57. August 6, 1965 Lancaut, England
Beatrix trails her hand along the gravestones, worn smooth by time. The names are impossible to read now, but she knows which one is hers.
Oliver follows her a few paces away. A warm breeze ruffles his hair.
He takes in the ancient forest surrounding them, the river cutting through the limestone cliffs below them, and what is left of St. James’s ahead of them.
Four moss-covered stone walls, two long, two peaked.
No door. No windows. No roof. A hollow shell of what it used to be.
The low stone wall valiantly defends the fallen sanctuary from the encroaching forest. Beatrix is glad to see it—to see something of Lancaut still standing—but her heart knows the truth. A fight against time is one it cannot win.
She stops in front of a lichen-dusted headstone, askew in the shifted earth.
Oliver studies the grave over her shoulder. “Is this…?”
“Mine,” she confirms. “And William’s.” She can imagine the words he had carved there, swears she can still see them if she looks hard enough.
Amor vincit omnia. Love conquers all.
William truly believed those words, even after she was gone. He thought—hoped—that in death they would be together again. Except they can’t be. Because she is still here.
She had tried to forget William, to bury the memories of the man she loved—but they wouldn’t let her go. So she spent her days cursing his name and those two tiny words that haunted her.
Get out.
She had hoped William tried to forget her, too; that he tried as desperately as she did to bury the memory of their love, to twist it into something that wouldn’t tear him open every time he thought of her.
She hoped he failed.
She hoped every time he looked at their daughter, he thought of her, of that night, of those words. She hoped she haunted him for the rest of his short days.
Only now, standing in front of their time-worn grave, does Beatrix understand. Cold seeps through her, sinks into her guts like a stone. She did.
“He was a good man,” she whispers. A good man who didn’t deserve her wrath.
Who protected their daughter, who never married again, who spent the rest of his life trapped in the moment that changed its path.
She hopes he learned to live with the regret, hopes he found some peace from those two tiny words that must have haunted him, too.
Beatrix lays a gentle kiss on top of the stone, cool and unyielding against her lips.
“It was an impossible choice,” she says, swallowing against the lump rising in her throat.
She can’t imagine the agony he must have been in, the strength it took to sacrifice one love to save another.
“I would have done the same,” she whispers.
She places a small bouquet of wildflowers in the shadow of their headstone. She picked them as she walked the path to the church with Oliver. When he offered to help her gather them, she instructed him to keep the stems long.
Beatrix takes a shuddering breath. Oliver squeezes her hand. She turns to the grave across from her own. “My daughter,” she tells him. There is nothing of her name left on her stone, either.
Oliver pulls her close as she blinks against the tears burning her eyes. “Theo talks to our parents when we visit the cemetery,” he says gently.
“It’s just a stone.” Her heart breaks a little at her words. All that is left of her baby girl.
He kisses her on the temple. “I don’t think it matters.” He tells her to take her time and wanders back toward the church.
Beatrix looks out over the remains of the cemetery. All of Lancaut, long dead, long buried, long gone. Except for her. She settles on the grass and faces her daughter’s grave. “Where to start?” she asks. She feels a bit silly.
A memory surfaces. A New Year’s Eve and the melancholy pull of “Auld Lang Syne.” Lord Sutton had looked at her with those tormented eyes and asked her the same question.
Beatrix holds two of her wildflowers in a cross, the heads nearly touching. She wraps one stem around the other, up, over, and through.
She starts at the beginning.
Dusk settles over the ruins of Lancaut and the heat of August fades with the daylight. Beatrix and Oliver meander back to the car, fingers laced together, content in each other’s silence.
Beatrix opens the trunk. She unpacks a red plaid picnic blanket and a square wicker basket.
“What’s all this?” Oliver asks.
“I meant what I said, five years ago,” she says. “It felt selfish to ask you to come back to Lancaut for me.”
“Bea—” Oliver starts, but she continues.
“I knew I wouldn’t change your mind, so I thought I’d make it something for you, too.” She hands him the blanket. “I seem to recall the word ‘stargazing’ somewhere in that notebook of yours.”
Oliver grins. “And the basket?”
