Chapter 26: The Other Edward

I need to talk about Edward.

I've been putting it off, writing around it, mentioning him in passing the way you mention weather: Edward said this, Edward was there, Edward's hand. But I haven't written about what was actually happening between us, because what was actually happening between us was the thing I understood least about my new life, and the thing I was most afraid of getting wrong.

Here is what I knew. I knew that I looked for him every morning when I came out to the garden. I knew that when he wasn't there, the morning felt slightly dimmer, the way a room feels dimmer when someone turns off a lamp you didn't know was on. I knew that his voice, his particular voice, the warm baritone that was so different from the slightly more organized version his info used, had become one of the sounds my body associated with safety. I knew that in Sao Paulo, dancing with his hand on my waist, I had been happier than at any point I could remember in either century.

And I knew that I was still engaged to a man who had been dead for decades, whose info was waiting for me somewhere in the architecture of this world, and whose name was the same as the name of the man I was falling in love with. Every time I said "Edward" I heard both of them, the one I'd lost and the one I was finding, and the echo was so constant that I'd stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing a ringing in your ears.

One evening after dinner, Edward and I walked down to the lower terraces. It was one of those San Francisco evenings when the fog came in low and the city below disappeared and the hilltop neighborhood felt like an island floating above the clouds. The amber light from the paths made the fog glow. We could hear music from somewhere but couldn't tell where.

We sat on the wall at the edge of the lower garden, the one James had been repairing the morning I first watched the neighborhood work. Our legs dangled. The fog moved below us like a slow river.

"Can I ask you something personal?" I said.

"You can ask me anything."

"Have you ever been in love?"

He was quiet for a moment, not because the question bothered him but because he was thinking about it. This was something I'd noticed about people in 2100. They didn't rush to fill silence. They thought, and then they spoke, and what they said was what they meant.

"Twice," he said. "Once when I was twenty, with a woman I met in Lagos. We were together for about two years. It was wonderful and then it wasn't, in the way those things go when you're young and still figuring out who you are. And once when I was twenty-five, with a man I met in Osaka. That lasted a little longer. Three years. We're still close."

He said this easily, without self-consciousness, without the particular careful framing that people in my era used when mentioning same-sex relationships. It was just a fact. He'd loved a woman and then a man and now he was sitting on a wall with me.

"In my time," I said, "that would have been a whole thing. The bisexuality. People would have had opinions. They would have wanted you to pick a side, or they would have treated it as exotic, or they would have been uncomfortable."

"I know," he said. "It seems exhausting."

"Everything about my time was exhausting."

"Not everything." He looked at me. "You weren't exhausting."

"You didn't know me then. I was extremely exhausting. I worked eighty hours a week and talked about growth metrics at dinner and checked my email during sex."

He laughed. The real laugh, the unguarded one I'd first heard in the garden months ago. "During sex?"

"I'm not proud of it."

"I should hope not."

We sat in the fog and the amber light, and I felt the particular tension of two people who both know what's about to happen and are each waiting for the other to make it happen.

"Edward," I said.

"Yes."

"I want you to know that I'm aware of how strange this is. I'm a woman from seventy-three years ago. I still carry the weight of an engagement to a man who lived his whole life without me, a man who has your name. I have no idea what I'm doing in this century or who I am here or what my life is supposed to look like. I am, by any reasonable measure, the worst possible person to be falling in love with."

"That's not a question," he said.

"I know. I'm working up to one."

"Take your time."

I looked at him. The fog behind him, the amber light on his face, the thick dark hair that was always slightly too long, the eyes that were serious and kind and patient and, right now, looking at me with an expression I recognized because I'd seen it on my own face in the mirror when I thought about him.

"Do you want this?" I said. "Me. Whatever this is. Because I need to know, because I've been living in your mother's house for three months and eating your food and wearing clothes your neighborhood made for me and falling asleep in a room built by your grandmother, and if this is just you being kind to the lost woman from the past, I need to know that now, before I make a fool of myself."

"Juliana," he said. "I have been trying not to fall in love with you since the first night, when you came out of the capsule and looked at my mother and drank from the cup and didn't cry, even though you had every reason to cry. I have been failing at not falling in love with you every single day since then. I'm not being kind. I'm not taking care of a visitor. I am a man who cannot believe his luck."

I kissed him. Or he kissed me. I don't know which. It doesn't matter. What matters is that it happened on a wall in the fog above San Francisco, in a garden my dead fiance had helped build, in a century I was only beginning to understand, and it felt like the first true thing that had happened to me since I woke up.

We stayed on the wall for a long time, not talking, his arm around me, my head on his shoulder the way it had been that first night on the front step when I was broken and he had simply held still. Except now I wasn't broken. I was something else. I was beginning.

"There's something I need to do," I said, eventually.

"I know."

"I need to talk to him. To Edward. To his info."

"I know."

"Not because I need permission. That's not what this is. It's just that I can't start something new without acknowledging what I lost. He was going to be my husband. I owe him that."

Edward was quiet for a moment. "You don't owe him anything. He would say the same. But I understand wanting to."

"How do you know what he'd say?"

"Because if he was anything like the person you've described, a man who studied history and worked at a housing nonprofit and waited patiently while you built your company, he was a good person. And good people, especially good people whose infos have had seventy years to process their own lives, tend to want the people they loved to be happy."

I leaned into him. He was warm and solid and he smelled like the garden, like soil and green things, and nothing like cedar cologne, and that was right, that was how it should be.

"Soon," I said. "I'll talk to him soon."

"Whenever you're ready. I'll be here."

We walked home through the fog, hand in hand, and the neighborhood was quiet and glowing, and when we reached the house Edward kissed me once more at the door, gently, and said good night, and went to his room across the hall, and I lay in Adaeze's bed and thought about two men named Edward and the seventy-three years between them and the fact that love, it turned out, was not diminished by time or death or the strangeness of waking up in a world you didn't choose. It was just love. The oldest and most ordinary thing in the world.