That night, she tries to kiss Noah.

It only makes things worse.

It only makes things worse because she shows up at his door to explain, to say that she's sorry for the dinner.

He doesn't remember the dinner. He asks if she means their walk to the park, and she grits her teeth against the thousand ways that time and timelines are fickle, and nods.

"I'm sorry," she says. No doubt the date didn't go well, no matter what calendar it marked.

Noah smiles, but it doesn't reach his eyes. She kisses him, but it doesn't reach her heart.

When he tries to deepen the kiss, she pulls back. How, how can it be that this leaves her cold, when three-quarters of a century ago, she felt all afire when Wyatt's lips touched hers?

Lucy does the cowardly thing. She has to be brave so often, but she can't be with Noah, with the chilly diamond circling her finger.

She dashes out the door and goes back to Mom's.

...

Wyatt and Jessica. Wyatt and Jessica. She threads the names through her mind like a mantra. It might work better if she hadn't been the one to talk about possibilities.

It was all for show, Wyatt said. And Lucy wasn't in love with Wyatt. He was a friend. She trusted him. She wanted him as part of the team. She'd never leave him behind.

And sure, she watched for his smiles and elbowed him when he was needlessly griping and screamed his name when she thought that he was hurt. But that meant nothing.

The kiss, it meant nothing.

She rubs her fingers together. Her hand, against the pulse in his throat, scraped by the faint brush of his stubbled jaw. He kissed the same way he looks at her, steady and true.

She needs to break up with Noah.

...

Lucy gives the ring back on a Thursday, and tells him she's so sorry. She's had a crisis of life, lately. It's not him.

(She doesn't even know who he is.)

Mom says nothing about it, but her lips are pressed too tight. Lucy wants the next mission, wants Rufus, wants Wyatt.

Amy, she thinks, would understand.

Sometimes, a week passes before Agent Christopher calls again. And the team exchanges texts, but Lucy always feels that she's the most talkative. All the more so now, when she feels that she wants to say something but knows not what.

She's not in love with Wyatt. She barely knows him, she tells herself, but that falls flat—she's known him for centuries, now.

She's not in love with Wyatt. It doesn't have to be love to like the feeling of her skin warmed by his, to lean back against him, to play the memory of his lips against hers again and again and again.

Lucy is too busy to be in love; it is too soon, and he is too fixed in the past.

But then again, the past is their future.