The sunroom does exactly what it says on the tin – it catches the bright April sun, floor to ceiling windows amplifying the heat and holding it in , the bright light catching on the dust motes that float with no intention. It radiates calm, filled with leafy plants along the low ledge that runs the perimeter of the room, and the one windowless wall, where the sunroom has been built onto the back of the house, is an homage to the sun itself. And everything with which it shares the sky. The place looks like Delilah's future: old queer women and their love for the galaxy, all the unknowable secrets of the universe.

Celeste is sitting in a wingback armchair facing the surprisingly long garden that unrolls down to the river that wends its way from the mountains to the sea. It's hard to believe they're in the centre of town in this slice of heaven. The real world feels a million miles away. Celeste turns around and Sunny feels as though she's in the presence of a queen, so strong is the woman's regal aura. Even sitting, she is tall and straight-backed with silver hair wrapped in an elegant chignon, a shimmery shawl around her shoulders. Her features are sharp and precise – thin brows and narrow lips and a Grecian nose; grey eyes that could freeze mercury – and Sunny is rooted to the spot, like she needs to be invited to step any further.

"Hello," Celeste says before turning to Astrid to ask, in a guarded tone, "Who is this, darling?"

"This is Sunny. She has questions about the well," Astrid says, setting the tray down on the table beside Celeste's chair. There are several places to sit in the bright room, each one mismatched but equally comfortable. Astrid picks a wide, warm orange armchair surrounded by greenery, the fronds of a fern tickling her cheek when she sits.

Celeste's expression does a complete one eighty. The cool frostiness melts away, a little colour injected into her cheeks when she smiles. "Ah. I see. I must say, I was expecting you a lot sooner. What has it been, three days?"

"Apparently it's been fourteen months," Sunny says. Celeste waves a hand.

"Time is a fickle pixie. Three days, fourteen months, it's all the same."

"I don't understand."

"Sit, my dear." Celeste nods at the chair closest to her. It looks old and precarious so Sunny lowers herself into it cautiously, only for it to feel as warm and soothing as a hug from her mother. "You say it's been fourteen months – fourteen months since what, exactly?"

"Since I made a wish and accidentally threw a bunch of money in your well. I thought it was a few days ago but according to everyone I know, it's been over a year."

"And how long has it been since you found yourself in the wrong time?"

"Friday. So, yeah, three days."

Celeste wears a satisfied smile. She nods once. "So you see? Three days; fourteen months. It's the same."

Sunny's not sure she understands but Celeste's confidence is reassuring. "I take it this means you know that you've got a magic well, then?"

"Magic is a little reductive, don't you think?"

"I don't really know what the fuck to think," Sunny snaps, quite without meaning to, and flushes red. Something feels so wrong about swearing in front of a pair of silver-haired women whose lives quite likely began before the first world war ended. She digs her nails into her palms and says, "Sorry."

"That is far from the worst we've heard, I can assure you." Celeste's eyes are laughing. "That well can be quite the cunt."

A shocked laugh bursts out of Sunny.

"You think such language is only for the young?" There's a twitch to Celeste's lips. "We were all young once." Unfolding her legs, she tucks a stray hair back into her updo and sits forward, letting the shawl slip from her shoulders. She's wearing black slacks and a thin, wide-necked white jumper that hangs off her shoulders, showing off the pendant around her neck.

Sunny tries to inconspicuously peer closer but Celeste doesn't miss a trick. She lifts the chain so the charm lies flush against the back of her hand. It looks like a smooth silver pebble, a portrait on either side.

"Venus and Sappho," Celeste explains, holding the pendant out for Sunny to take a closer look, though she doesn't unclasp it from around her neck. "It was given to me by the first woman I ever loved."

Astrid titters and says, "That makes it sounds like you've loved more than one woman." To Sunny, she says, "I gave that to her for her twenty-first birthday. She hasn't taken it off in sixty years. I think she's a keeper."

Sunny marvels at the intricate etching until she realises that these women are masters of distraction, whether through tea or jewellery, when she has come here to find answers about what happened to her and why they are so cavalier about the fact that there's a freaking portal in their front garden.

"Why am I here?" she asks.

"You knocked on the door. I invited you in," Astrid says, breaking a biscuit in two and dropping crumbs on the tiled floor. The cat slinks into the room and leaps onto her lap with practised ease, curling up and instantly purring.

"I mean why am I here. In this year. Why, after dropping my bus money in your well, did I get flung into the future?"

Astrid and Celeste share a look. Astrid looks down at the cat, scratching between its ears until it's purring so loud that it sounds as though it's about to take off.

"Tell us your story," Celeste says. Sunny's getting sick of repeating it but she does, making sure not to skip out on a single detail. She doesn't emphasise Delilah's theory this time, though – she wants to hear it from Celeste.

