"So I wouldn't what?" he said.
"Send me back," she said. Simply. The truth of it, clear and flat, the kind she told only when she was entirely certain she was safe to tell it.
He held her and said nothing for a moment.
"I would not have sent you back," he said. "There is no version of any event that ends with me sending you back."
"I know that now," she said.
"You knew it before you knew it," he said. "The way you stayed. The way you built things here. Part of you knew it was permanent even when the other part was still tracking exits."
"Yes," she said. "Both things at once. I was very busy."
He laughed. She laughed with him, both of them in Eleanor's bed in the last morning of the island, both of them laughing at the thing that had been very difficult and was now, on the far side o
