen reaches, in a daze, to hold his phone in her grasp. He lets her do it easily, no secrecy here, not really. ‘Wow,’ Jen says, zooming in on her features.
‘Never seen a woman before?’ Todd remarks.
‘Let me look in peace,’ Jen says, working it through.
So, now. Baby Eve was never stolen. Jen prevented it. She stayed with her mother, as Eve Green. Jen stopped them meeting in one way, but, look: they met in another. She fell in love with her son in 2022 the same way she did as Clio, when she was stolen and sent to live with a relative of Joseph’s. Fate.
Jen looks up at her husband, and at her son. Clio. Ryan. Eve. Kelly.
People whose names have changed but whose love has endured despite that.
Jen extends an arm to him and Todd steps into their embrace, and they stand there, in the picture window, just the three of them. Jen’s breaths slow.
She goes downstairs after a few minutes, just to check, just to look. Her hand on the door knob.
A strange feeling descends around her, like a fine mist. Déjà vu. What
was that? She shakes her head. Stolen babies and … gangs? She blinks, and it’s gone. How strange. She never gets déjà vu.
And on such a normal evening, too.
