He remembered different moments in his mind as fulcrums, turning points upon which everything rested, and that made it easier. There were problems that made everything they'd done into an enormous game of if: What if he'd caught her when she fell? What if he hadn't let her go that night? What if he'd come after her once she'd gone? What if she'd never gotten that job offer, or they'd never kept that baby, or he'd never proposed to Athene? What if he told her how much he loved her every single damn day that they were together?
And the thing about the timeturner was that he could answer all those questions. He could change things, little things that would influence the way their lives moved together, and he could find out exactly what that would mean. Having few to no moral compunctions about it only made it easier. That was the beautiful thing.
But it never changed. And that hurt. So many paths, so many endings, and all of them the same. Oh, the hows and whens and whys changed every time—murder, death, adultery, a hundred and one systems of loss—but there was no present with them, no route he could take that would lead him to her.
As much as he hated to admit it, maybe they'd all been right, Potter, Granger, Zabini, his mother, Ginny herself, everyone who told him that he couldn't take the coward's way out, that he had to do things the long way, the hard way, go back to the beginning and do it all over again the way it had happened the first time, because that was how it was supposed to happen.
After that it was fairly simple—agonizing, horrifying, terrifying—to count out the turns of the small, golden hourglass slowly and watch the world blur.
He'd do it the hard way, this time. But that didn't mean he was going to do nothing at all.