65. September 17, 2202 Cambridge, Massachusetts
Time is still a strange companion.
The closer Beatrix gets to the day Oliver promised to meet her, the slower it passes, each week dragging, each day crawling, every hour sticking—like something out of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—until she is sure it must be broken entirely.
She has thought about finding Oliver early, just to make it stop.
But it is a foolish idea, fueled by her impatience.
She wants to see him again, is desperate for every extra moment she can get with him.
But not desperate enough to risk everything they have already shared, to break the vow she swore to him in Lancaut. So, she waits.
A docent unlocks the door and ushers Beatrix inside, out of the gloomy Boston morning that reminds her of London. She purchases her ticket and follows the sign pointing the way to the Glass Flowers exhibit.
She steps into the gallery and gasps. Oliver Rhodes is still trying to impress her.
Rows of glass display cases line the walls.
Others stand freely in the center of the bright gallery, edged in warm, dark wood.
They are all filled with flowers, precisely positioned on white backgrounds, each with a tag noting its scientific details.
Flowers of every shape, every size, every color—some newly opened, some nearly spent—from all over the world.
Each one vibrant and delicate and breathtakingly beautiful.
Each one sculpted from glass centuries ago.
“They look so lifelike, don’t they?” A docent pauses as she strolls past the case to admire a branch of autumn-red maple leaves. “Every day someone comes in here and thinks they’re real.”
But the flowers are real. They’re just…
Undying.
The docent retreats, and Beatrix meanders through the exhibit, looking dutifully into each brightly lit case as her stomach twists itself into knots and her heart threatens to pound out of her chest. Waiting. Hoping.
The flowers aren’t a comfort. They aren’t even a distraction as she waits for Oliver and what she knows—inevitably—comes next.
Goodbye.
Because the flowers are frozen in time and fragile, glass kept behind glass. Because they remind her too much of her heart, of what it has become these last two centuries, waiting for Oliver. Waiting to shatter.
She doesn’t notice she is crying until a young woman with bubblegum-pink hair asks her if she is all right.
“Fine, thanks.” She brushes the evidence quickly away and looks up at the woman with a forced smile, as if that will prove it.
The woman’s eyes meet hers and go wide. “Are you Beatrix?”
“How do you—”
“Oliver.”
Her heartbeat falters. “You know Oliver?” She is stating the obvious, but it is safer to ask a question she knows the answer to than to ask the one sending her heart into her guts: Why isn’t he here?
The woman stares at Beatrix, her mouth slightly open, her wide brown eyes darting over her. She shakes her head. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting you to be real—here—I mean,” the woman says quickly. “I wasn’t expecting you to really be here.” She forces a smile. “I’m his friend Zoe.”
“Is Oliver—” Beatrix swallows the lump rising in her throat. “Is he all right?” He has to be all right. She still has time. He still has time.
Zoe hesitates. “He wasn’t up to coming, so he asked me to meet you. He said to give you this.” She offers Beatrix a folded piece of paper.
She takes it with a trembling hand and opens it. It’s his handwriting, but not so neat as his journal pages, unsteady words scrawled across hospital stationery.
Bea—
I hope you like the flowers as much as you liked the stained glass at the Great Exhibition.
I am so sorry I’m not here to see it with you.
I told you I would try to get back to you with everything in me.
Turns out everything in me isn’t enough anymore.
It’s torture knowing where you are, knowing you’re so close, but I still can’t reach you.
I asked Zoe to bring you to the house if you want to see me, but if this is even a fraction of what you felt every time I left you, then I don’t know how you could stand to look at me anymore, let alone want to see me again.
I can’t imagine how long this time apart has been for you, how hard it’s been. I would love to see you again, but if you don’t want to see me, I understand. Really.
—Oliver
He is giving her a choice, a way out. Because this is it, the end of everything they have shared, have ever had together. Because he has run out of time, and she never will.
She reads the note again, but the words don’t change. Whatever she chooses now—in this moment—there is no going back.
But Oliver is wrong. It isn’t a choice at all.
She looks up at Zoe. “I want to see him.” More than she has ever wanted anything in her entire life.
Beatrix stands frozen on the threshold of Oliver’s bedroom, cold seeping through her insides, her voice caught in her throat.
Apollo 11 felt like the end. So did Woodstock.
