She vaguely reaches out a hand, brushes against his thigh, but with no response forthcoming she drops it down to hang at her side. He’s staring at her in a defensive posture, his arms crossed. She doesn’t know how to articulate everything that’s churning inside her. There’s no obvious end or beginning, and no conclusion, because she doesn’t know anything now except what she wants at this moment.

Finally Max nods his head.

“I shouldn’t have booked it like that,” he says stiffly. “I won’t be so awkward in the future. You’ll have your professional atmosphere.”

“But what if I don’t want . . . things to be so professional,” Karen replies, moving forward, although she can’t muster any eroticism in her advance. Instead her voice betrays emotional need. And she knows immediately that it was a mistake. If she had said it in a flirtatious or sensual way, had tossed it off like this wasn’t the gravest matter in the world to her, then he probably would have smiled and moved closer as well, instead of giving her the pitying look he does now, his expression shifting to the sadly nostalgic, letting go in that instant.

“You’re saying you want to start up again?” he says. “Now? It’s been weeks. I needed you during that time. And you weren’t there.”

“I didn’t—”

“You did.”

Her voice is tremulous as she speaks—“But I need you now.”

A penitent nod of the head, trying to project grace like he had suddenly transmuted into a saint, a holy man who was trying to communicate by his body language the impossibility of the situation without breaking her heart. But his words are harsh.

“You need me now. I needed you then. Looks like we’re perpetually out of sync.”

Someone enters the stairwell below them and just like that he gives her a final glance and descends. The reality of the ending is upon her. Karen says his name twice. The first is loud enough for him to hear but the second is just for her.

Later, there she is utterly losing her shit behind the locked door of her office, losing her research program, losing Max, hell, who knows, maybe losing her own shot at tenure here if the Crick Program goes under, a total dissolution. All her failures beat at her like winged devils, and she realizes that the wolf of time has eaten up the hours of her life and it is too late to correct any of it.

Kierk is lying on the floor of his apartment next to a shrinking To Read pile and a rapidly growing Read pile. It’s everything he originally rescued from Atif’s desk. When Kierk gets to one of his own papers he lets out a laugh, thumbing through it with nostalgia. Some handwriting in the margin catches his eye.