Day Minus Seven Thousand Two Hundred and Thirty, 08:00

Day Minus Seven Thousand Two Hundred and Thirty, 08:00

Jen is back in the flat when she wakes. She blinks, looking at the sash window and the purple cushions below it. She flings an arm across her eyes.

She’s here.

She rolls over in her single bed. Still in the past.

He did it because he loved her.

He has been lying to her for twenty years.

What else was he supposed to do?

He isn’t who he says he is.

He gave up everything. For her.

He never told her her father was bent.

Why is she here? She pads out of her bedroom and into her kitchenette. It’s full of early-morning January sun. She hasn’t yet met Kelly. His number isn’t yet in her phone.

He’s undercover. Investigating her father. That’s why he never tells her.

That’s why he warns her, in the future, about looking into it.

That is why Joseph comes to the law firm, to find Kelly, to start things up again – and to notice which of his old associates may not be who they said. This is why Kelly says, in 2022, that she is in danger, that she should stop looking: Joseph assumed she knew what her father was doing. He said as much in the prison when they met.

She goes to the sash window that overlooks the crowded streets, already full of commuters in suits. Her husband-to-be is out there, somewhere, working as a police officer, yet to meet her.

She turns away from the sunlight. January the twelfth.

The date from the news story she saw after her shower.

Today is the day Eve goes missing.

Tonight is the night she is stolen.

Jen takes the bus to Merseyside Police in Birkenhead.

It’s so like Crosby police station from the outside. A sixties building. A revolving door lets her into a bright foyer. Bigger than Crosby, but still as tired, the same kind of chairs bolted to each other. She thinks about how they sat in them on that first night, all those weeks ago but years into the future, Kelly vibrating with fury.

She supposes it is easy to disappear. Quit the police, go travelling in a camper van with the woman you love. Re-settle out of Liverpool. Never travel. Get married using a fake passport that nobody ever checks. Thousands of people must do it, for reasons both more and less honourable than Kelly’s. Jen has never once in Crosby bumped into somebody she grew up with. She wonders if Kelly had any near misses. The world’s a big place.

A receptionist with thin, plucked eyebrows and her waterline pencilled in the way that everybody did in 2003 types at a boxy computer.

‘I need to speak to a police officer,’ Jen says. ‘He will go by the name of Ryan or Kelly.’

‘Why?’

‘I have a tip-off. About the crime-ring operation that he is working undercover on,’ Jen says. As she says it, a man pushes the door open. He’s old, maybe fifty, and has feathering grey hair at his temples.

His face arranges itself into an expression of surprise. ‘Kelly?’ he says to her.

‘I need to speak to Kelly. I know he’s undercover.’

‘You’d better come in,’ he says. He reaches to shake her hand. ‘I’m Leo.’

Kelly is sitting opposite Jen in an interviewing suite and he doesn’t know who she is. It’s crazy, but it’s true. To him, they have never met.

‘Look,’ Jen is explaining patiently. ‘I can’t say how I know. But the house they intend to burgle tonight … they intend to take two cars.’ She dutifully gives the address of Eve Green, taken from the news story, which Leo and Kelly write down.

It’s the same address – only one digit different – from the one on her father’s piece of paper. 125 Greenwood Avenue.

‘Thanks,’ Kelly says professionally to her. His blue eyes linger on hers. ‘No intel at all on where it came from?’

Jen’s gaze meets his. ‘Sorry – can’t say.’

‘Sure, okay. Well,’ he says, dismissing her as though she is a stranger, ‘we will be sure to check it out.’ A fixed, careful smile.

She looks at him, wondering where the join is between him – this Ryan – and her Kelly. Whether he became the latter, or always was, deep inside. Suddenly, there in the police station, looking at this man that she has loved for twenty years, she wonders if it matters. Does anyone care how or why we are forged into who we are? Dark, guarded, funny. Whatever. Or does it only matter that we are?

‘You will look into it?’

‘Yeah – ’course,’ he says lightly. ‘Life’s too long not to follow a lead.’

Jen waits on the road where it all happens that evening. She is sitting in an old banger of a car, wondering how come her father could do it: supply information to criminals, keep it from her, let her marry somebody undercover …

It begins to rain, spring drops that fall irregularly on the roof of her car. She thinks, too, of what her father said the night he died. That Kelly was straight-up. Why would he say that, if he didn’t believe Kelly to be good? Perhaps he knew. Perhaps Kelly told him.

Something pops into her head, as if from nowhere. The sign she saw at the NEC but didn’t realize the significance of. Abdominal aortic scanning. You could scan for the illness that killed her father. She wonders if that technology exists yet. If it does, she could do that – call him, now, tell him to get a scan. Save more than one life tonight.

She rests her elbow on the window and her face in her palm. She knows, somewhere deep inside her, that it isn’t the right thing to do.

She thinks of him asking her to make that garlic bread. Content as anything. She thinks, too, of her mother, long gone before him. Perhaps it was his time to go. You can’t save everyone. You just can’t.

She must have woken up on the day he died so that she would go and speak to him and learn something about the timeshares. That must be what it was for. Nothing else, but something still feels unfinished about it, to Jen.