She sighs dramatically. “Honestly, how did you not already have ‘moonlight picnic’ on your list?”
He lays a hand over his heart. “A tragic oversight.”
“Then let’s fix it, shall we?” She pecks him on the cheek and leads the way down the hill to an open field.
The stars have changed over the centuries, fading from Beatrix’s view with every passing decade, as if they have grown old and weary alongside her. On the darkest nights, she has feared she would outlive them, too. But not here. The stars still shine the same over Lancaut.
She lies under them with Oliver for hours, curled into him on her picnic blanket, listening to the steady rhythm of his heart.
“What do you think happens when you die?” she asks. “To your soul, I mean.”
Oliver chuckles softly. It rumbles through his chest.
“Is that funny to you?”
“I mean, kind of,” he says. “In that morbid if I think about this too long, it’s horrifying sort of way, all things considered.”
She laughs, too. “I suppose that’s true.”
“I was actually thinking about Theo. I asked him the same thing, maybe three months after our parents died.” He shakes his head. “I can still picture the sheer terror in his eyes.”
“Because he didn’t know what to tell you?” Beatrix asks.
“Or because he didn’t want to think about it,” Oliver says. “Me dying, I mean. I think he must have had the Aevum report by then. He told me our parents were at peace and not to worry about it.”
“And what do you think now?” Beatrix asks.
Oliver shrugs. “I like to think it’s like going home.”
“I used to think heaven was like Lancaut, but only the best parts,” Beatrix says. “Just endless perfection.”
“And now?” Oliver asks.
“Maybe it’s like daydreaming,” she says. “But instead of your mind wandering, it’s your soul.”
“I like that idea,” Oliver says. “It can be anything you want it to be.”
“It can be everything.”
It can be William, sitting by a fire in a cottage on the edge of the woods with a sleeping baby girl in his arms. It can be the Whispering Gallery high in the dome at St. Paul’s—golden sun streaming through the windows—every lost person who has ever meant anything to her gathered together to welcome her home.
It can be something different, something beautiful, something new.
But it can never be hers.
“My mom used to say the stars were souls, looking down at you from heaven,” Oliver says. “The night after the accident, I remember wishing I had counted them. I wanted to know if she was right, if there were two more stars in the sky. If they were up there, looking out for me and Theo.”
“I think my mother would have liked the idea of more eyes watching me,” Beatrix says. “Anything to keep me out of trouble.”
“My mom would have liked you,” he says. “Especially the trouble.” He pulls her close and kisses her on the cheek. “I wish you had a chance to meet her.”
She props her chin on his chest. “I do.”
“Oh,” Oliver says. The idea stuns him speechless.
She smirks at him. “Shall we meet your mum and dad in, say, two hundred years?”
Oliver shakes his head. “Lucy would never approve that.”
“So don’t tell Lucy,” Beatrix says. “Didn’t your parents ever go to a historical event you could sneak into?”
“Yes!” Oliver sits up abruptly, more energized than she’s seen him all day. “They took Theo to DC for the quadricentennial. It was huge.”
Beatrix sits up, too. “The what?”
“The four hundredth anniversary of America’s independence,” Oliver says. “He still remembers the fireworks.”
“That sounds like a perfect excursion to me,” she says.
His face falls and his sudden enthusiasm drains away.
“What’s the matter?”
Oliver runs his hand through his hair. “I’d love to visit my parents with you. But I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
Cold ebbs through her. “Why not?”
His shining eyes find hers in the dark. “I tried to come back a week ago. I was denied.”
Her guts twist. “Denied? What does that mean?”
“It means the time machine said I was too unstable for travel.”
Even in the dark, Beatrix can see the shadow that flits across his gaze. “Are you all right?”
“I’m dying,” he says gently.
“But you came back.” Her heart thunders in her chest. He is here, now, with her.
“I went home and rested for the week, and this time, the chamber let me travel. I was lucky. Next time, I might not be.” He looks her in the eyes. Tonight, his are stormy and dark, more gray than blue. “There’s a real chance every visit could be my last. Even this one.”
The words land like a punch to her gut, knocking the air from her lungs. “You want to say goodbye?”
“It’s the last thing I want,” he says. “But I think it’s time we do.”
