53. July 19, 1960 Paris, France
Beatrix takes a cautious shuffling step in the dark. “Now?”
Oliver’s hands don’t move from her eyes. “Not yet.”
“You are full of surprises, aren’t you?”
“Surprises are the best part of birthdays.” Oliver stops walking, and she stops, too. “Don’t peek,” he warns. He steps away, leaving her alone.
A door unlatches with a loud click. A warm breeze brushes against her skin, carrying the low thrum of city traffic.
“Now?”
Oliver covers her eyes again. “Three more steps.”
He counts softly in her ear. They step together.
“One…” The floor changes, the give of the soft carpet turning hard and hollow under her heels.
“Two…” The light brightens beneath her lids.
“Three…” Oliver’s hands drop away, and Beatrix opens her eyes.
She gasps. Paris stretches out below her as far as she can see. A beautiful, old city. Even the Eiffel Tower stands silhouetted against the cloudless sky in the not-so-far distance.
“Welcome to Paris, Bea.”
She turns away from the ornate balcony rail. Oliver grins and hands her a bubbling glass of champagne. A square pastel-pink box tied with a white ribbon sits on the wrought-iron table behind him.
Beatrix smirks at him. “Oliver Rhodes, are you trying to impress me?”
His eyes sparkle in the morning sun. “I’m trying to give you a birthday to remember.”
“You have.” She didn’t need a journey on the Night Ferry and champagne with a view of the Eiffel Tower for that. Today, she has him, and that is enough for her to remember this birthday forever.
He gestures to the box. “Open it.”
Beatrix pulls the ribbon away and slowly lifts the lid. A gasp escapes her. A small round cake frosted in white and edged with pastel roses sits inside, Happy Birthday Bea piped across the top in sunshine-yellow icing.
“I love it,” Beatrix says. “Thank you.”
“Cake for breakfast, or dessert after our dinner tonight?” Oliver asks.
Beatrix is tired of waiting. She wants to do everything with him, wants to do it all now. “Cake for breakfast.”
“Cake for breakfast it is.” He disappears inside their room and reappears on the balcony a moment later. “I thought nineteen boxes of candles might be excessive,” he says, tearing a single box open.
“You wouldn’t want to set the cake on fire,” Beatrix jokes. “Or the hotel.”
He pushes each candle into the frosting, pale pink and blue and yellow, twirled together with white. He lights them with a book of hotel matches.
“It’s perfect,” she says. Twenty-four flames dance and flicker in the imperceptible breeze. The year she’ll never reach.
Oliver stands behind her. He pulls her close and props his chin on her shoulder. “I apologize in advance.”
“For what?”
“For how I am about to absolutely butcher ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”
But Beatrix doesn’t mind the off-key rendition he half sings in her ear. She loves it all. “Now that was unforgettable,” she teases.
“I think you mean unforgivable.” He kisses her on the cheek and loosens his grip on her waist. “Make a wish. If you blow out all your candles at once, it will come true.”
“Really?” Beatrix raises an eyebrow at him.
Oliver shrugs. “You never know.”
She made a wish that came true before. Maybe she can do it again. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.
“Uh-oh, this is getting serious,” Oliver says.
Beatrix tries not to smile. She fails miserably. “Shush, you.”
The balcony falls quiet.
She can think of only one thing to wish for. One thing she wants more than she has ever wanted anything: a way to hold on to Oliver.
She could wish to stop time, wish to keep them together, frozen in this moment forever. She could wish for him to never leave her. Wish for him to have more time, too. But none of those feel right.
Beatrix has learned not to trifle with wishes—to be exacting with her phrasing, to choose her words carefully. If there is even a single grain of truth in what Oliver has said, a speck of old magic ignited in her candles, she will not take it for granted.
She breathes deep and wishes with her whole heart that she never loses him. She opens her eyes and blows out twenty-four golden flames, watches as their white smoke swirls away into the skies over Paris. She lets her heart hope.
Beatrix eyes Oliver skeptically as they walk past the welcoming shade of the trees at the paved plaza’s center, the afternoon sun warm on her back. “That cannot be true.”
