Lloyd nodded. "We — you and I — we must have been divorced. Or… "

"Or?"

He shrugged. "Or maybe we never went through with the marriage in the first place."

"Don't you still love me?" asked Michiko.

"Of course I do. Of course I do. But — look, I didn't want to have that vision. I didn't enjoy it at all. Remember when we were talking about our vows? Remember when we discussed whether to leave 'till death do us part' in there? You said it was old fashioned; you said nobody says that anymore. And, well, you have been married once before. But I said we should leave it in. That's what I wanted. I wanted a marriage that would last forever. Not like my parents — and not like your first marriage."

"You were in New England," said Michiko, still trying to deal with it. "And I — I was in Kyoto."

"With a little girl," said Lloyd. He paused, unsure whether he should give voice to the nagging question. But then he did, not quite meeting her eyes as he spoke. "What did the girl look like?"

"She had long black hair," said Michiko.

"And… "

Michiko looked away. "And Asian features. She looked Japanese." She paused. "But that doesn't mean anything; lots of kids of mixed couples look more like one parent than the other."

Lloyd felt his heart move in his chest. "I thought we were meant for each other," he said softly. "I thought… " He trailed off, unable to say, "I thought you were my soulmate." His eyes were stinging; so, apparently, were hers. She rubbed them with the backs of her hands.

"I love you, Lloyd," she said.

"I love you too, but… "

"Yes," she said. "But… "

He reached across and touched her hand, which was now sitting on the tabletop. She gripped his fingers. They sat silently together for a very long time.

Theo sat for a while in his car on the street outside the Dreschers' home, his mind racing. He'd been shot by a Glock 9mm; he was pretty sure from cop shows he'd watched that the Glock was a semiautomatic pistol, popular with police forces worldwide. But the ammunition had been American; maybe it had been an American who had pulled the trigger. Of course, Theo had probably not yet met whoever it was who would one day want him dead. Surely there would be almost no overlap between his current circle of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues and those who would comprise those groups two decades hence.

Still, Theo already knew a lot of Americans.

But none well. None, except Lloyd Simcoe.

Of course, Lloyd wasn't really an American. He was born in Canada. And Canadians didn't like guns, either — they had no Second Amendment, or whatever damned thing it was that made Americans think they could go around armed.

But Lloyd had lived in the U.S. for seventeen years before coming to CERN, first at Harvard, then as an experimenter with the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago. And, by Lloyd's own admission, he'd be living in the U.S. again by the time of the visions. He could have gotten a gun easily enough.

But no — Lloyd had an alibi. He was in New England when Theo was — what was it the Americans say? When Theo was wasted.

Except…

Except that Theo was/would be killed October 21 — and Lloyd's vision, like everyone else's, was of October 23.

Lloyd had told Theo his vision — he'd said he hadn't told Michiko yet, but Theo had insisted, and Lloyd had relented, although he did swear the young Greek to secrecy. Lloyd had said his vision had him making love to an old woman, presumably his then-wife.

Old people surely didn't make love that often, thought Theo. Indeed, they probably only did it on special occasions. Like when one of them had returned from a long absence. It's only a six-hour flight from New England to Switzerland… and that's today. Twenty years hence, it might be much less.

No, Lloyd could easily have been at CERN on Monday and back home in New Hampshire, or wherever the hell it was, on Wednesday. Not that Theo could think of any reason that Lloyd would want to kill him.

Except that, of course, by 2030, Theo, not Lloyd, was apparently director of what sounded like an incredibly advanced particle accelerator at CERN: the Tachyon-Tardyon Collider. Academic and professional jealousy had led to more than one murder over the years.

And, of course, there was the fact that Lloyd and Michiko were no longer together. If he were honest with himself, Theo fancied Michiko, too. What man wouldn't? She was gorgeous and brilliant and warm and funny. And, well, she was closer to his age than to Lloyd's. Could he have had a role in their breakup?

Just as he had pushed Lloyd to share his vision, so, too, had he pushed Michiko to share hers: Theo was hungry for insight, vicariously trying to experience what everyone else had been lucky enough to see. In Michiko's vision, she was in Kyoto, perhaps, as she had said, taking her daughter to visit Michiko's uncle. Could Lloyd have waited until she was temporarily away from Geneva to come over to settle an old score with Theo?

Theo hated himself for even considering such possibilities. Lloyd had been his mentor, his partner. They'd always talked about sharing a Nobel Prize. But—

But there was no mention of a Nobel in the two articles he'd found now about his own death. Of course, that didn't mean Lloyd wouldn't get one, but…

Theo's mother was diabetic; Theo had researched the history of diabetes when she'd been diagnosed. The names Banting and Best kept coming up — the two Canadian researchers who had discovered insulin. Indeed, they were another pair people sometimes likened Lloyd and Theo to: like Crick and Watson, Banting and Best were of different ages — Banting was clearly the senior researcher. But although Crick and Watson had been jointly awarded the Nobel, Banting had shared his not with his true research partner, young Best, but rather with J. R. R. Macleod, Banting's boss. Perhaps Lloyd would get a Nobel — not for the Higgs discovery, which had failed to materialize, but rather for an explanation of the time-displacement effect. And perhaps he would share it not with his young partner but rather with his boss — with Beranger, or someone else in the CERN hierarchy. What would that do to their friendship, their partnership? What jealousies and hatreds would fester between now and the year 2030?

Madness. Paranoia. And yet—

And yet, if he were killed on the CERN grounds — Moot Drescher's suggestion of a shoot-out in a sports arena still seemed a dubious proposition — then he would be killed by someone who had managed to gain access to the campus. CERN wasn't a maximum-security facility by any means, but neither did it allow just anyone to enter its gates.

No, someone who could get into CERN had likely killed him. Someone whom Theo would meet with face-to-face. And someone who wanted him not just dead, but who had clearly vented pent up anger, pumping shot after shot into Theo's body.

Lloyd and Michiko had moved to the couch in the living room; the dishes could wait for later.

Dammit, thought Lloyd, why did this have to happen? Everything had been going so well, and now—

And now, it looked like it all was going to fall apart. Lloyd wasn't a young man. He'd never intended to wait this long to get married, but…

But work had gotten in the way, and—

No. No, that wasn't it. Let's be honest. Let's face it.

He thought of himself as a good man, kind and gentle, but—

But, truth be told, he wasn't polished, he wasn't slick; it had been easy for Michiko to improve his wardrobe, because, of course, almost any change would have been for the better.

Oh, sure, women — and men, for that matter — said he was a good listener, but Lloyd knew that it wasn't so much that he was sage but rather that he simply didn't know what to say. And so he sat, taking it in, taking in the peaks and valleys of other people's lives, the highs and lows, the trials and travails of those whose existence had more variation, more excitement, more angst than his own.