New York City, March 1931
He told her on a Tuesday, in the rain, on the roof, because it was the only place in the city where nobody could hear them.
He had rehearsed it for four months. He had a version that was gentle and a version that was clinical and a version that began "I need you to sit down," and in the event he used none of them, because she got there first.
"You're going to tell me you're leaving," Edith said.
The rain came straight down. There was no wind.
"No."
"You have been building up to something since Christmas, Jim, and there are only so many things a man builds up to." She had her arms wrapped around herself. She would not take his coat. She had never once taken his coat. "So say it, and let us both stop pretending we don't know what tonight is."
"I'm not leaving."
"Then what?"
And he found that four months of preparation had gone, and there was nothing left in him but the flat truth, for which he had never had any talent.
"I need you to stop," he said.
She blinked. "Stop what?"
"All of it. The mission. The talks. The whole thing. I need you to walk away from it, and close it, and never build it again, and I need you to disappear so completely that history does not remember your name."
The rain came down. Edith looked at him for what felt to him like a geological age.
"Why."
"I can't tell you."
"Jim."
"I can't tell you." His hands had begun to shake, and he put them in his pockets. "I would give anything. I would give my hands. I cannot tell you."
"You can't tell me why I should burn down the only thing I have ever done that mattered."
"Yes."
"You are asking me to look at Dutch Vandermeer and Solly Marks and two hundred men who have nothing, and tell them that the one place in this city where somebody knows their names is closing, and give them no reason, and never speak again. And you cannot tell me why."
"Yes."
"Because?"
"Because if you don't," Kirk said, "everything ends."
"That is not a reason. That is a threat with the numbers taken out."
"I know."
"Then give me the numbers."
"I can't." He heard himself nearly shout it, and brought his voice down with an effort that felt physical. "Edith. If I tell you why, you will not believe me. And worse, you will begin to build a defense against it, and it will be intelligent, and it will be persuasive, because you are the most persuasive person I have ever met, and I have met a great many. And you will convince yourself. And then you will convince me. And then it will be too late for everyone who has ever lived."
She stared at him. And then, very quietly, "You're mad."
He shut his eyes.
"You are, aren't you," she said, and now there were tears on her face, and she did not appear to have noticed them, and the rain would have hidden them anyway. "Something happened to you. In the war, or on a ship, or in whatever it is you will not talk about. And it has gone bad in you. And I did not see it, because I did not want to."
"Edith."
"Don't."
"Edith, please."
"I have spent my whole life being told to be quiet by men who could not tell me why. Ministers. Aldermen. My father. Every one of them had a very good reason, and not one would say it out loud, and I have made a life out of not being quiet."
She stepped back. "And now you."
And then she stopped. And Kirk watched her face change, and knew, before she said it, exactly what was coming, and knew he had no answer.
"The aldermen," she said. "You stopped me going to the aldermen."
"That was a true argument."
"I know it was a true argument." She was shouting now, on a roof, in the rain, and there was nobody in that city to hear her. "That is exactly the trouble, Jim. It was true, every word of it, and I have gone over it eleven times looking for the place where you were wrong, and there isn't one. And it has taken me until this minute to understand that a man can hand you nothing but true things and still be steering you.
"How long."
"Edith."
"How long have you been steering me?"
And James Kirk, standing on a roof in Brooklyn in March of 1931, in the rain, with the woman he loved four feet away, said the truest thing he had said since he came into that century.
"Since the first day," he said.
She did not move.
"Since the first day I met you. I have not had a conversation with you, in four months, that I was not steering. Not one. I have managed every word out of my mouth since I understood who you were, and there has not been an hour of it I have not hated, and I am telling you because you have caught me and because I will not add lying to it."
Edith Keeler looked at him.
"Get out," she said.
* * *
He did not follow her. She went through the stairwell door and did not slam it, which was worse, and he stood on that roof for an hour and forty minutes in the rain, and then went down and out onto Twenty-first Street.
And he stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the lit window on the second floor where she kept her room, and watched her cross it twice, carrying things. At ten o'clock she put the light out.
He was still standing there at midnight, soaked through, when the street door opened behind him.
She had a bag in her hand. She had her coat on. She stood in the doorway of the mission with the rain coming down between them and looked at him for a long time.
"I don't believe you," she said.
He nodded.
"I want that understood, Jim. I want it on the record, whatever record there is. I do not believe you. I think you are ill, and I think you need help I do not know how to give, and if I am wrong I will spend the rest of my life apologizing." Her chin came up. "I do not believe a single word of it."
"I know."
"And I am going to do it anyway."
The rain came down. He could not speak.
"Because I have looked at your face for four months, and tonight, on that roof, I saw something I have never seen on a living man, and I have seen a great deal. You are certain. I have met certain men. They frighten me and they are always fools. But you are also sorry. And I have never met a man who was that certain and that sorry at the same time, and I do not believe a lie can do that to a face. I think only a truth can. I think you have seen something."
The rain came down between them. She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice had changed. "I am going to tell you a thing I have never told a living soul," she said. "All my life I have known things that were coming. Not seen them. Known them, the way you know a storm before the sky does anything at all. That men will lay their hands on a power that can burn a city to the ground or light one forever, and will have to choose which, and soon. That we will go up off this Earth. That there will be feet standing on the face of the moon, and I will be dead long before it happens, and it will happen all the same. People have laughed at me for it since I was a girl, and I learned to say it to no one. And I am standing here in the rain looking at you, Jim, and I have the feeling now, this minute, the very same one, and it is pointed straight at you. I do not believe you. But I sense you. And I have not once in my life been wrong about a thing I sensed."
She came down one step.
"So I will do it. I will close the mission. I will burn the papers. I will stop speaking, and disappear, and let two hundred men believe I lost my nerve, and some of them will never forgive me, and one of them is Solly Marks, and I will carry that for the rest of my life."
She came down another step.
"And I am not doing it because I believe you. I want you to understand that until the day you die. You did not convince me. There is no argument here and there never was one."
She stopped in front of him. The rain ran off the brim of her hat.
"I am doing it," she said, "because it is you asking."
She put her hand flat on his chest.
"And God help us both, Jim, because that is the worst reason in the world, and I have never been more certain of anything in my life."