The police have 123 Greenwood Avenue surrounded with unmarked cars.

Eventually, around eleven thirty, they arrive. Two teenagers, just boys really, barely Todd’s age. They get out of the car, wearing all black, their bodies like spiders’, and she watches them go in.

She knows it’ll happen but is still awed when it does. That she, forty-three-year-old Jen, is still here, in a much younger Jen’s body, watching the things happen that she knew would, the things she’s worked out, despite never believing that she could, that she was capable of it.

She watches them fish keys out of the letterbox. She knows things are coming to a close. She knows that this is the last day, however it will end.

Like clockwork, a tired-looking woman emerges out of the house next door to 125, carrying a baby. She lowers the baby, crying, into a car seat, then stops, patting her pockets. She hesitates, looking at the quiet street. Not seeing the car parked wonkily. Not seeing the careful letterbox crime happening next door, the two boys dressed in black, camouflaged in the shadows of the house.

At that moment: blue. An explosion of light so blue it’s as though the saturation is turned up.

Police everywhere, emerging from cars and shrubs and behind buildings, arresting the teenagers.

She hears somebody read the caution out. She thinks of Kelly, absent for his own protection. He hasn’t yet done anything that will require undercover testimony. He hasn’t yet become Witness B, and everyone he will become after that. He hasn’t yet met Jen as he knows her.

The woman with the baby hasn’t left her driveway, has just watched it all play out, holding Eve, with no idea of the bullet she’s just dodged; there but for the … We only think of the bad things that happen, rather than those that, through fortune, pass us by.

Jen closes her eyes, leans her head on the steering wheel and wants to sleep. She’s almost ready. There’s a deep knowledge, sitting underneath everything, just like Andy said there would be. She’d lived her life once, and missed it all, but her wise mind, her subconscious, it knew things.

She’s almost ready.

Almost one o’clock in the morning and the police pull back up at Merseyside station, where Jen is waiting. And so, too, is Kelly. Just as Jen hoped.

The moon is out, the sky high and clear, and Jen is almost gone. She knows it.

Kelly and Leo get out of an unmarked car. Leo goes immediately to his own car, but Kelly loiters. He walks slowly towards the station, his breath puffing out into the cold winter air. He pulls a mobile phone out, presumably to call a taxi home.

She gets out of her car before he can dial. They only met once, earlier today, and uncertainty crosses his features. Confusion blended with amusement: he is all Todd.

‘Hi. We met earlier,’ Jen says, hurrying over to her husband of twenty years.

‘All right,’ Kelly says, his frown deepening. ‘You okay?’

‘Yes,’ she says breathlessly. She’s so far back now, an arrow aimed at the future: the slightest, slightest tweak, and she will miss. ‘I just wanted to know – the burglars – my tip-off – you got them?’

‘We did,’ he says carefully. He puts his phone back in his pocket but turns his slim body away from her.

The remoteness stops her in her tracks, there in the January drizzle, almost identical to the October mist. He doesn’t know, she thinks, looking at him. This man she’s loved and laughed with, got pregnant by, said vows to, shared a bed with. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know her. She is seeing wary Kelly, the way he greets strangers. He has nothing to be wary of, now, in the past, but he still is. He is still him. She was right. He is still himself. The man she loves.

‘I’m so glad you got them.’

Curiosity gets the better of him. ‘How did you know?’

‘I can never reveal my sources,’ she says, the exact kind of banter he likes.

His face eases into a grin. ‘You asked for me. You said you wanted to speak to Ryan or Kelly.’

‘Yeah. I know.’

‘Nobody is supposed to know the connection between those two names. I mean – I barely knew that …’

Jen shrugs, holding her hands out by their sides. ‘Like I said. No sources.’ She’s getting wet, out here in the cold mizzle.

‘Ha, well. You know, we intervened so early. The main guy got away, we think. Our arrest of his foot soldiers tipped him off.’

Joseph. Joseph got away. Jen shivers with something more than the cold. Shouldn’t she be wary of one thing: unintended consequences? But didn’t she do the right thing, whenever she could? She didn’t play the lottery. She didn’t even save her father, not this time, though she had the opportunity. She let those things go. She draws her coat further around herself and moves closer to Kelly, hoping it’ll be okay.

‘I think you did the right thing,’ she says softly, sadly, thinking of baby Eve. Thinking about how we never see the near-misses that slide past us, just missing us, arrows just grazing our skin.

He hasn’t called the taxi yet. His gaze lights on hers. And she knows, she knows, she knows that look.

He raises an eyebrow. And then he says it, the sentence which changes everything: ‘I know this is a fucking cliché, but: do I know you? From before today?’

Jen can’t help but laugh. ‘Not yet,’ she says, the banter with her husband flowing as easily as ever.

She meets his eyes in the car park. He fell in love with her so deeply that he gave up his life for her. His name. His mother. His identity. She doesn’t think he has been pretending all of their marriage. She thinks he was trying not to.

‘I’m Ryan, anyway. You?’

‘I’m Jen.’

And this is the moment. Jen knows. She’s ready. She closes her eyes, as if falling asleep. And she’s gone. And everything that has been is wiped, just as she suspected.