on her; it could be Candace or Erin, trying to confirm that she’s alive. The idea that it might be Roger doesn’t even cross her mind. He won’t be calling her today. Maybe not ever again.
She answers the phone. (The feeling of jamais vu rises, breaks around her, because she didn’t answer the phone, not the first time: the first time, it was voice mail and a stuttered message that was somehow enough to make things a little better, to cause the situation to repeat the next time around. This is not the first time. It’s closer than they’ve been in years.)
“Hello?”
“Dodger.” The voice is Roger’s, and it’s not: he sounds older, exhausted, not at the end of his rope but some distance past it, holding on through sheer force of will. “I know you’re mad at me, and I know I’m the last person in the world you want to talk to right now, but I need to ask you to please not hang up.”
(this was a message last time this was a message on my voice mail; we got it wrong, we got it wrong at least once more, even after we thought we were getting it right)
“Mad at you?” Laughter bubbles in her throat. She swallows it. “Why would I be mad at you? I’m worried about you. You ran away so fast, I didn’t even have a chance to tell you we’d be okay. Are you okay? You don’t sound so good.”
“I’m not okay, really. But . . . didn’t the earthquake just happen? Wasn’t that today?”
“Oh,” she says, things falling into place as the world goes crystalline and clear, all the numbers lining up for a change. Of course. It’s the only thing that makes sense, because there’s no way Roger would be calling her: not now, anyway. “You’re in the future, aren’t you?”
He doesn’t swallow his laughter as well as she swallows hers. It seeps up around his words as he says, “You figured that out even faster than I thought you would. I’ve really missed you, Dodge.”
So they don’t make things right between them, then: so this silence that echoes in her skull, filling the space he should be occupying, becomes the new normal. She shivers. “I haven’t had time to miss you yet, but it sounds like I’m going to get it,” she says, forcing her voice to stay level. “I wish I didn’t have to.”
“Me, too,” he says, and she believes him. “But I—I mean, the me in your timeline—he needs his space if he’s going to accept what’s going on. You’ve always adapted faster than I did. And he—I—needs to accept this, because it’s not going away.”
“I’m following the numbers. They tell me what to do.”
“Sometimes I wish I’d been the one to get the math,” he says, and is quiet for a moment before continuing: “The Roger in your timeline is a fool. He’s not ready to accept what he needs to know, and he’s pushing you away because he’s scared. I can’t change that. The trick that lets me call you doesn’t work if I’m trying to call myself, because I’m not math, I’m words, and words can change a lot of things, but they can’t break the laws of time. You’re the only person I can reach this way. So please, Dodge. I want you to give him time. I want you to let him come to you. But I want you to remember that I love you. That he loves you, and he never stops, not for a second, not even when he’s trying to convince himself the two of you were involved in some sort of messed-up folie à deux for all these years.”
“We don’t have a shared delusion,” Dodger protests. “It’s all real. If you take away the quantum entanglement, we’d never have met.” A wave of uneasiness sweeps over her, because they would have met, wouldn’t they? They would have met in a room she can’t quite remember but can’t quite forget, with bruises on their arms and the ghosts of sedatives in their veins, and they would have clung to one another and promised never to lose track again. That’s where this started. That’s when they learned what they could do.
But it’s all vague and hazy, and she can’t quite grasp hold before it dissolves into shadowy outlines and déjà vu. The feeling has haunted her for her entire life, the strong sensation that almost everything she does has happened before at