CHAPTER EIGHT
Ceci
For one suspended second, Ceci considered lying again. Not a full lie this time, only something smaller, a delay, a softer version of the truth that would give her one more hour, one more evening, one more chance to decide whether saying it aloud would make any of it more real than it already was.
But Duncan was standing across from her with one hand resting on the table and his eyes fixed on her face, and his expression had gone too steady for evasion. Lying to him now would feel like knocking over a chair in a chapel.
He would know.
Maybe not the shape of the truth, but the fact of being denied it.
“All right,” she said.
The words came out quieter than she intended. She cleared her throat and tried again.
“All right.”
He did not move.
Neither did she.
The library seemed to hold itself around them. She could hear the small movements Duncan made without meaning to. The shift of cloth when he breathed. The faint tap of one finger once against the table, then stillness.
He waited.
That was the hardest part. She reached into the pocket of the borrowed trousers and took out her phone. Duncan’s gaze dropped to it at once.
“You’ve had that with you the whole time?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“A phone.”
He said nothing.
“That explains absolutely nothing, I know.”
“It does not explain much.”
“No.”
She woke up the screen and for a second the light looked indecent in the room, too clear, too cold, too immediate. Duncan’s attention narrowed. He stepped closer without seeming to realize he had done it. Ceci pulled up the date first.
31/10/1938.
She turned the screen toward him. His face gave away almost nothing, but she could see the small recalculation happen.
“That is impossible,” he said.
“No.”
“You’ve altered it.”
“I haven’t.”
He looked from the screen to her.
“You expect me to accept that?”
“I expect you to notice I’m not stupid enough to invent evidence that creates more questions than it answers.”
That won her the briefest flicker of something from him, maybe not amusement, but recognition. He held out his hand. She hesitated, then gave him the phone.
He took it carefully, as if it might break or explode or both. His thumb brushed the glass and the screen shifted under his touch. He stopped at once.
“It responds?”
“Yes.”
He turned it, examining the surface, the casing, the seamless brightness beneath the glass. His fingers were steady. She noticed that because she was trying very hard not to notice anything else about them.
He asked, “How?”
The question opened the door to every other question.
“It’s from 2023,” she said. The words settled between them. Duncan’s eyes lifted to hers.
“You are serious?”
“Yes.”
“Not figuratively?”
“No.”
He set the phone down very carefully on the table, screen still lit, as if some part of him was unwilling to let it out of his sight.
Ceci could feel her own pulse in her throat now. There was no turning back from this, not to privacy, vagueness, or any manageable version of herself.
“I’m an academic librarian,” she said. “In America. In 2023. I came here to work in the Gladstone archives. That part was true. I was researching correspondence. Diana Mitford, the Gladstone family, social networks, influence, how ideas spread through polite circles before anyone admits what they’re carrying. ”
One letter had bothered her before any of this became impossible.
It had been a small thing in the Gladstone material, the kind of half-social, half-political remark that would have looked harmless to anyone reading too quickly.
Diana had been mentioned in passing, along with Sir Oswald Mosley, Berlin, dinner, charm, money, and a man identified only as M.
The writer had not sounded frightened. That was what stayed with Ceci. She had sounded entertained.
Someone is helping O. refine the message, she had written. Less noise, more discipline. Fewer boots in the drawing room.
Ceci had copied the phrase into her notes because it felt too neat. Too strategic. People wrote many ugly things in private letters, but this had not read like ordinary prejudice or gossip. It read like method.
She had thought, at the time, that she was looking at the social polishing of fascism after the fact. Now she was standing inside the fact itself.
Duncan listened without interrupting.
“I went up to the ruins because I needed air,” she continued.
“It started raining. I remember sitting down for a minute under what I thought was shelter. I must have fallen asleep or hit my head or slipped sideways into whatever impossible thing was happening here, and when I woke up, I was still in Hawarden, just… not my Hawarden.”
She laughed once with no humor in it.
“Your turn to say that sounds insane.”
He did not say it. He looked from the screen to her. “Did you know it was 1938 before you looked at this?”
“No,” she said. “Not exactly.”
He waited.
