43. December 6, 1920 Barnbow, England
The plush green carpet muffles Oliver’s footsteps as he walks down the hall, his hands shoved deep into his coat pockets. He fidgets with the quarter there, desperate for any luck he can get. He finds his room and listens at the door. Silence.
He knocks, waits, his heart pounding in his skull. He had been an idiot. Now, all he wants is a chance to tell Beatrix as much.
“Are you in there, Bea? Open the door, please.”
The stairs creak. Oliver makes a show of searching his pockets for the key he left on the nightstand inside the room.
Beatrix rounds the corner with a stack of folded towels. Her black dress falls to her ankles, and her hair is styled in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. Her eyes meet his, grow wide at the sight of him. She reaches for her face. The towels cascade to the floor. “You came back?”
Oliver’s stomach drops. Her ring sits on her left hand again. She must have gone to the munitions factory for her things. Alone. “Hi, Bea.”
She takes his hand and pulls him away from the door. “What are you doing here?”
Oliver can’t tell if she’s happy or angry or simply can’t believe he has the nerve to show his face again. She drops his hand and waits for him to explain himself.
“Listen, I’m sorry about what I said earlier. I shouldn’t have said I didn’t care. It was stupid. I was stupid.”
Beatrix stares at him, her mismatched eyes impossible to read.
She must have believed him then. Thought he meant what he said. “Come on, Bea, say something.”
She picks up a towel from the floor. Her hands are shaking. “You’re sorry?”
Oliver stoops to help her. “I am. Really, truly sorry. I fucked up.”
She doesn’t look like she believes him. “For what you said earlier?”
“I didn’t mean it, I swear.”
Beatrix takes the towels from him. “We need to talk.”
She leads him down the hall, pushes open a door at the end, and ushers him inside. The bedroom is smaller and sparser than the one they shared. It doesn’t even have a window. “You switched rooms?”
Beatrix drops her towels onto an oak washstand near the door. She crosses the room to the brass bed in the corner and sinks down onto it. She studies his face as if she has never seen him before in her life. “Oliver, you vanished from that other room four years ago.”
His heart skips a beat. “Four years?”
Beatrix nods. “To the day.”
He runs a hand through his hair. “No, that’s impossible. I returned to the same day, twelve hours after I left.”
“You must have made a mistake.” She reaches for a magazine on her bedside table and hands it to him.
He scans the title: Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event Described by A. Conan Doyle. Beatrix taps the corner of the cover. “It’s 1920.”
Oliver closes his eyes, tries to think through the dull throbbing in his skull, to remember Lucy’s too-bright tablet screen and the numbers he couldn’t focus on. Had it read 1920 instead of 1916? It must have.
He opens his eyes. Beatrix watches him, her brow lined with worry, even now.
Oliver shakes his head. “But you’re still here.”
“I work here,” she says. “Cleaning the rooms. The innkeeper’s wife felt sorry for me.
She let me borrow one of her daughter’s dresses so I could fetch my things from the factory.
Told me I could stay here and work for her if I needed a place to go.
You left so abruptly, I wasn’t sure you’d come back.
But if you did…” She looks quickly away.
Oliver’s heart sinks. “You waited for me?”
Beatrix won’t meet his gaze, all her attention on the ring she’s twisting around her finger. “I always wait for you.”
Her words hit him like a punch in the gut.
Four years. He’s left her for four years. “Bea, I am so sorry.” He wants to reach for her, wants to pull her into him and wrap his arms around her. He doesn’t. He’s not sure she wants him to.
“It’s fine,” she says.
“It’s not fine.”
She raises her eyes to meet his and her mask cracks. Something in Oliver does, too.
A tear rolls down her cheek. She brushes it away. “I replayed our fight over and over in my head.”
“So did I,” Oliver says. “I didn’t mean it, that I didn’t care. I shouldn’t have said it. And I’m not jealous of you. I wouldn’t want your life. I just wish I had more of mine, and I let it get the better of me.”
“I thought you’d wait a hundred years to come back,” Beatrix admits, her voice no more than a whisper. “If you came back at all.”
Oliver’s blood runs cold. “Why would you think that?”
“I told you I had survived for a hundred years without you. That I didn’t need you.”
He sinks down onto the bed next to her. “You thought I would leave you for a century out of spite?”
“I know you would never do anything so cruel,” she says. “I do. But every day you didn’t come, and every day I remembered what I said. It was terrible of me. I don’t even know why I said it. I deserved for you not to come back.” She drops her gaze to her ring again.
“Nobody deserves that,” Oliver says quietly.
Beatrix lifts her eyes to his, and he can see exactly how deeply he has wounded her.
His breath catches. “Bea, I had no right to look you up, and I had no right to tell you to leave London. I was—am—terrified of the idea of you being there when those bombs fall. I want to protect you. But it’s your life to live. However you choose.”
“Endlessly,” she agrees.
Oliver swallows. “Do you still want me in it?”
“I do,” she whispers, and the tightness in his chest eases.
He takes her hand in his. “Then I promise you, I will never leave you like that again. I will never leave you without a goodbye.”
“No goodbyes,” she insists.
“I’ll never leave without a plan to come back then.”
Her eyes search his. “A promise with me lasts a very long time, Oliver.”
“I swear it.”
When she smiles at him, it brightens the entire room. His entire world.
He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out his journal. He takes a folded slip of paper from it and offers it to Beatrix. “I came back because I needed to apologize. I needed to give you this.”
She takes the paper from him and unfolds it. Her eyes grow wide as her gaze darts across the page.
“If my math is right, she’s your great-granddaughter, times fourteen.” He counts down on his fingers. “Your great-great-great-great-great—”
Beatrix laughs. She grabs his hand, stops his counting. His heart skips at her touch, at that sound.
“I get it,” Beatrix says. “She’s my family.” Her voice breaks on the word. “Thank you.”
Those remarkable eyes find his. One brown, one blue, both impossibly old; sad and beautiful and deep enough to drown in. She leans closer, and he catches the delicate scent of flowers. Violets, maybe. His heart thuds against his ribs.
Her lips press against his cheek, soft and tentative and not at all how she kissed him in the Crystal Palace. He turns toward her. Her lips brush against his and time stops.
He leans in.