So did turning the last page of Oliver’s journal.
But none of those endings felt like this—like time has conspired with grief to flood her veins with sadness and fear and anger and pain and despair, all at once.
Like the only thing keeping her afloat is a love so deep it hurts.
She isn’t sure which will drown her in the end.
Because this time, it really is the end.
She hasn’t seen Oliver in over two centuries. He is her past, lost to her ages ago. And yet here he is, just as she remembers him. Slighter. Paler. But still him. Still here.
“Oliver?”
He turns toward her without raising his head from the mountain of pillows beneath it. A gasp escapes her. His summer-sky eyes are sunken, grayer now, fading into a winter blue. The weight of his gaze on her still makes her heart leap.
“Bea?” He pushes himself up to sit in his single bed. It takes more effort than it should.
She takes a step forward, then another, not so much walking toward him as being pulled into his orbit.
Oliver stares at her. She stops at the edge of his bed, close enough to reach out and take his hand if she wants to. If she dares. She wonders if he can hear her heart thudding.
“Two hundred and thirty-three years, two months, one day.” His voice is laced with amazement and horror, as if he has only now realized how very long eternity is.
“I had to take the long way.” She catches a ghost of a smile on his lips as he contemplates her.
“I was afraid I would never see you again.” His voice is hoarse, but she can still hear the relief in it.
“So was I,” she admits.
He takes her hand and threads his fingers through hers. She wants to melt into his touch. She sinks onto the bed next to him. “I missed you.” More than she ever thought it was possible to miss anyone.
Oliver tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, a familiar gesture and a gentle caress she hasn’t felt in centuries. “I’m sorry, Bea—”
“Don’t,” she says firmly.
“I wanted to find you.” Anguish darkens his dull eyes. “But there was nothing I could do. I was too late. I should have—”
Beatrix lays her hand on his cheek. He falls silent. “You stayed with me as long as you could. I wouldn’t change a thing.”
“But you’ve waited so long.”
She has. But she would have waited longer—would have waited forever—just to get another day, another hour, another moment with him.
“When you disappeared, I didn’t know what to do,” she admits.
His gaze is shrouded in guilt. “I thought about trying to forget you altogether. About trying to make myself hate you. I searched through every memory we ever made together, looking for something—anything—that would make losing you easier. I couldn’t do it. ”
Oliver squeezes her hand. There was only one regret she found, one single regret that cut her open every time she remembered him. She leans forward, and her lips find his in a soft kiss. Warmth blooms through her, fights back the chill creeping into her bones. “I love you,” she whispers.
She didn’t know it was love in Venice or at the ballet.
Was too scared to admit it might be, when she was dancing with him on the Thames.
Knew Oliver was in love with her when he took her to the Whispering Gallery for the first time.
And still, she didn’t dare to listen to the whispers of her heart.
She wanted to tell him after the explosion in Barnbow, but it took everything in her to say, Stay with me, and it was like ripping out her heart to admit she didn’t want to be alone.
That she needed him. I love you seemed so much less than that.
Not even Paris coaxed those words from her heart to her lips.
“I should have told you.” Should have told him every chance she got.
“You didn’t have to.” He wraps his arm around her and pulls her close.
How she has missed this. Missed him. She slips off her shoes and lies down next to him.
He places a soft kiss on her forehead. “I love you, too, Bea. Always.”
Beatrix leans against the kitchen counter, staring out the window over the sink. Wisps of clouds race across the gray sky as she waits for the kettle to come to a boil. Zoe had shown her where the mugs were kept, had dug a box of tea bags out of the pantry, then promptly excused herself.
She hasn’t gone far. Beatrix can hear her whispering with Luke, just across the hall in the living room.
“I’m not saying he’s lying,” Zoe says. “I’m saying what Oliver believes and what’s true might not be the same thing anymore.”
“You found her where he said she’d be,” Luke says. “He wasn’t delusional about that.”
“So? He could have met her anywhere.”
“Theo believes him,” Luke says pointedly.
“Theo said Oliver didn’t lie about her,” Zoe says. “That’s not the same thing.”
The front door creaks open, then slams shut. Heavy footsteps approach. Stop. Beatrix’s pulse quickens.
“Where is she?” Theo asks.
