“And the German pilots who got lost didn’t mean to start the London Blitz,” Polly said. “The sailor lighting a cigarette on deck didn’t mean to get his convoy blown up. History’s a chaotic system. Cause and effect aren’t—”

“Linear. I know. But even in a chaotic system, good deeds and good intentions—and courage and kindness and love—must count for something, or else history would be even worse than it already is,” Eileen said.

She refused to send Alf and Binnie away. “When the vicar tried to place them last summer before we left Backbury, no one would take them,” she said. “And even if we could find someone, they’d only run away to London and begin living on their own again. And collecting UXBs. They’d be in just as much danger as they are with me.”

Except that the continuum wouldn’t be after them. “But by sending them away, you’d be saving their lives,” Polly argued.

“I thought you said saving lives was a bad thing,” Eileen said. “That that was how we got into this mess in the first place. That if I’d let Alf and Binnie go on the City of Benares and drown, if I’d let that man in the back of the ambulance bleed to death, that everything would be fine.”

“Eileen—”

“Don’t you see? If I send them away, they may be killed, and if I keep them here, they may be killed. But if I send them away, they’ll think I’m abandoning them, and that will kill them. They’ve already been abandoned by everyone they’ve ever known. They can’t survive that again. And I swore I’d take care of them.”

But don’t you see? You can’t, Polly thought.

But Eileen was right, it was a no-win situation, so it probably made no difference where they were. Eileen had saved both of their lives once and Binnie’s twice, and that would clearly have to be corrected. She tried to comfort herself with the knowledge that the Hodbins could take care of themselves. That if anyone could survive a correction—or a war—it was the two of them.

Polly wanted desperately to believe that it was possible for them, and at least some of the others, to survive. And that it was possible to do something even now to protect them, even though she feared it was as useless as Sleeping Beauty’s father burning the spinning wheels.

But she kept away from St. Paul’s and Kensington anyway and took the bus instead of the tube, searching for a seat where she wouldn’t have to be next to someone, taking care to watch where she was going so that she didn’t collide with anyone. She stayed strictly away from Oxford Street, and when Mr. Tabbitt dispatched her to buy sateen or ribbon for costumes, she went to Regent Street or Harrods and said no more than “Five yards, please.”

Even that might be enough to seal the shopgirl’s fate, but at least she wasn’t at Townsend Brothers, where she might endanger Doreen or Miss Snelgrove. Or in Notting Hill Gate with the troupe. And the effort of avoiding people kept her mind off the sprawling network of people they’d come into contact with: the bombing victims she’d saved while she was stationed at Dulwich, the bus driver who’d taken her to Backbury, the servants at the manor, the people who’d been on the train with Eileen and her and Mike, and the girls who’d picked Mike up and dusted him off in Bletchley.