He raises his right hand. “I swear. Time traveler’s honor.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.” In twenty-nine years, according to Oliver.
“You visited the Crystal Palace,” he says. “Why is a glass pyramid so hard to believe?”
“It’s not hard to believe,” Beatrix says.
The world has changed around her, sometimes in ways she never imagined possible, like airplanes and rockets and sending satellites into space.
“It’s just at odds with all this.” She gestures to the Louvre.
It is a beautiful, old, grand building rising four stories above her, surrounding her on three sides with walls of windows and arches and columns.
A former palace built of warm, cut stone that has seen as much history as she has.
“That’s what people said about the Eiffel Tower, and now look at it,” Oliver says. “Times change.”
“They never stop changing.”
“Wait until you see the giant Ferris wheel they build in London,” he says. “Right on the Thames.”
Beatrix hits him playfully on the arm. “Now I know you’re lying.”
Oliver can’t keep a straight face. He takes her hand and twines his fingers through hers. “Is it weird to visit a museum with you?”
“Why? Because I’m older than some of the exhibits?” She shakes her head. “I think it’s weirder for you to visit a museum. You could watch da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa instead of looking at it hanging on the wall with the rest of us.”
“I could,” Oliver concedes. He pulls her close. “But I can think of better things to do than watch paint dry. Even exceptionally famous paint.”
They tour the museum, hand in hand, exploring the galleries of paintings and sculptures and artifacts.
Beatrix finds comfort in the rooms, in the crowds of people from all over the world wandering through them.
It is proof the past existed, that it is valued, that it is remembered, even as the world evolves around her.
By the time they stroll through the gallery of neoclassical exhibits, she has lost all track of the day.
“ ‘Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss,’ ” Oliver reads from a black-and-white placard.
The sculpture stops Beatrix’s breath: love and desire and passion exquisitely captured in pristine white marble.
Cupid cradles Psyche in his arms as she reaches for him, his feathered wings spread wide above them.
She tips her head back, a moment away from kissing her immortal lover.
Beatrix can’t fathom how the artist carved so much life from stone.
“Do you know the story?” Beatrix asks.
Oliver shakes his head.
“Psyche fell in love with Cupid before she knew who he was,” she says. “Before she even saw him. He would only come to her in the dark, and he forbade her to look at him. He always left her chambers before the sun rose.”
“He’d only ever stay the night?” Oliver asks.
Beatrix nods. “She loved him. Thought she loved him. She doubted him, too. Soon, she was bearing his child, and yet she had never seen his face. She thought he must be a hideous monster. Why else would he hide from her? So, one night, after he fell asleep next to her, she looked. And she saw him.” Beatrix gestures to the sculpture of Cupid.
“Not a hideous monster, then,” Oliver says.
Beatrix shakes her head. “He woke and saw that she had betrayed his trust, so he left her. Psyche wandered the world and the Underworld, searching for him. She completed impossible task after impossible task, all the while despairing, believing that she would never succeed, would never find him.”
“Did she?”
“She fell into an endless sleep after failing a task in the Underworld. Cupid found her. He saved her. Married her. He even made her immortal, just like him.”
“And they lived happily ever after?” Oliver asks.
Beatrix nods, afraid if she speaks another word, her voice will betray her.
Oliver puts his arm around her and pulls her close. “Then why do you look so sad?”
“Because I am sad,” she whispers. So suddenly and deeply, it frightens her.
“Why?”
Because it is a beautiful sculpture and a beautiful story, built on a beautiful lie that still breaks her heart. Because she so desperately wants it to be true, even now. Especially now.
Amor vincit omnia. Love conquers all.
Because Oliver is wrong. It isn’t a happy ending. It’s an impossible one.
She steps away. Cool air fills the space where Oliver was, chills her skin where his touch was warming her a moment ago. “I’m sorry. I need some air.”
She turns on her heel and she leaves him—like he has left her countless times—standing alone in the crowd, watching her go.
