“And he’s certain there’s nothing we could do that would change things back?”

“Yes.”

“So we’re in an unwinnable situation.”

“Yes.”

An unwinnable situation with not even a way to get out of it. If Polly killed herself, or even let a convenient HE do it for her, that still wouldn’t put an end to the damage she could do, the changes she might effect. She would endanger the rescue crews who had to dig for her. Or delay them from digging for someone else, and that someone else would die from a broken gas main in the meantime. And her death would affect Doreen and Miss Snelgrove and the troupe.

And Sir Godfrey, who last time he thought she was buried in the rubble had moved heaven and earth to find her, who had sent ripples out in all directions.

She’d been wrong—she wasn’t a delayed-action bomb. She was a UXB that would blow up if someone didn’t defuse it—but that, if someone attempted to, was even more likely to explode. And once the bomb squad had set it ticking, they didn’t dare stop, and the only safe way to dispose of it was to take it out to Barking Marshes, where it could explode without harming anyone.

But the continuum had no Barking Marshes, and short of being dead, there was no way Polly could get out of her service with ENSA and out of endangering everyone in the cast, to say nothing of all those soldiers and sailors in the audience.

She lay awake nights, thinking of everyone she might have unwittingly endangered—Fairchild and Lady Denewell and Talbot, whose knee she’d wrenched, and Sarah Steinberg and the other shopgirls at Townsend Brothers and the guard at Padgett’s who’d chased her up the stairs, the old man with the fringed pink silk cushion who’d caught her when her legs gave way and eased her down to the curb after she’d seen St. George’s.

And that was only her. What about Eileen’s evacuees and Agatha Christie and the nurses and doctors and patients at the hospital in Orpington? And at St. Bart’s?

Mr. Dunworthy had clearly thought he’d put his nurses and doctors in danger. He’d also said that perhaps not everyone they’d come into contact with had to be part of the correction, but even if only a few of them were …

She knew now how Theodore’s neighbor felt. She wanted to shut herself in the cupboard under the stairs and stay there, even if it offered no protection at all. But that was impossible. She had to make Mr. Dunworthy soft-boiled eggs and tea and keep Alf from asking him how it felt to be blown up and Binnie from sharing her opinions of fairy tales, had to learn her lines, practice tap routines, rip ruffles off her costumes and sew sequins on them. And face Eileen’s unquenchable optimism.

“I don’t think Mr. Dunworthy’s right,” she said the day after Polly told her. “Saving people’s lives is a good thing, and after all, Mr. Dunworthy didn’t intend to run into the Wren—”