Has it been worth it, watching him go, each time harder than the last? Has it been worth missing him—aching for him, for years—only to have him for hours? Have those briefest moments of joy been worth the decades of heartache?
She looks up at Oliver, watching her with dark eyes, waiting for her answer.
Just tell me how.
He can’t.
Her eyes well with tears, and Oliver’s face crumples before she can utter a word. But the goodbye catches in her throat, the unspokenYou should gochoking her. She can’t say the words. She can’t let him go. She can’t. She can’t. She can’t.
Because Oliver makes her happy.
Because that brief happiness makes the long, lonely wait bearable.
Because she loves him.
Beatrix swallows her goodbye. “Twelve hours at a time.”
Oliver’s face cracks with relief. He searches her mismatched gaze. “Are you sure?”
Beatrix twines her fingers through his. “We have here and we have now.” It is the most she can ever promise him, all that he can ever give her. “And that’s enough.”
Oliver presses a gentle kiss to her forehead. “It’s more than enough.”
July 20, 1960Paris, France
Beatrix leans against the iron balcony rail and gazes out at the Paris skyline, the morning sun already warm on her bare arms. She clutches a wide bowl of coffee with both hands and inhales the rich aroma. Oliver sits behind her at the table, bent over his journal, the collar of his plaid button-down askew. The gentle breeze ruffles his dark hair as he writes.
“If I lived in Paris, I’d never get sick of this view,” she says.
Oliver looks up from his notebook. His gaze lingers over her. “Me neither.”
She rolls her eyes and hides her smile behind a sip of milky coffee.
Oliver wraps his arm around her waist and pulls her down into his lap. She puts her bowl on the table before he manages to spill its contents on her yellow floral sundress.
“What do you want to do today?” He turns the page of his journal. “Eiffel Tower? River cruise on the Seine? Versailles?”
She frowns. “Did you make a list?”
The wordLouvreis written in his neat handwriting near the top of the page. A check mark fills the box drawn next to it.
He shrugs. “I don’t want to miss anything.”
“Everyone misses something,” Beatrix says.
Oliver sighs. “I know. I just want to make the most of whatever I’m doing, wherever I’m visiting. It’s my only chance.”
She adjusts his collar, straightening and smoothing it into place. “I think there’s a fine line between making the most of a moment and living in it.”
He gives her a weary smile. “I guess I’m still trying to find it.”
She can hear the undercurrent of regret in his words, his unspoken fear: that he’ll die before he figures out how to live. “I think I knowwhere to start.” She reaches for his journal and closes the cover. “Why did you choose Paris?”
“I wanted to take you somewhere new for your birthday. Somewhere neither of us had ever been, that could be ours, together. You mentioned Paris at Carnevale, and my parents had honeymooned here, so I guess… I thought it would be romantic.” His cheeks flush pink, and she wonders if he is remembering what happened yesterday morning. Neither of them has mentioned theNight Ferrysince. “It’s a total cliché, isn’t it?”
“What’s clichéd about a man traveling through time to celebrate someone’s four hundred and seventy-ninth birthday?” She smiles, and he does, too. She slides off his lap and offers him her hand. “Let’s pack a lunch and my Polaroid, and go make Paris ours, shall we?”
Beatrix doesn’t believe in perfect, but if she did, this would be a perfect day.
