CHAPTER EIGHT #2
“Because you were going to see through me eventually.”
A faint breath left him, closer to acknowledgment than surprise.
“And because,” she added, “you asked like it mattered whether I told the truth.”
For the first time since she met him, Duncan looked away first. He turned, one hand bracing against the edge of the table, and she saw the effort it cost him to remain inside his own composure. When he spoke again, his voice was even, though only just.
“If I believe you,” he said, “then the implications are catastrophic.”
“If you don’t believe me,” Ceci replied, “they still are. You’ll just be unprepared.”
He looked back at her. There was no offense in his face. No anger. Just the ruthless, disciplined motion of thought.
“Show me more.”
She reached for the phone again. He did not stop her.
Photos first. Her apartment. New Haven in winter.
The front of the library. A mirror selfie she immediately regretted because Duncan saw it too, saw her in a different dress, in another world, smiling into a phone he still does not understand.
She flicked past it too quickly. He noticed that as well.
“Leave it.”
She stopped.
“What?”
“The buildings.”
She swallowed and flipped back. The modern city sat under his gaze, all glass and steel and shapes no 1938 architect would have dared with available materials. He studied each image as though it might reveal not just its own construction but the century that made it inevitable.
“That is London,” he said finally, on one of the skyline photographs.
“Yes.”
“But not mine?”
“No.”
He nodded once, more to himself than to her. Then, almost absently, “And this one?”
“My office.”
The words felt strange in the room. He looked at the rows of modern shelving, a floor lamp, pictures of buildings on the wall, the computer half visible at the edge of the frame.
“You work there every day?”
“I did.”
The past tense slipped out before she could stop it. Duncan noticed that too, though he was kind enough not to press the point. Instead, he asked, “Is there anyone expecting your return?”
The question caught her harder than she expected. She folded her arms around herself, not from cold this time.
“No,” she said. “Not in the way you mean.”
“A husband?”
She gave him a brief, tired smile.
“Former. Happily, former. Bishop, not Wright”
The line beside his mouth loosened before he caught himself.
“Family?”
“No.” She offered no explanation at that.
“Children?”
“No.”
He took that in.
Ceci reached for the edge of the table and gripped it, because now she was saying things she had not planned to say, not tonight, perhaps not ever.
“My life was fine,” she said. “That’s the annoying part. It wasn’t tragic. It wasn’t unbearable. It just… wasn’t the life I thought I was building when I started it. Not when I was twenty and full of dreams. Thirty-five looks very different than I expected.”
Duncan said nothing.
She was grateful for that. Anything sympathetic from him right then might have actually undone her.
“So no,” she said. “There isn’t anywhere else I need to be.”
He was quiet for so long she thought she may have said too much. He was quiet for a moment, then asked, “And if a way back presented itself?”
Ceci looked down at the phone, at the impossible date burning steadily back at her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I believed I would know the instant I was given the choice. I believed some part of me would rise up and call me home. But it hasn’t. It hasn’t at all.”
He accepted that with a small, grave nod.
At length he said, “Sabrina must not know yet.”
The relief that moved through her was immediate enough to make her weak.
“No,” she said. “She really shouldn’t.”
“You trust me more than her.”
“In this specific matter, yes.”
“That is unwise.”
“Probably,” she said. “But here we are.”
He almost smiled again.
Then his expression settled into something she could not read at all.
“You understand that I cannot simply take you at your word?”
“Yes.”
“But I also cannot dismiss what I have seen.”
“No.”
His hand moved toward the phone, then stopped just short of touching it again.
“I will need time.”
“Take it.”
“I will need details. Names. Dates. Sequences. Everything you can remember.”
“I can do that.”
“And until I decide what to do with what you’ve told me, you say nothing of this to anyone.”
Ceci nodded.
“Agreed.”
The agreement changed the room, anchoring it rather than easing it. Duncan straightened fully then, and some part of him returned behind the eyes, some practical layer of self-command that had thinned while she was speaking.
“You will remain here,” he said. “Publicly, as the librarian my uncle expected. Privately, as a woman who has given me a problem with no decent precedent.”
She let out a breath that might have been a laugh.
“That’s about as warm a welcome as I’ve had in years.”
“It was not meant as a welcome.”
“I know.”
He looked at her for a long moment.
“You’re very calm.”
“No,” she said. “I’m very tired.”
That, finally, earned a real smile. Small, but unmistakable.
Then it was gone.
“Sabrina returns for supper,” he said. “By then you will have decided what version of yourself she is allowed to meet.”
Ceci glanced at the phone, then slipped it back into her pocket.
“And which version do you think that should be?”
“The one least likely to make her curious.”
She laughed despite herself. “Then we’re doomed.”
Her laugh caught him before he could defend against it. She saw it happen. Saw him hear her as a woman standing too close in his library smelling faintly of sleep and smoke and a mouth that kept almost smiling at the worst possible moments. His eyes flicked once to her hair. Then back to her face.
“Go and rest,” he said.
The tone was steady.
The meaning underneath it was not. Ceci felt suddenly, vividly aware of the distance between them. How little it would take to shorten it. How impossible that would be.
“Yes, Captain Duncan.”
Something about the title reached him differently this time. She saw the reaction in his shoulders before he stilled it. When she reached the door, she looked back once.
He had not moved. One hand remained flat against the table. The late sun had shifted again, leaving half his face in shadow and half in gold. He looked like a man already regretting how much he believed her. And she, God help her, already trusted him more for it.