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sure.
    “He looks good,” Adam admits. He takes a sip of wine, then a second, then tilts back his head and drains the whole glass. He puts down the empty cup on the dining table and rubs his eyes behind his glasses. “I can’t believe … after all this time … it worked …”
    I sit down across from him. “So what are you going to do? I mean, who do you tell about something like this?”
    Adam looks down at the rabbit and strokes his fur. In the entire year I’ve known him, he’s always had circles under his eyes. He always looks a little bit exhausted. And right now, he looks really exhausted and his hair is sticking up at odd angles, even more so than usual. I wonder if he spent the whole night awake, working on the machine. “Nobody,” he finally says.
    Nobody? What?
    “What are you talking about, Adam?” I say. “An invention like this—”
    “Is incredibly dangerous,” he interrupts me. “You think the atomic bomb was dangerous? This is about a hundred times worse. Imagine being able to go back in time and alter history. Do you realize how awful that could be?”
    “Awful?” I shake my head. “It could be wonderful. I mean, you could go back in time and … and kill Hitler before he rose to power.” I never understood before why every single time travel theoretical seems to involve killing Hitler. And now here I am, doing it myself. Oh, well.
    “Right, that would be great,” Adam says. “Except someone could also use the time machine to go back in time and help Hitler. Make him win.”
    Fine. It’s pretty clear that if a time machine came into existence, Hitler’s life would either get better or worse, but definitely not stay the same. And I can see his point, I guess. A time machine could be really dangerous in the wrong hands. But that still leaves one really important question. “So why the hell did you make it?” I ask him.
    Adam just looks at me for a minute, and I think he knows the exact reason why he invented it, but he doesn’t want to tell me. Instead, he grabs the bottle of wine and pours himself another glass. He doesn’t drink it right away though. He swishes it around, staring at the translucent liquid. “Claudia,” he murmurs.
    He puts down the glass and starts pulling on his earlobe, which I’ve noticed he always does when he’s nervous. And right now, he’s getting me nervous. Whatever he’s going to say to me, it’s big. And it’s not a marriage proposal either.
    “I need you to go through the wormhole,” he says to me in a low voice. “And I need you to stop me from getting hit by that car.”
    When we were dating about a month, Adam told me the story of how he was injured. He was innocently riding his bike on his way to work when he was twenty-two years old, and a taxi slammed into him, breaking his back and severing his spinal cord. He successfully sued the taxi company and received a considerable settlement, enough to finance his expensive brownstone and his inventing hobby.
    I finally get it. Adam doesn’t want to revolutionize the world, become famous, or even kill Hitler. He built a time machine so he’d be able to walk again.
    And all I know is I don’t want to do this. I love him, but I don’t want to do this. I really, really don’t. And he can look at me and pretty much know it.
    He drops his face into his hands. “I’m sorry, Claudia,” he says. “I hate myself for asking you. If there were any other way …”
    “Why can’t you go?” I say. As I reach for my glass of wine and notice my hand won’t stop shaking. A drop of wine splashes over the edge and rolls down the back of my hand.
    “I wish I could,” he says. “I’ve put metal through the machine and it doesn’t do so great. My wheelchair … probably wouldn’t make it. And then I’d be screwed.”
    “Great,” I say. “You’ve got a machine that apparently destroys metal and you have absolutely no issue with putting your girlfriend through it. Wonderful.”
    Adam lifts