In this talk, we focus on the then-present puzzle, namely the observation that the present tense is incompatible with the temporal adverbial ‘then’ (Ogihara & Sharvit 2012; Vostrikova 2018; Tsilia 2021). This is not only the case in root clauses when ‘then’ picks out a time overlapping with the speech time (e.g. *John is then not feeling well), but even more interestingly in embedded clauses too when the present tense is shifted (e.g. In Greek: Yanis thought that Mary is pregnant (*then)). The phenomenon is cross-linguistically robust, observed so far in Russian, Modern Hebrew, Modern Greek and Japanese, all languages where the shifted present does not have to co-occur with the time of the utterance but can simply overlap with the time of the attitude. We further investigate the behaviour of ‘then’ in past-under-past sentences, when we have an embedded past tense instead of a shifted present. It turns out that ‘then’ is acceptable with an embedded past, even when the latter is deleted and should in principle give rise to the same truth conditions are a shifted/relative present. Modern Greek is a case in point, since being a mixed tense language, it has both a shifted present and a deleted past, and yet ‘then’ is only compatible with the latter. Where does this incompatibility come from? We propose an analysis in which (i) non-deleted, interpreted tenses (present or past) as well as ‘then’ are sensitive to the local perspective, and (ii) deleted/zero tenses are non-perspectival bound variables. We account for the puzzle thanks to the perspectival conditions of present and ‘then’, which prevent them from designating overlapping times. The contrast between shifted/relative present and deleted past is captured by their perspectival sensitivity and non-sensitivity respectively. In other words, we show that a shifted present is not fully identical to a deleted past, since the former is perspective sensitive. Time permitting, we will discuss some immediate challenges to this account as well as some answers to those.