Every life has an arrow of time. It starts at the beginning, and runs to the end.

But not for Amy Gallagher. As an astrophysicist, Amy has a different conception of time. And now, with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, she is poised to reassemble the events of the past by studying light from the first known stars. In much the same way, 22 LIGHT YEARS TO YOU redshifts Amy’s own life, reversing the arrow of time from the year 2022 to the night she first met her husband, Greg, in October 2000.

Following the chain of Octobers past, we see how Amy’s transgendered teen both is, and isn’t, the person he was as a child. How the love Amy feels for her second husband is but a dim reflection of the passion she knew with Greg, who fell—or jumped—to his death in 2015. How Amy’s best friend, Dee, who grew up Black in the same white-bread, Appalachian foothills that Amy did, has a very different story to tell about the two women’s friendship—and about the country unraveling around them.

Most lives carry an inflection point: a Big Bang moment separating before from after. The farther we drift from that seismic event, the harder it is to imagine an alternative. But what Amy comes to understand is that fate is a story we tell ourselves to cover for the mistakes of the past. And that love is a force beyond all reason—a special relativity that binds and shapes.