Once she's done, after several minutes of stumbling over her words and searching for the right ones to sum up how she feels, she asks, "So why me?"

"We don't know why the universe chooses who she chooses," Celeste says at last. "A lot of people make wishes in our well, heaven knows how much money is sitting at the bottom, but not many get their wishes granted. Those who do are a rare few."

"So this has happened to other people?"

"There have been others," Astrid says, before her attention snaps back to the cat.

"And you knew. How did you know? You said there was a ripple? What does that mean?" Sunny only remembers her tea when she looks down and sees it in front of her, and she takes a sip to give herself something to do as she waits for one of the women to formulate an answer.

"It doesn't happen often," Celeste says, clearly taking time to choose each word carefully with a hesitant breath, "but when it does, there's a feeling. Like a spark of energy. It was a while before we made the connection." Looping two fingers through the handle of her mug, she sips her lemon and ginger tea.

"Can I talk to them? The other people?" Knowing she isn't alone in this is an oasis in the desert, until she catches that glance that Celeste shoots to Astrid. Caution and resignation and a glimmer of sorrow.

"We only got to know two others whose wishes were answered. One of them, her story wasn't dissimilar to yours – she was a young woman who felt her life was missing love, and she made a thoughtless wish when she saw our well. And, like you, she got exactly what she asked for."

"Why do you say that like it's a bad thing?" Sunny's hope is fading. She doesn't like where this story is heading, sensing it like a storm on the horizon.

"The trouble with the strings of the universe is that they are easily tangled unless one knows exactly what they are doing. She – her name was Margaret – was a desperately lonely woman." Sunny clocks the past tense and her stomach curdles. "Such a sweet thing," Celeste says, "but ultimately misguided. She was only young, no older than you; she didn't have any family and she had been burned by love. All she wanted was to skip forward to the day she had a family of her own and true happiness – it's amazing, really, how many more people ask for happiness than fortune – and she got it, but the problem with the well is that it comes with caveats."

"Like what?"

"Like you've found – wishes granted in exchange for time. You've lost fourteen months."

"What did Margaret lose?"

It's Astrid who speaks up this time. "Twenty years."

"Fuck." The goosebumps are back, along with the nausea. Sunny is disorientated enough having lost a year, but twenty? How could anyone want to skip forward twenty years? "Oh my god. Two decades?"

"She tracked us down when she made the connection. She wanted answers."

"But we don't hold the secrets of the universe," Celeste says. "We can't do anything but guide and advise and be here for you on whatever journey it is you need to take. It isn't our well – we don't pretend to know how it works. We are merely its keepers."

"What happened to Margaret?" Sunny's gripping her mug so tightly that it feels like it could crack in her hands and soak her in the lukewarm remains of her tea.

"She tried," Astrid murmurs, "but she'd lost too much time. When she made the wish, she never thought she'd be in her forties when she found true love. She woke up in a life where she was married, where she was a mother, but all the love in the world couldn't make up for what she lost."

Sunny can fill in the blanks, but Celeste spells it out for her anyway.

"She took her own life. Not long after she found us." Her voice is quiet and sombre and Sunny wants to cry. Her throat is petrified, a painful lump lodged in her oesophagus, pressing on her windpipe and making it hard to pull in a deep breath.

"Playing with time is a dangerous game," Astrid says.

"But if Margaret was anything like me, she didn't know what the fuck she was doing!" Sunny cries out when she manages to swallow past the lump. "I didn't make that wish thinking I was seriously going to wake up with a girlfriend! And I sure as fuck bet that Margaret didn't actually want to skip half her life. She just wanted a family. I just wanted love but if I'd known I was going to miss more than a year of my life, I might've fucking thought twice."

Celeste, hands folded in her lap, nods. "I know. And maybe, if Margaret had stayed longer, who knows, maybe she could have made that choice again."

"What does that mean?"

"Time is only so flexible," Astrid says. "It's like an elastic band – there's only so far you can pull it before it snaps back. Whatever has happened to you and Margaret and everyone else whose wish came true puts a strain on the fabric of the universe. It's an anomaly. You've been pushed forward; it stands to reason that at some point it could fling you back."

Sunny's sitting right on the edge of her seat now. "So I can go back? This is reversible? How do I do that?"

Celeste cuts a glare at Astrid. She has overstepped. "We can't know for certain. I don't want to get your hopes up."

"But?"

"The other woman we knew – she turned up on our doorstep a long time ago."

"Decades," Astrid adds. "We hadn't lived here long."

"We didn't know her. Isabel Beecham. She said she wanted to come back to where it had all begun." Celeste sips her tea and stares at her fingernails, sighing a heavy sigh. "As a young woman she'd made a wish and it had come true. Like you, she found herself in an unfamiliar world – a few years, I think it was, that she was catapulted forwards. All she wanted was to be a mother and after she made her wish, she woke up four years older with a newborn son."