“I knew something was wrong,” she said. “The gate. The house. The car. The way everyone spoke to me. None of it matched what I’d come here expecting.”
His gaze drops to the phone. “And this gave you the year.”
“Yes.”
“You trusted it?”
“No. I checked it against everything else I could find.”
“The newspapers?”
“The newspapers,” she said. “And after that, I stopped thinking I’d hit my head and started thinking something much worse had happened.”
He looked at the date again, then set the phone down with deliberate care, as though handling it gently might make it easier to believe.
When he raised his eyes to hers, the question had changed. He was no longer asking about the device, or even about the year itself. He wanted to know what that year meant.
“So that is what you recognized,” he said. “Not just where you are. What comes after. A coming storm?”
“Yes.”
He held her gaze for a moment.
“Tell me.”
She drew in a breath. Then stopped.
The first thing that rose in her was absurd.
Stories.
Every time-travel story she had ever read or watched crowded in at once with its little warnings: leave the past untouched, keep the future sealed, preserve the record, step carefully because one careless mercy might break the world.
History, in stories, behaved like glass. Fixed. Fragile. Dangerous in the hands of anyone sentimental enough to touch it.
But history had never felt like glass to her. History was paper and appetite and cowardice. It was people making choices, then pretending afterward that the choices had been inevitable.
She looked at Duncan, at the steadiness of him, at the impossible fact that he was asking her for knowledge that had ruined whole generations after him.
“I don’t know how much I should say,” she admitted.
His expression changed. “Should?”
“Time travel ethics,” she said, and gave a short, humorless laugh. “A field with surprisingly strong opinions and very little peer review.”
He did not smile.
“In fiction, the rules are always clear,” she said. “Keep quiet. Preserve history. Let the record remain the record.”
“And you believe those rules apply here?”
Ceci looked down at the phone between them, its impossible date glowing in the quiet library.
“I believe in records,” she said. “I believe in evidence. I believe facts matter. I also know silence can dress itself up as principle when it is really only fear.”
His gaze held hers.
“If I tell you too much, I could change things,” she said. “If I tell you too little, I may be protecting the idea of history while abandoning the people trapped inside it.”
Duncan said nothing.
That was worse than argument. He gave her room to hear herself.
“The future I came from is no sacred object,” she said quietly. “It has its own cruelties. Its own cowards. Its own men selling hatred as order. I cannot stand here in 1938 and decide the timeline deserves more loyalty than the living.”
Something in his face shifted then, though his voice stayed controlled.
“Then tell me what you can bear to tell me.”
That nearly undid her.
Because it was trust. Worse, it was responsibility.
Ceci drew another breath. This time, she went on.
“The peace talks in Munich buy time and get mistaken for peace. Hitler keeps going. Poland comes next. Britain goes to war. France falls. London is bombed. Cities burn. Fascism takes hold. People die in unfathomable numbers. The whole century bends around it.”
The library had gone very quiet, and Duncan had not moved.
He said, after a long moment, “And Oswald Mosley?”
His mind went there first, straight to the danger closest at hand: Mosley, money, rooms full of respectable people making room for ruin.
“He doesn’t take power,” she said. “If that’s what you mean, he doesn’t take it officially. But that doesn’t make him harmless.”
Duncan’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
“You know of him?”
“I know enough,” she said. “I know the British Union of Fascists does not stay fringe just because people want to pretend it’s vulgar.
I know people with titles, money, and invitations make room for dangerous things because they’re flattered by them.
I know women like Diana Mitford help make it all seem stylish before it becomes shameful. ”
He lowered his gaze, thinking.
“And you came here already studying that?”
“Yes.”
She did not say the obvious thing at once. She had come to study the first signs of fascism in letters and private circles, and now she was face to face with the world that would give it room to grow.
He does.
“That is a remarkable coincidence.”
“I know.”
“You do not believe it is one?”
“No.”
He folded his arms, then unfolded them again almost immediately, dissatisfied perhaps with how defensive the gesture might look.
“You understand,” he said, “that what you are asking me to accept is not merely improbable. It is beyond reason.”
“Yes.”
“And yet you have told me anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
The question was softer than the others. More dangerous for it. Ceci looked at him, really looked, and answers before she could polish it into something safer.