The kettle whistles—screams. Gives her away. Beatrix pulls it quickly from the stove. Her ears ring in the deafening silence.
Theo walks through the doorway, a paper bag printed with a pharmacy logo clutched in one hand. He drops it on the counter as his weary gaze finds hers. He freezes.
“Hi, Theo.”
He looks at her like he’s seen a ghost. Because to him, she is.
“What the hell?” Theo’s voice is laced with fear and confusion. “How—who are you?”
Zoe barges into the kitchen, Luke on her heels. He looks from Beatrix to Theo, back again. “Everything all right?”
“She was at the hospital,” Theo says. “The night our parents died. She knocked me over.”
“You don’t honestly think—” Zoe starts.
“I remember her eyes,” Theo snaps. “Her clothes were stained with blood. Security was chasing her down the hall.”
“Okay, that is pretty memorable,” Luke admits.
Beatrix remembers his eyes, too, so much like Oliver’s that she almost stopped. “I never meant to go to the hospital,” she whispers. “Just the accident.”
Theo’s eyes widen. “You were there?”
She had messed up. There was blood everywhere—hers, theirs—sharp pebbles of glass grinding into her flesh as she crawled to reach them, the wail of sirens growing louder.
Closer. But what was she supposed to do?
She couldn’t leave them. “When the paramedics arrived, they saw me all cut up from the glass. I thought it’d be better not to make a scene, so I let them bring me to the hospital.
I healed too fast. I had to run before they realized I wasn’t injured anymore.
” Right into Theo, his mind dazed, his heart crushed, on his way to give Oliver the news.
“Wait, why were you injured?” Luke asks. Zoe elbows him in the ribs.
Beatrix looks to Theo. He nods. He wants to know. “The car landed on its roof,” she murmurs. She can still see it when she closes her eyes. “I kicked in the window so I could hold your father’s hand.”
“Why?” Theo asks. His voice is barely a whisper.
“Because no one should die alone.”
“Mom?”
“Already gone,” Beatrix says. Her heart cracks at the memory of the lithe, lively woman, so still in that car. “I’m sorry.”
Theo’s eyes shine. “Did Oliver ask you to do that?”
“Oliver doesn’t know.” She hadn’t so much planned on going to the accident as she found herself knowing she would be there.
Theo runs a hand through his hair. He looks like Oliver, or maybe it is Oliver who looks like Theo when he does it. “Do you work for Aevum?”
Beatrix shakes her head. He sounds like Oliver, too, that night in Venice. “I don’t work for Aevum. I don’t work for another agency. I don’t work for the government or time travel through a university program. But Oliver already told you all that, didn’t he?”
Theo can’t hold her gaze.
“He did,” Luke admits.
“He told us everything,” Zoe adds.
She considers taking the easy way out, considers telling them Oliver’s illness must be affecting his mind. But Oliver trusted them with the truth. They should believe him, like he believed her.
“If I was time traveling to see Oliver during his excursions, why wouldn’t I time travel to his present, to be with him?” she asks.
“Maybe you have,” Theo says. “That’s why he arranged to meet you at the museum, where Zoe found you.”
“He arranged to meet me because I refused to say goodbye to him in 1965,” she says. “In my present. And then it was too late. If I was a time traveler, I would have come to him.”
Luke shakes his head. “I can’t keep any of this straight.”
“I know you’re trying to protect your brother, Theo,” Beatrix says.
“You’ve been doing it for so long you don’t know how to stop.
But I have nothing to prove to you.” She pushes the sleeve of her sweater up and steps closer to him.
She offers him her exposed arm. “But for Oliver’s sake, if you’d like to cut me open and watch my skin stitch itself back together, by all means, go ahead. ”
Theo looks horrified. “I’m sorry. It’s just so—”
“Unbelievable?” Beatrix says. “I know. That’s why Oliver is the only one I ever told. But he’s trusted you three with it now, so here we are.”
“Because he thought we’d believe him,” Zoe says guiltily.
“I believe him,” Luke says.
Zoe studies Beatrix for a long moment. She doesn’t know what Zoe sees when their eyes meet, but her gaze softens. “So do I.”
Beatrix looks to Theo. His shoulders sag. Because Oliver told him everything. Because he believes him. “I’m sorry, Beatrix.”
“I’m sorry, too.”