41. July 2, 2202 Boston, Massachusetts
If there is such a thing as perfect timing, then does imperfect timing exist, too? It must, because that is what Oliver has—flawed, inexact timing. How else do you vanish during the most important argument of your life?
Oliver lies on his back, stretched the length of his faded couch.
He thought cleaning his apartment would take his mind off it—off her—but he’d managed less than an hour before a dizzy spell hit.
He flips through the pages of his journal until he reaches the ones that are empty except for an inked heading.
Maybe he should tear them out, plan something else. Something new.
Like any of it matters.
Maybe she was right. Maybe it is the splinter of truth in her words that has gotten under his skin. Is he wasting his time?
Oliver sits up and tosses his journal onto his coffee table, already littered with books and papers.
He scrubs his hands over his face. I don’t care.
The words ring through his pounding head, over and over.
Of all the stupid things to say, why had he said that?
He regretted it as soon as the words were past his lips, as soon as Beatrix flinched.
But he couldn’t take them back, even if he hadn’t meant them.
The truth is he does care. He cares too much.
Like any of it matters.
Oliver jumps at the sound of a sharp knock on his door. He puts his glasses on and crosses his living room, dodging vague piles and half-packed boxes. He pulls open the door.
“Surprise!” Zoe exclaims from the hall.
Behind her, Luke shrugs, as if he’s not sure how he got dragged along. Which might be believable if he hadn’t moved to Brooklyn last month.
“What are you guys doing here?” Oliver asks.
Zoe gives him a one-armed hug and pushes past him into the apartment, clutching a bag of groceries to her chest. Her bubblegum-pink hair is piled on top of her head in a messy bun, and a two-sizes-too-big alumni T-shirt hangs off one shoulder, almost covering her cutoff denim shorts.
Luke pulls him into a hug. “Do we need a reason?”
Oliver waves him inside. “No, I just—I thought you’d be busy with moving and new jobs and stuff.” New lives.
“He was busy,” Zoe says pointedly. She nudges a pile of clutter out of the way and drops her grocery bag onto the counter.
Luke blushes a shade of pink Oliver wouldn’t have believed if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. “Doing what?”
“Max and I eloped.” He pulls his left hand from the pocket of his jeans. A plain gold band shines on his ring finger. “We thought, what the hell, you know? No time like the present. We went to city hall last week.”
“Congratulations, man. I’m happy for you,” Oliver says. And he is. So why does he feel so… sad?
Zoe surveys the apartment, her hands on her hips. “Should we order takeout? I don’t think I can find your kitchen to cook.”
“Sorry, I was… cleaning?” Oliver says it like a question, the gap between what he was trying to accomplish and what he has managed to achieve too wide for logic to leap.
His apartment has never been pristine, not like Theo’s house. It has always been lived in. Now, it looks like a tornado has torn through his living room and kitchen. His bedroom is no better, but at least that door is closed.
“I think you’re doing it wrong,” Luke says. “This is the opposite of cleaning.”
“It’s kind of overwhelming,” Oliver admits.
He has spent a lot of time thinking about closure—lying in his bed, surrounded by the fallout of his too-short life—when sleep won’t come. What he can live with and what he can’t, and what he will regret leaving unfinished.
He has decided to tuck away a few of his things for Theo and Zoe and Luke to have when he is gone, and to write each of them a letter.
The rest he will get rid of, spare his brother the pain of sifting through the memories, trying to guess what might be the thing he values in a year or ten or fifty.
But sorting through every scrap of paper in his apartment, every book, every photo, every cheap vacation souvenir and silly coffee mug and old birthday gift—and, and, and—has proven harder than he thought.
It is admitting that he is going to die.
More than that. It is accepting it. And even though he knows it is coming, knows he can’t change it—that it is completely and utterly out of his control—accepting it is something he can’t do. Not yet.
He has never realized before how everything is a piece of the past, how everything can hold a fragment of a memory or a piece of a story. How it all seems so fucking important when you are about to lose it.
He can’t put the things back, can’t pretend he’ll need them in six months.
Three.
Not even.
He can’t let them go, either. So they stay, the unwanted and wanted things, stuck between a past that mattered and a future that doesn’t. Like him.
Zoe’s gaze softens as it sweeps over the chaos. “Do you need our help, Oliver?”
He braces himself for that look of pity, the one that dulls the shine in her warm brown eyes, like a light going out. It’s not there. Did he imagine it, twist it in his grief? Maybe it has always been what is there now. What is mirrored in Luke’s eyes, too. Love.
“Yeah,” he says, his voice strained. “Yeah, I think I do.”
Luke pulls a lime out of the grocery bag. He tosses it between his hands. “So, drinks, dinner, and death cleaning?”
Oliver laughs. “In that order, please.” He hasn’t eaten all day, and nothing that compares with Zoe’s cooking in ages.
Not since the night before graduation, when she cooked them one last meal before they helped her pack her pots and pans and life away into neatly labeled cardboard boxes destined for the other side of the country.
Zoe dices an onion—for what, Oliver doesn’t know. She refuses to reveal the night’s recipe. He guides the conversation away from himself. For a little while, at least, his friends oblige.
Luke cuts the lime into wedges for their gin and tonics. Oliver shifts the clutter from the counter to the floor and asks him about the elopement. Luke tells him they are planning on taking a honeymoon in the fall. London, maybe. They haven’t decided.
