Chapter 47
Rayna
Rayna found it. Two days later.
Their answer.
What she’d always felt in her gut.
Buried deep on the second hard drive under a file named “Misc,” as if her mother had purposely tried to hide the doomed reality of their situation.
It was a document of random entries of her mother’s thoughts from before and during helping Alex. All the proof Rayna needed to solidify the realisation that had been spiralling since her encounter with Sheun. It read:
In the case that this experiment fails, then I may have to conclude that the Rupture of those Studies with greater importance in history may be impossible to reduce significantly.
At least not from the present, and definitely not from within the Ruptured timeline.
Which begs the question of whether it’s possible to reduce it from the Study’s own time?
But how? Because if the Study is back in their rightful place, then history will automatically play out as it was always meant to, wouldn’t it? As if they’d never even left in the first place.
So then, can a significant Rupture ever really be overcome to the extent of allowing a Study to remain in the present?
While ensuring that throughout the life of the Study, the Rupture always remains small and stable?
Would this be possible if they never return to the past, or would they have to visit regularly?
I want to think that it isn’t entirely impossible, but I don’t know how it could be achieved.
And I think I’ve run out of time trying to find out.
That was the last entry in her notes.
Dated 1st April 863. A few days before the accident.
“I found it,” Rayna muttered hoarsely.
All the flickering of papers and muttering under breaths stopped as Kelly, Erin, and George looked at her wide-eyed.
The three of them rushed over to her, Kelly grabbing the laptop off her first. Rayna watched as their faces fell one by one as they passed it between them.
“Rayna,” Erin whispered.
“This isn’t—it’s not ideal, but it doesn’t mean our search is over,” Kelly quickly said.
“Kelly’s right,” George added, pressing the laptop closed. “Your mum didn’t say it was impossible. She just hadn’t found a way. We’ll be the ones to find it, though.”
But their reassurances weren’t helping.
It made her blood boil as pain and frustration took it in turns to claw at her heart and stomach. Her ears were stinging, the room was spinning, the walls closing in.
She needed space. She needed to think. She needed these feelings gone.
She wanted to tear them out of her and throw them as far away as possible.
It was the perfect reminder why she’d always kept things easy and surface-level. Why deep feelings were never a good thing, never worked, couldn’t last.
Rayna was standing before she knew she was. “Move,” she uttered.
But Kelly, Erin, and George kept her caged in against the armchair, all three of them giving her worried looks.
“Let’s just sit down and talk about this first,” George urged.
She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“We know this isn’t what you wanted to find, but don’t run from it,” Erin said.
“I’m not running,” Rayna bit out, but her eyes frantically searched for a way out. “I just…I need space. I need to step outside.”
“Okay, okay,” Kelly said with her palms up. “That’s understandable. But let’s just wait until Victor gets back first, yeah?”
“Please move,” she croaked.
None of them did.
“You’re panicking,” Erin said, her voice liquid. “And we can’t let you go anywhere like this.”
As much as it irritated her, somewhere in her head, she appreciated her friends’ concern. It didn’t silence her desire to get away, though.
“I won’t go far,” she promised. “I just need a moment to myself.”
The three of them looked at each other, and when Rayna stepped forward, Kelly and Erin parted, letting her pass.
As she swiped up her phone and car keys from the corner of the dining table, she heard behind her, “I’m going to call V.”
Rayna’s phone kept buzzing with incoming messages and phone calls in her trouser pocket as she stared at the four gravestones lined up in front of her.
Specifically, the second headstone, engraved with the name Yasmin Taylor, dated 11 October 823 to 4 April 863 below.
The drive to the cemetery had taken ten minutes, though Rayna honestly didn’t remember a second of it. Neither was she sure how long she’d been standing there. And for the first time, she didn’t know what to say to her mum either.
Normally, the one-sided conversation of all the things she had to update her mum on flowed in her head—she didn’t like saying it aloud like George did—but there was nothing in her mind. Just a broken, barren post-apocalyptic landscape, dried of thought and emotion.
Drained of hope.
Another handful of slow minutes passed before Rayna’s phone buzzed with a call again. She wasn’t sure what made her dig it out of her pocket that time, but she did.
It wasn’t Victor, or George, or Dominic, or any of her friends and colleagues.
It was her dad.
She swiped to answer with tired movements and brought the device to her ear. “Hello?”
“Rayna?” her dad said quickly. “Rayna, child, where are you? Why haven’t you been answering your phone? Victor and George, Dominic, all your friends—they’ve been trying to get a hold of you for the last hour. Where are you? Are you okay?”
It’d been an hour?
“I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I didn’t realise how long it’d been.”
“Where are you? Why weren’t you answering your phone?”
She glanced between the four graves of Alex, her mother, and Frank and Samara Aynsley, George’s parents. “I’m at the cemetery.”
Her dad was quiet for several moments.
“What happened?” he asked.
She blinked mutely at the etching of her mum’s name, not knowing how to explain what she’d read in those notes nor how it was making her feel.
