Chapter Four

When it came to Arthur and me getting together, he was the one who brought it up first.

But I knew better than anyone that Arthur wasn't Lucas. Even if he looked seventy percent like him around the eyes, he could never replace him. So when we first got together, I even felt a little guilty for using him. After all, all I wanted was his face.

Until I happened to find out that the one who got away, for him, was Chloe. And then one night when he was drunk, he grabbed my wrist and mumbled, "Once I figure out how to love someone, I'll come back for you."

That was when it finally clicked. When he'd first said, "I don't understand feelings. Can you teach me?" it was never a real confession. He was treating me like a dating simulator.

He didn't love me at all. We were each just getting what we needed.

Once I understood that, I felt perfectly fine treating him as a substitute. I started copying, onto him, every single way Lucas had ever loved me, holding nothing back.

I knew perfectly well it was a con, like drinking poison to quench my thirst, and still I let myself sink into the illusion.

Until one day, I saw the whiteboard in his underground lab, crammed with equations for quantum entanglement and theories of folded time, and in the corner, one line circled hard: The jump vessel can only anchor to nodes in its own past.

Looking at those crazy calculations, my heart pounded like mad.

Arthur was an incredibly proud genius. Chloe leaving him was the one stain on his life. He was obsessed with fixing that mistake, even if it meant tearing time apart. I didn't know if he'd succeed. But I chose to keep my mouth shut and go on playing along.

Until the day before our fifth anniversary.

I stood at the floor-to-ceiling window and called him. "Arthur, when you get back from the lab, we need to talk." I wanted to end this absurd relationship.

There was a dead silence on the other end. After a long time, his cold voice finally came through.

"Eve, I can't make it to dinner tomorrow."

"Sorry."

Then the dial tone. He'd hung up on me. When I drove to the lab, it was already empty. Only the cooling machines were left.

He'd taken the perfect-score answer sheet I'd given him and gone back to the past to be someone else's perfect boyfriend. And because of that, I got a second chance too. I had what I needed to change the ending where Lucas had to die.

On the coach, the air seemed to freeze.

Without a word, Arthur handed the camera back to me. Something I couldn't read churned in his bottomless eyes. Then he turned his head and stared out the window at the streets flying by, and never looked back.

I didn't have time to guess what he was thinking. Looking at Lucas's face on the screen, I suddenly realized something very serious.

The butterfly effect had already begun.

Even though I'd tried hard to keep things on the same track as my last life, waiting to meet him naturally at the court, small deviations were already happening. Like this photo, which should never have existed.

Like the next afternoon, in the big public law lecture, when there was suddenly a cool hint of mint in the air.

In the noisy lecture hall, Lucas, in his gray hoodie, made his way through the crowd, pulled out a chair, and sat down right next to me.