Beatrix doesn’t stop until she is on the island of grass in front of the Louvre, among the trees. She sits against the widest trunk and breathes deep, searches for the scent of damp earth and rotting leaves. There is only city and stone and now.
Oliver slowly crosses the plaza, his hands shoved into his trouser pockets. He sits next to her on the grass—together, but not—watching the patrons come and go from the museum until Beatrix finds her voice.
She twists the ring on her hand. “You’re a time traveler. Do you ever wish you could go back and change something? Make a different choice?”
“All the time. That has nothing to do with being a time traveler. That’s just being human.”
“Would you change us?” she asks him.
Oliver sighs. “Something has to change, doesn’t it?”
Beatrix looks over at him.
“Honestly? Sometimes I wish I had met you years ago, in my time. I wouldn’t have to leave you. We could have more than twelve hours together. You wouldn’t have to wait for me.”
“That sounds nice,” Beatrix says.
“It does. But that Oliver wouldn’t be the same person whose pocket you picked at the Globe.”
“Like my Louvre isn’t your Louvre?” she asks.
“Not yet, anyway,” Oliver says.
“Sometimes I lie awake at night and imagine what my life would look like if I had left you standing on the Rialto Bridge,” Beatrix admits.
Oliver shifts next to her. “And?”
She has tried to imagine it so many nights.
After the Great Exhibition. After Barnbow.
After Anna. And each time, she has failed.
She can’t separate Oliver from her life.
The more she tries, the deeper the cold, awful truth settles into the pit of her stomach: He is hopelessly entangled with it.
With her. “If I hadn’t met you, I’d be a completely different person. ”
Oliver takes her face in his hands. “Don’t go back. When I’m gone. Don’t go back to living like before.”
Beatrix doesn’t want to think about a life without Oliver in it. She stands, out of his reach. “Let’s forget it, all right? Let’s go inside and forget about all of this.”
But Oliver won’t let it go. “Promise me you won’t be a ghost, Bea.”
She shakes her head. “You can’t ask me that.”
“Please.”
“I can’t,” she insists.
Oliver’s gaze turns dark. “Why not?”
“Because I’m not sure what losing you will do to me.
” Her words land like a blow. Oliver sags against the wide trunk.
“A ghost might be all that’s left of me for a very long time.
” Now that she has seen how the threads of her life are woven through with his, she is certain of it.
She turns away, blinking against the burning in her eyes.
“I’m sorry.” Oliver rises to his feet and catches her arm. “I’m sorry. I just—I don’t know if I’m supposed to stay or go or never see you again.”
“I don’t know, either,” Beatrix whispers. Because she is never happier than when she is with him. Because he puts another crack in her heart every time he leaves. Because they can never have their happily ever after.
Oliver’s shoulders slump. “I want to make you happy, Bea. Just tell me how.”
He’ll leave if she tells him to, leave her to return to a life before she met him. But she wasn’t happy before Oliver, either. If she had been, she wouldn’t have imagined leaving him on the Rialto Bridge. She would have done it.
But she didn’t. That night, she chose him, chose to live as more than a ghost. Chose to try, at least. And she has tried. For centuries, she’s tried.
Has it been worth it, watching him go, each time harder than the last? Has it been worth missing him—aching for him, for years—only to have him for hours? Have those briefest moments of joy been worth the decades of heartache?
She looks up at Oliver, watching her with dark eyes, waiting for her answer.
Just tell me how.
He can’t.
Her eyes well with tears, and Oliver’s face crumples before she can utter a word. But the goodbye catches in her throat, the unspoken You should go choking her. She can’t say the words. She can’t let him go. She can’t. She can’t. She can’t.
Because Oliver makes her happy.
Because that brief happiness makes the long, lonely wait bearable.
Because she loves him.
Beatrix swallows her goodbye. “Twelve hours at a time.”
Oliver’s face cracks with relief. He searches her mismatched gaze. “Are you sure?”
Beatrix twines her fingers through his. “We have here and we have now.” It is the most she can ever promise him, all that he can ever give her. “And that’s enough.”
Oliver presses a gentle kiss to her forehead. “It’s more than enough.”