Would Beatrix still be in London? Riding on the tube, reading a book on the way to an office job in the heart of the city?
Or teaching, making history come alive for her students?
They’d all roll their eyes and joke, “Ms. Lancourt thinks she’s been there.
” Or maybe she’s at St. Paul’s, giving guided tours to travelers, telling them all about the St. Paul’s that no longer stands but that she will always remember.
He doesn’t realize his mouth has tilted into a smile until Zoe asks, “What are you grinning about?”
Oliver ducks his head. “I was thinking Luke and Max should visit St. Paul’s if they honeymoon in London. Fantastic architecture.”
Zoe raises an eyebrow. “Fantastic?”
Luke hands him a tall gin and tonic and Oliver gladly takes it. But one sip and he’s back at the Frost Fair, back in that tent on the ice, back in that room at the inn thinking, What if I could stay?
He dreams about it sometimes, awake and asleep. About being with her, about finding her now. But the last time he saw her was 286 years ago. He could never leave her waiting that long.
“You all right?” Luke asks, setting a plate in front of him.
“Yeah,” Oliver says. “Sorry, just tired.”
He gathers the utensils from the drawer and tries to ignore the fact that Luke is watching him out of the corner of his eye. He asks Zoe about her new lab and new apartment in California. She tells him she’s thinking about taking up surfing.
“What about you? Anything you want to share with the class?” Zoe points her chef’s knife at him. It makes the question sound vaguely threatening.
“No.” Oliver slides onto the stool next to Luke at the counter.
Luke leans in and whispers, too loudly, “She knows. Don’t deny it.”
Zoe has an uncanny ability to read people. She joked that if her career in bioengineering failed, she could always pretend to be psychic. But even if she can read something in Oliver’s demeanor, there is no way she knows anything. He hasn’t told a soul about Beatrix.
She scrutinizes Oliver’s face.
He straightens on his stool. “What? There’s nothing to deny.”
Zoe leans against the counter. She reaches across it to Oliver. “Hand.”
Oliver rolls his eyes but offers her his left hand. She grips his wrist, firm but not tight.
“She’s like a human lie detector,” Luke mutters.
“Shh!” Zoe searches Oliver’s eyes, as if she can read all his secrets there. She stares for so long, he wonders if maybe she can.
He forces a laugh. “Getting anything, Madame Zoe?”
Her grip tightens. “You’ve met someone.”
His eyes snap to hers. Shit.
She releases his wrist and slaps the counter with her open palm. “I knew it!”
Luke shakes his head. “Told you not to deny it.”
“Do I know her? Who is she?” Zoe demands.
“No. She’s no one. It’s… not a thing.”
“You’re blushing like it’s a thing,” Luke says.
“It’s not a thing anymore,” Oliver clarifies. “We had a fight. I’m pretty sure it’s over.” Whatever it was. He slides off his stool, suddenly unable to sit still. He tries to pace around his living room. He’s blocked at every turn.
“Pretty sure?” Luke asks, swiveling his stool to follow Oliver with his skeptical gaze.
“I haven’t seen her since. I thought about apologizing, but then I thought maybe I should let her go, considering…” He sinks down onto his couch with a groan.
“Does she know?” Zoe asks gently.
Oliver squeezes his eyes shut. “That I’m dying?”
“That you’re in love with her.”
His eyes fly open. Zoe is already watching him. “I’m not—” He glances at Luke, smirking at him from his barstool. “I don’t—I can’t love her.” The rest of it doesn’t matter.
“Oh no, you’re not doing that.” Zoe jabs her wooden spoon in his direction.
“Doing what?”
“Being you.”
Oliver throws his hands up. “Who else am I supposed to be?”
“You can’t justify your way out of love because you’re afraid of it,” Zoe says. “This is your heart we’re talking about. You either love her or you don’t.”
“I’m not afraid of it,” Oliver says.
Luke and Zoe exchange a look that tells him two things at once: They’ve theorized about his sad excuse for a love life before, and they think he’s full of shit.
He opens his mouth to protest but closes it without a word. He has fallen for a woman he can keep at a distance, who will always be separate from the rest of his life. A woman he can never lose, because he can never have her.
Luke sits next to him on the couch. “If you love her, no amount of your usual mental gymnastics will change it. You’ll just know.”
Oliver rests his elbows on his knees and cradles his throbbing head in his hands.
He knows. Knew it the moment she kissed him, when her lips met his and it stopped his heart and his breath and time, took everything in him to pull away from her.
Knew it, when the soft lilt of her voice traveled across the stone of St. Paul’s and into his dreams. Knew it, when he looked into her mismatched eyes and told her he was a fool. Because he was. Is.
He lets his head fall back against the couch, defeated. “What kind of asshole falls in love when they’re dying?”
Luke grins.
“I love her,” Oliver admits. “But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything.”
“Of course it matters,” Luke says.
“I don’t want to hurt her.” But he already has, hasn’t he? His guts twist.
Zoe sinks onto the couch beside him. “Then you have to talk to her. Even if it’s only to say goodbye.”
She’s right. He can’t leave Beatrix like that, can’t let it end this way. A goodbye is the least he owes her.
Zoe squeezes his hand. “You’re going to break her heart either way.”
“I know.” And he hates it.