“I know it’s against all their rules, but if I could, I’d go back and change it,” Theo says. “I wish I never went to Aevum.” One choice thatshaped their entire relationship. How different would it be if Theo could undo it?
“It worked out in the end,” Oliver says. He doesn’t believe in fate exactly, but there’s no denying it. If Theo hadn’t gone to Aevum, or hadn’t waited to show him his obituary, or hadn’t felt so guilty about it that he gifted him with time travel, he never would have met Beatrix.
“At least something did,” Theo says. He sounds defeated, like everything that has ever gone wrong in Oliver’s life is his fault.
He brings their empty bottles to the sink. The rain has let up outside, and Oliver takes it as his cue to leave. Theo insists he can stay, but it’s still not home.
His brother walks him to the door.
“I’ll bring your clothes by this week, after work sometime,” Theo says. “We can grab dinner, if you want?”
“Sure,” Oliver agrees. He pulls the door open and the night air greets him, cool and damp and smelling of wet pavement instead of cinnamon. He hesitates, something nagging at him, a regret one step away from hatching in his guts.
“Oli?”
He came here because he didn’t know what to do. He knows now, even if it isn’t the answer he wants. There is nothing he can do. He has no control over whether he will see Beatrix again. He might already be too late. All he can do is rest and hope that this, too, will all work out in the end; that the universe, like Theo, thinks something should go right in his life for once.
He won’t leave anything else up to fate or luck or the universe’s whims. He still has a chance with Theo—a choice—and he won’t make the same mistake he made with her.
Oliver pulls his brother into a hug, catching him off guard. “I love you,” he says. His voice is choked, the words rusted from too little use.
So are Theo’s. “I love you, too.”
August 6, 1965Lancaut, England
Beatrix trails her hand along the gravestones, worn smooth by time. The names are impossible to read now, but she knows which one is hers.
Oliver follows her a few paces away. A warm breeze ruffles his hair. He takes in the ancient forest surrounding them, the river cutting through the limestone cliffs below them, and what is left of St. James’s ahead of them. Four moss-covered stone walls, two long, two peaked. No door. No windows. No roof. A hollow shell of what it used to be.
The low stone wall valiantly defends the fallen sanctuary from the encroaching forest. Beatrix is glad to see it—to see something of Lancaut still standing—but her heart knows the truth. A fight against time is one it cannot win.
She stops in front of a lichen-dusted headstone, askew in the shifted earth.
Oliver studies the grave over her shoulder. “Is this…?”
“Mine,” she confirms. “And William’s.” She can imagine the words he had carved there, swears she can still see them if she looks hard enough.
Amor vincit omnia. Love conquers all.
William truly believed those words, even after she was gone. He thought—hoped—that in death they would be together again. Except they can’t be. Because she is still here.
She had tried to forget William, to bury the memories of the man she loved—but they wouldn’t let her go. So she spent her days cursing his name and those two tiny words that haunted her.
Get out.
She had hoped William tried to forget her, too; that he tried as desperatelyas she did to bury the memory of their love, to twist it into something that wouldn’t tear him open every time he thought of her.
She hoped he failed.
She hoped every time he looked at their daughter, he thought of her, of that night, of those words. She hoped she haunted him for the rest of his short days.
Only now, standing in front of their time-worn grave, does Beatrix understand. Cold seeps through her, sinks into her guts like a stone. She did.
“He was a good man,” she whispers. A good man who didn’t deserve her wrath. Who protected their daughter, who never married again, who spent the rest of his life trapped in the moment that changed its path. She hopes he learned to live with the regret, hopes he found some peace from those two tiny words that must have haunted him, too.
Beatrix lays a gentle kiss on top of the stone, cool and unyielding against her lips. “It was an impossible choice,” she says, swallowing against the lump rising in her throat. She can’t imagine the agony he must have been in, the strength it took to sacrifice one love to save another. “I would have done the same,” she whispers.
She places a small bouquet of wildflowers in the shadow of their headstone. She picked them as she walked the path to the church with Oliver. When he offered to help her gather them, she instructed him to keep the stems long.