There are welts in Sunny's palms where her nails have dug deep enough to bruise the skin. Her chest is tight, her breaths shallow.

"Isabel never regretted the time she had lost, never wanted to go back, until the boy died as a child." Celeste sighs. Long and slow. The hole in Sunny's chest is tearing wider and wider; she feels sick and faint, her head spinning. Celeste closes her eyes before continuing. "Whether the universe took pity on her or the potency of her sorrow ripped open whatever fissure in time she'd first come through, she found herself back where she started. As though the last eight years had never happened."

"Fucking hell." This is all starting to sound a lot more serious than Sunny first thought and her heart rate is rising with each second that goes by, until she feels clammy and shaky, teetering on the cusp of passing out. This isn't what she wanted. This isn't what she asked for. This is too much and her head is pounding and she wants to go back now, she doesn't want to have to wait until she is struck by a tragedy so awful that her grief tears the world apart.

But when she stands to leave, to go god knows where, her knees buckle and her mind goes blank.

Time yawns. Dreams stretch and distort like melting wax. Muffled chatter breaks through the veil of unconsciousness, and then the smell of lavender, and then the touch of a hand to the back of her head.

"Sunny?"

It's Astrid's voice. Sunny opens her eyes and she's staring up at Astrid's round face, staring into those deep eyes.

"I'm so sorry, dear. I think we overwhelmed you."

"What happened?"

"You fainted. Only a few seconds ago," Celeste says. She hasn't moved from her chair and Sunny wonders if she knew this would happen, if she reacted so predictably that Celeste knew there was no need to move.

"I feel lightheaded."

"You do look a little grey. Can you sit up?"

She does, but she feels woozy and unsteady and she looks accusingly at the tea.

"It's a lot to take in," Astrid says. "A bit too much all at once." Her hand is on Sunny's back, rubbing in slow circles.

"A bit?" Sunny lets out a stranger laugh. "You basically just told me my fate is either suicide or to wait it out until I am sad enough that fate shoves me back where I came from. That doesn't make me feel particularly good. Why do you even have the well? Why don't you board it up?"

"The well has always been here," Celeste says. "It's protected land – a stipulation of living here is that the well is not to be touched as it dates back centuries. We cannot change it, just as we cannot change what has happened to you. But we can offer you support and understanding, which I imagine can be hard to find when you're going through a situation like yours."

"No shit," Sunny scoffs. She gets to her feet and leans against the chair when her knees wobble. "I think I need to go. Yeah. I'm going. Thank you for the tea and the answers, though I wish I hadn't asked. Have you thought about, I don't know, putting up a sign that says please don't make a wish because it just might come true and it won't be what you think it is and p.s. you might lose years of your life?"

Celeste just looks at her, her gaze cold again. "Most people ignore the well. Do you not think that such a sign would draw attention to it? Of course we've considered it. But it's a historical artefact. It has its own page in the Black Sands guidebook. There isn't much we can do, Sunny."

Sunny doesn't buy it, but she doesn't want to fight. She wants to get out of there and forget everything she's just heard. She wants to forget Margaret and Isabel and their tragic fates; she wants to cry until her lungs burst. She wants to go to the club with Fenfen and drink until today feels like a mirage.

"Sunny, I know you're upset and I understand why," Astrid says, "but we only want the best for you. Please don't include us in your anger at what has happened to you."

"I'm not angry at you," Sunny spits, because she's not. It's not their fault, even though she's sure they could at least cover the well. "I'm ... I'm..." Her anger flickers like a flame in the wind before it goes out. "I'm scared." She drops onto the chair again and this time the tears work their way past the lump in her throat.

Celeste's posture softens. She reaches across the gap and her bony hand is surprisingly warm. "The root of fear lies in the unknown, and there is nothing more unknown than the whims of the universe," she says, her voice light despite the gravity of her words, "but we are here for you if you ever need us, and it sounds to me like you have good friends."

Sniffling, Sunny nods and says, "I have wonderful friends."

"And the girlfriend? The one you wished for? What about her?"

"She's really nice," she says, her breath shuddering. "She could've kicked me to the curb when I told her what happened but she didn't. She's making the effort to help me."

"So make the effort to help yourself. You could be here for a long time. You could be here forever, so if you want to stay? You need to let the universe know it."

Sunny nods. She doesn't know if she wants to stay yet, and as much as it devastates her, she understands why this would all be too much for Margaret. It would be too much for a lot of people. At least she has a solid network around her. All she can do now is to root herself in this life. Make it her own.

*

possibly one of my favourite things about writing this book is how very very gay it is. there isn't a single straight character and i love that so much