Beth and I were marooned two hundred years in the future. Temporal refugees without a thing to our name. Or so I thought. Elliot left some money and the cottage in trust to an Elizabeth and David Asha, but we could never bring ourselves to live in it. So I maintain it as a museum of our lives and visit once a year to be reminded of his sacrifice. Beth comes with me to the Peak District, but she has never once accompanied me to Longhaven.

Too painful, I suppose.

When Harri didn’t come back, her colleagues thought she and Elliot had been murdered by Ben Elmys, a man recently released from prison and set on revenge. The police searched for him, but of course he was never found. None of them were, and rumours swirled about their disappearances, but everyone assumed Elliot and Harri were dead. Case closed. No loose ends for anyone to pull on. The secret safe. The secret of time.

I often think about the implications of what Elliot did, and have spent many years researching time. Is he a paradox? Some might say so, but they’d be wrong. We perceive time as a continuum, but block theory dictates it must be extant. All moments must exist and always have existed for other physical properties such as gravity or atomic bonds to be true. The block theory of time, that all moments exist at once, changes how we consider paradox. If moments are as real as rooms in a house, we can move between them, be active in them and affect physical reality without what we would typically consider to be causation. Cause and effect cease to matter if all we’re doing is travelling between spaces.

Our minds are bound by their limitations. Elliot’s wasn’t. He saw the universe differently. We imagine ourselves travelling from one moment to the next, but are we? Where is the past? Point to it. Where does it exist other than in our minds or the collective memory or some artificial record of history? And where is the future, other than in our anticipation? And the now? The now we experience is the new past, and as it drifts away, it becomes the distant past.

Time is an illusion our minds create to give us a sense of direction. Elliot knew that and invented a way to break free of our bonds. I’ve tried to tell this story before, to close friends. Given my profession, it’s dismissed as fiction, but even those who give it a degree of credence struggle to conceptualize time in this way, and when they find it difficult, I talk about stories and storytelling. A tale can be told from beginning to end, going neatly through the middle, or the author can chop and change, taking the reader through time as best suits the purpose of the story. In the real world most of us are like characters, destined to play out our lives in the chronology we’re given, but Elliot found a way to become something akin to an author, to rearrange events to suit him. I’m not sure my explanation helps, but it gives people a new way to think about time and ultimately it doesn’t matter what others think. What’s important is that Beth and I know the truth about our son.