She’s calling me again, and I can see the sky turning pink, so I really must go. Before I do, I hope you’ll indulge me and allow me to go back to the beginning. I want to show the courage that still makes me so proud.

Think of Elliot when your life is hard.

I find it helps.

Perhaps you will too.

Chapter 63

It was a balmy August day and Ben Elmys shifted uncomfortably. He didn’t want to be in this chair, in this office, but it was a necessary part of the journey.

Elaine Hardcastle, the ceaselessly cheerful care home manager, sat behind her desk and studied the paperwork that would make him legal guardian of the child.

Elliot Asha.

Himself.

Ben shifted again. Sometimes his mind balked at the disjointed reality he’d created, but he’d had to do it and the child would have to do it again. He was the link between moments in time that ultimately saved his mother’s life and brought her back to his father so they could be together, and he would do it endlessly, because that’s what it took.

Elaine looked up. She was slightly overweight and her plump cheeks were creased with smile lines. She showed her teeth now.

‘Everything seems in order,’ she said. ‘Shall we?’

She crossed the carpeted office, but her heels started clacking the moment she stepped into the corridor. Ben followed, trying to keep his eyes off a ladder in her tights that ran up her left leg and disappeared beneath her pencil skirt. She seemed too bright and cheerful for such a blemish.

She took Ben to a reception area where the walls were the colours of sweet wrappers. Smiling faces and cuddly toys crowded posters that covered the gaudy walls, but despite all the cheer, the room seemed permeated with sadness. There was a corner unit of fabric-tile chairs of the kind found in job centres and doctors’ surgeries, and in front of them lay a graveyard of toys, battered and broken, fallen warriors maimed in battle by tiny hands.

‘If you wait here,’ Elaine said with a smile, before stepping through another door.

Ben heard her clack away. He tried to prepare. This was another crucial moment, and he scoured his memory. This one was old. From childhood. How did it go? Did it matter if he remembered? Wasn’t he fated to get it right?

Was he an actor in a play, trapped by lines written by his future self? Or did he have agency? Are our paths set? Or our futures undecided? Ben never could make up his mind.

He tried to recall the words and paced the space until Elaine returned with another woman, this one much younger and less smiley. And they brought Elliot Asha with them.

Ben smiled uncertainly at his younger self, but Elliot was distraught.

‘I don’t want to go with him,’ he said the moment he saw Ben. ‘I want Mum and Dad.’

‘I know,’ Elaine responded, ‘but Mr Elmys—’