“Dad,” she heard herself say. “Why did you and Mum get divorced?”
Her dad made a quiet noise of surprise.
Understandable, she supposed. Neither she nor he had ever brought up her parents’ divorce. Rayna had never asked, and if her dad had mentioned it, he’d always skirted around the topic with hinting comments, but nothing ever so direct.
“I…” he started, then stopped and sighed.
“We loved each other, Rayna. We did. Neither of us ever doubted that, and I don’t ever want you to either.
But…maybe we married too young and didn’t really know who we were, or maybe we didn’t discuss the important stuff, thinking that love was enough, but we began realising that we wanted different things in life.
“I wanted a bigger family and to slow down, but your mum wanted to focus on her career. And we argued about it; there’s no hiding that.
But it got to a point that we both realised the way we loved each other wasn’t enough to keep our relationship going.
We were holding each other back from what we really wanted, and it wasn’t fair for one of us to ask the other to give up on that.
“Your mother would’ve been miserable if I’d asked her to cut down on her work at the lab,” her dad said.
“And I couldn’t do that to her. She would’ve come to hate me, and that was the last thing I wanted.
But I knew, I saw that I didn’t fit into the life she wanted to create, and she didn’t want to be a part of what I pictured for us.
We had to give each other up, and thankfully, we loved each other enough to do it on good terms.”
The numbness encasing Rayna’s mind was cracking as she compared her father’s words to her relationship with Dominic.
“Did you ever regret it?” she asked quietly.
“At first? Yes, I did. It hurt, of course it hurt, knowing that love wasn’t enough to keep us together, that our marriage was over. I regretted that we didn’t become the couple we’d imagined we’d be when we first married.
“But after? No. How could I? We were both better for it.
Happier with ourselves and for each other, and we ended up finding the people we were meant to be with.
The ones who loved us and wanted what we did.
Victor was the man I could never have been for your mother, and Isha wanted the slow life I did too.
“I know for you,” he continued, “it probably didn’t feel like a good thing.
Divorce isn’t easy for children, even amicable ones.
But I promise you, Rayna, leaving each other was the best thing Yasmin and I ever did for ourselves and for you too.
If we hadn’t, it would have gotten to a point where our arguments would have hurt you more than they already did. ”
“Hmm,” Rayna hummed, the sound hardly audible.
With the shell blocking her emotions smashed to smithereens, pain seeped from the bleeding cavity of her rib cage. It rose through her like black smoke. Gathered thick and suffocating in her throat, making her eyes water and hands tremble.
“But,” Carlos Faez said. “You’ve never asked before. So why now? Does it have anything to do with Dominic?”
“No. I just…I just wanted to know.”
“Rayna.” He sounded troubled. “Rayna, tell me what happened. What’s wrong? What can I do to help?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s because of Dominic, isn’t it? What did you find?”
“I have…” Her croaky voice got trapped under the lump in her throat.
“Whatever barrier you’ve run into, you’ll find a way around it. You will. I know you will.”
Her jaw ached as she forced it to move. “There’s no way around it, Dad.”
“There is. There has to be,” he said. “I know I had my reservations about him and your situation, but Dominic loves you, Rayna. And if you love him, if he makes you happy, then keep fighting for each other. Don’t lose hope.”
But love isn’t enough.
Her dad had just said that.
Love didn’t justify keeping Dominic from the life he was meant to live, the one where his family was, and where Rayna couldn’t be the majority of the time.
And if she couldn’t and wouldn’t give up so much of her life to live in the past with him, what right did she have to ask him to do the same for her?
How could she ask him to spend the rest of his life with her when she couldn’t even decide if she wanted the life he envisioned for them?
But Lady Claire…
Lady Claire and Dominic would grow old together, learn together, and support each other. They’d never ask each other to sacrifice their wants or feelings for the other.
How then could Rayna selfishly try to keep him? To prevent the beautiful man from having that? On top of the fact there no longer seemed to be a feasible way to achieve it either.
Even if Dominic stayed with Rayna, if they went back to the past to see his family, history would carry on. He’d still meet Lady Claire, and maybe he’d realise he’d made a mistake staying with Rayna. Maybe he’d come to regret it and wish he never had.
But if Rayna loved him even just a little bit, then she’d let him go now, so it never came to that.
She’d let him be happier without her.
She wouldn’t hold him back from being with who he was meant to be with.
She wouldn’t take away the love history had already promised him.
“I have to go,” Rayna whispered. “Bye, Dad.”
“Rayna, wait—”
She cut the call, and her arm fell limp at her side.
Her phone buzzed in her hand, but she paid it no attention as her bottom lip began quivering and the world around her blurred.
Something wet slipped down Rayna’s cheeks.
She curled her lip between her teeth as more followed. And more. And more. Scarring her face with the red blotches of heartbreak before dripping off her jaw and searing paths down her neck.
Until a stifled sob fell from her lips, and she crumpled forward.
Crouched at her mother’s grave, Rayna cried over the only man who’d ever stolen her heart.
The one man she couldn’t keep.