“But you could come back again,” Beatrix says, her mind reeling. He could rest more, take more time off between visits. “It could still work.”
“It might,” Oliver says. “But it might not. I don’t have a lot of time left.”
She swallows against the lump rising in her throat. “How long?”
“Do you really want to know?” He won’t look at her.
Her heart plummets. This is it. The end.
She shakes her head and her vision blurs. She doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to waste a single moment with Oliver counting down to his last.
A tear rolls down her cheek. He wipes it away with his thumb. “I don’t want to leave you waiting.”
“I’m always waiting,” she whispers.
“Not like this.” Not with no end in sight. Not with the treacherous hope she will see him again hanging over her for an eternity. “I can’t do that to you, Bea.”
So he would leave her in Lancaut instead.
Her stomach drops and her heart races a frantic rhythm. She’s too hot, and the thoughts buzzing through her head are too loud. She might just be sick.
Oliver takes her face in his hands, his touch rough and cool against her skin. “I’m sorry.”
“Will you try to come back?” she asks.
“With everything in me.”
And there it is. A pinprick of hope, like one of those bright stars shining in the heavens above her, keeping the darkness at bay.
She pulls away, lets Oliver’s hands fall from her. “Then I’m not saying goodbye to you.”
“Bea—”
She shakes her head, stopping him. “But if it doesn’t work—if you can’t make it back—will you do something for me?”
“Anything.”
She takes his hand and squeezes it. “Find me. In your time.”
Oliver’s eyes grow wide. “That’s not for another—”
“Two hundred and thirty-seven years.”
He tips his forehead against hers. “I can’t do that to you, Bea. I can’t.”
“Please,” she begs. “I don’t care how long it is.”
“I do.” He shakes his head. “It’s longer than when I left you before the Frost Fair. More than twice as long. I can’t leave you alone like that.”
“The time will pass anyway,” Beatrix pleads. “I will be alone anyway.”
“Don’t you see?” His eyes shine in the starlight. “You don’t have to be alone. You don’t have to wait for me.”
“Yes, I do.”
Oliver runs a hand through his hair. “Think about all you could do. You could live dozens of different lives. Go on hundreds of adventures. Make thousands of new memories.”
“I don’t want them!” she cries. Tears spill down her cheeks. She swipes them angrily away. “What if I find you?” she says. “I’ll go to Boston before you get sick, before you go to the Globe.” She could be with him. They could have years together.
“Don’t you dare,” he says. His voice is harsh, strained to breaking. Like he’s holding back tears.
“Why not?”
“Because you could change it,” Oliver says. “Change us. And I don’t want to lose a single moment with you.”
“We could make new memories,” she pleads. “Share new moments.”
Oliver takes her face in his hands again. “Promise me you won’t.”
She’s never seen him so scared.
“Please, Bea.”
“All right,” she says. “I won’t. I promise.”
Oliver pulls her close. She wants to sink into him.
“I swore I would never leave you without a goodbye. But I almost did. I was so afraid I would never get that chance. I won’t make that mistake again.”
“And I told you, no goodbyes.”
“I know.” Oliver reaches inside his jacket and pulls out a sealed rectangular envelope. “I will do everything I can to get back to you. But if I can’t, then I want—I need you to take this. You don’t have to open it until you’re ready.”
She takes the plain white envelope from him, certain she’ll never be ready to face what’s inside.
His brow furrows. “Are you sure you don’t want to say goodbye?”
“I’m sure.” Sure she can’t let him go, even as he is about to be taken from her. She doesn’t even want to think about it. She tilts her chin and kisses him, desperate to remember his touch, his taste; to hold on to every piece of him she can.
Oliver shudders and pulls away. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I have to go.”
Her stomach twists. According to his journal, it will be four years before his next visit. “I’ll see you again,” she says. A promise she hopes she can keep.
“I’ll see you again,” Oliver says. He’s gone before she can blink.
Beatrix pulls the picnic blanket from the ground and shakes out the dried grass and crushed oak leaves. Four years is practically nothing to her. But she knows these four years will feel as long as 237.
Longer.
Because it will be four agonizing years before she knows if this was a goodbye after all.