When the light first hits, everything changes.
When they have run through the jungle and jumped through time and gotten caught and then freed, nothing is the same as it was, and Sawyer misses that beach camp and the days of fighting the Others, because now he doesn't know who he's fighting.
Juliet misses her little house and Ben's stifling attention. She even misses the dying women. At least then she knew who her enemy was and how it attacked.
Daniel seems to have ideas of what to do, but he seems so busy that she doesn't ask him what they are. She wouldn't be able to help anyway.
Sawyer sits down on the beach in the spot where she drank rum and watched her dreams die, and she feels defeat in her bones. After he's sat there for a few hours, she brings him a mango. He takes it without a word or even a look, and she sinks down next to him in the sand, suddenly heavy with the weight of their situation.
"You got any more Dharma Initiative rum left?" he asks her, throwing the mango pit into the sand.
She smiles. "No, but we could probably get some. Who knows, maybe it would be changing the past if we didn't."
She'd hoped to lighten the mood, but Sawyer brings her back down again. "Who knows if the Dharma Initiative even exists yet?"
She wants to tell him it's worth a shot, that she understands how he feels, why he desperately needs to save her, why he feels so inadequate because John did, but she knows it wouldn't matter. So she does the only thing she hasn't tried, and she twists his face to hers and kisses him, hard.
He doesn't hesitate in kissing back, and before she knows it, she's on her back in the sand with her blue shirt unbuttoned and her pants off, and Sawyer, naked and glorious above her, and she's still the other woman.
When they come together, she can't help but think that maybe the story isn't that different from before; they've just changed the names.