Beatrix takes a shuddering breath. Oliver squeezes her hand. She turns to the grave across from her own. “My daughter,” she tells him. There is nothing of her name left on her stone, either.
Oliver pulls her close as she blinks against the tears burning her eyes. “Theo talks to our parents when we visit the cemetery,” he says gently.
“It’s just a stone.” Her heart breaks a little at her words. All that is left of her baby girl.
He kisses her on the temple. “I don’t think it matters.” He tells her to take her time and wanders back toward the church.
Beatrix looks out over the remains of the cemetery. All of Lancaut, long dead, long buried, long gone. Except for her. She settles on the grass and faces her daughter’s grave. “Where to start?” she asks. She feels a bit silly.
A memory surfaces. A New Year’s Eve and the melancholy pull of “Auld Lang Syne.” Lord Sutton had looked at her with those tormented eyes and asked her the same question.
Beatrix holds two of her wildflowers in a cross, the heads nearly touching. She wraps one stem around the other, up, over, and through.
She starts at the beginning.
Dusk settles over the ruins of Lancaut and the heat of August fades with the daylight. Beatrix and Oliver meander back to the car, fingers laced together, content in each other’s silence.
Beatrix opens the trunk. She unpacks a red plaid picnic blanket and a square wicker basket.
“What’s all this?” Oliver asks.
“I meant what I said, five years ago,” she says. “It felt selfish to ask you to come back to Lancaut for me.”
“Bea—” Oliver starts, but she continues.
“I knew I wouldn’t change your mind, so I thought I’d make it something for you, too.” She hands him the blanket. “I seem to recall the word ‘stargazing’ somewhere in that notebook of yours.”
Oliver grins. “And the basket?”
She sighs dramatically. “Honestly, how did you not already have ‘moonlight picnic’ on your list?”
He lays a hand over his heart. “A tragic oversight.”
“Then let’s fix it, shall we?” She pecks him on the cheek and leads the way down the hill to an open field.
The stars have changed over the centuries, fading from Beatrix’s view with every passing decade, as if they have grown old and weary alongside her. On the darkest nights, she has feared she would outlive them, too. But not here. The stars still shine the same over Lancaut.
She lies under them with Oliver for hours, curled into him on her picnic blanket, listening to the steady rhythm of his heart.
“What do you think happens when you die?” she asks. “To your soul, I mean.”
Oliver chuckles softly. It rumbles through his chest.
“Is that funny to you?”
“I mean, kind of,” he says. “In that morbidif I think about this too long, it’s horrifyingsort of way, all things considered.”
She laughs, too. “I suppose that’s true.”
“I was actually thinking about Theo. I asked him the same thing, maybe three months after our parents died.” He shakes his head. “I can still picture the sheer terror in his eyes.”
“Because he didn’t know what to tell you?” Beatrix asks.
“Or because he didn’t want to think about it,” Oliver says. “Me dying, I mean. I think he must have had the Aevum report by then. He told me our parents were at peace and not to worry about it.”
“And what do you think now?” Beatrix asks.
Oliver shrugs. “I like to think it’s like going home.”
