“I feel for your situation. My boyfriend is one of the leprechauns. He told me that they’ve had trouble with ladies wanting to eat them too. I’ll take you to meet him, and he’ll show you their secret little town. Then you can live in safety with all of them,” said the friendly neighbour.

So Murray joined the leprechauns, vicariously pleased that one of them was enjoying the safe unadulterated romantic affections of a full sized woman he loved. From the safety of Leprechaun Town, Murray thought every day of his original first timeline adventure with 37-39 year old Trudi in giant land, of his second timeline romance with 24 year old Trudi in one of the villages, and finally of his third timeline escape from her throat and subsequent avoidance of recapture on the last day. His infatuation with her never faded, but nor did his awareness of the extreme danger of ever being seen by her again. However, he knew he only had less than two days of her being in Ireland, and he desperately wanted to talk to her again. When her friendly neighbour came to meet her leprechaun boyfriend, he went with the leprechaun and asked if he could use her telephone to call Trudi again.

“You’ve still got it really bad for her, haven’t you?” said the neighbour, “I guess it’s alright, since she thinks it wasn’t my house you called from. You can tell her you’re far away by now, perhaps even in the next village. I’ll leave you with the phone while we’re ... upstairs.”

The neighbour and the leprechaun went off to enjoy some intersize canoodling, while Murray made the call.

“I didn’t expect to hear from you again,” said Trudi, “I don’t know how you got away, but I suppose I should congratulate you on your ingenuity. Did you manage to time travel again? No, of course you wouldn’t have. If you had, I wouldn’t remember any of this.”

“Maybe I decided to pick a house with the owner still in it for the day, and got their permission to use the phone,” said Murray, convinced that a hypothetical untruth was morally permissible under the circumstances, “It was only you who assumed that the owner of the house I was calling from would be out for the day.”

“You’re not going to tell me any more than that, are you? I’ll assume that somebody has taken you in permanently. Is it a woman?” asked Trudi.

“Yes,” said Murray, hoping that she wouldn’t feel any unjustified jealousy.

He considered it astonishing to know how much things like that still mattered to him.

“Are you dating her now?” asked Trudi.

“No,” said Murray.

“Do you want to?” asked Trudi.

“I don’t know. She has a boyfriend, which makes it rather pointless to think about it. Even if I did, it wouldn’t be nearly as much as I wish I could have dated you in an ongoing way instead of you wanting to eat me. Hey, if I could keep up the time travelling indefinitely, I could even let you eat me over and over again, and then make short trips to escape from your stomach afterwards,” said Murray.