If only we’d met earlier, he says. He likes to think of alternative beginnings for us, having coffee at Grendel’s Den, standing in line for foreign movies with subtitles at the Brattle, falling in love as fast and hard as we actually did, but much earlier. I could have prevented his first heartbreak, he thinks. It’s a kind of lovesickness─ this nostalgia for a past that didn’t and couldn’t have happened. You’re such a romantic, I say. I clink our wedding bands together like champagne flutes, our happy ending, and hate it that he’s making me beg. I try not to think of the time frame he’s stuck in, my own stumble through false starts and stupid relationships. Yet this is where his mind goes. I can’t help but feel robbed. There’s no giving him what he wants. No time machine. No wormholes warping the space-time continuum. So I simply turn to him, knowing he’ll come to mourn this period, too, even as we pass through it together, holding each other’s hand in our sleep.