Road? I’m not sure that’s the right word. It was the step that wasn’t taken that caused it all. The road would have followed on I suppose, the road not taken. But it was the first step that threw him, and sent him spinning off course into the path of the rest of his life.

Could you do that? Could you look back over the years? Over, what, nearly forty years it must be now. Could you look back like that, and find one step, one step that you took or didn’t take, that changed everything?

Mark made a pact with the devil. He was getting old by then, a little confused perhaps. He was sitting up in bed, with Jane beside him at last after all those years. She was sleeping peacefully. He was propped up against the bed head, relaxed, full, letting his mind drift back over the years. I was enjoying his happiness. It’s happy endings I always aim for. I thought maybe this would be a good time to take him, but I was enjoying his moment so much that I thought, let him have it a little longer. I know how long he’s waited for it.
I closed my eyes.
That must have been when the thought popped into his head, that if he could just take back that one day, when he’d walked away from her all those years before, and do it differently, they could have been enjoying this togetherness for all that time. Not even the whole day, not even an hour of it: if he could just take back that single minute.
Of course Old Nick is always on the look out for that sort of thing, and he was there in a flash. A single minute was no problem. My eyes were open again by then, I can tell you, but I’m bound by that free-will thing, just as much as you are. Isn’t there a catch? Mark asked him.
That reminds me of the one about the accountant. It’s going round the cherubim at the moment. Old Nick offers an accountant all the money he’d ever dreamed of in return for his soul. That was a lot of money let me tell you. I’d seen those dreams. Well, the accountant thinks about it for a while, and then says. I get the money. You get the soul, right? Yup, says Old Nick. The accountant looks suspicious. What’s the catch? He asks.
Well, the deal was done in a moment, and there he was, back again, forty odd years earlier on, and she’d just offered him the cup of coffee. I thought maybe he’d do the same again, turn away and start out on that long rocky road to love I’d set for him. He was on for a hot date after all. Most people do do the same, being the same people.
But he didn’t. Thanks, he said, and in he went, and by then the minute was up, and he was back in bed, forty odd years on.
Of course, it wasn’t the same bed. It wasn’t even the same house. And Jane wasn’t beside him. In fact, he’d forgotten all about Jane. She’d just been the first, a disappointing first it must be said, of a whole string of one-night stands. He hadn’t thought about her for forty odd years, and there hadn’t been any one night stands for more than twenty.
He was sitting up in bed, propped against the wall, wondering, as he always did about this time in the morning, if it was worth getting up at all. I could have taken him then, but I always aim for happy endings, and so I thought I’d leave it just a little longer, in case he was redeemed.

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