We.
The room is suddenly stifling, as if it was already too small, and now the walls are closing in, too. It can’t stay like this, this perfect image of a life. Of two people, existing together, living together, loving together. It’s a lie, like that perfect Lancaut the faerie showed her. A heart-shattering, perfect lie she was fool enough to believe.
Beatrix snatches Oliver’s coffee mug off the table and hurls it at the wall. Ceramic shards explode across the room. The cleaning woman bangs on the door. Beatrix doesn’t notice. She grabs Oliver’s notebook, and the rage in her wants to rip it to shreds, like he ripped her heart out. But it is too much a piece of him. She can’t bring herself to tear a single page.
Because this is all her fault.
Her fault, for turning back that day in London when she should have kept walking.
Her fault, for asking to meet him again.
Her fault, for letting him through her walls and into her undying heart, when she knew. It could only end like this.
She flings the notebook across the room, watches the pages fly and scatter. The knocking is more insistent now. She sinks to the floor and lets her sobs overtake her.
“Hello, miss? Is everything okay?”
No. Nothing is okay. And Beatrix is sure nothing will ever be okay again.
September 10, 2202Boston, Massachusetts
Oliver wakes in an almost dark; the only light is the dim glow of machine monitors and the beam of a lamp over the recliner in the corner. Theo dozes there, cast in a harsh white light that deepens the shadows under his eyes and the worry lines across his brow. Or maybe that has nothing to do with lamplight.
He tries to focus—to remember what happened—but his skull feels like it’s being ground to powder inside his head. He went to Aevum. He went to the Apollo 11 launch with Beatrix. And then… nothing. The last thing he remembers is sitting on the trunk of her car.
His heart plummets to his guts. He’s left her without a goodbye, without a plan to see her again.
The reality hits him like an icy wave, breathtaking and brutal.
I always wait for you.
Theo sits up, rubs sleep out of his eyes with the heel of his hand. “How do you feel?”
Like his brain is about to implode and his body has been hit by a dump truck. Several dump trucks. Like he could sleep for a hundred years and still be bone-tired. Like a fault line has opened in his heart, and now, it is slowly, irreparably, cracking in two. His eyes burn. He squeezes them shut. “Like I’m dying.”
Silence stretches between them, broken only by the intermittent click of one of Oliver’s machines. He counts his heartbeats, pounding through his skull, until he loses track. “Theo?”
“Yeah?” He sounds like he did in that waiting room, three floors down, the night they lost their parents. His brother, but not.
Oliver swallows the lump in his throat. “Can I come home?”
July 20, 1969Cape Kennedy, Florida
Beatrix packs her things into her suitcase, the low voices on the television her only company. Her eyes ache from all the crying, puffy and raw.
The first night was the worst. She thought she had finally gone numb to it all, but when she slid into the empty bed, it hit her all over again: Oliver was gone. He was gone, and wherever he was, he was dying. She couldn’t breathe, felt like she was drowning on dry land, her heart hurt so much.
She had to make it stop. She told herself she wouldn’t let Oliver have this effect on her, hold this power over her, like she was some pathetic lovesick girl. There was only one thing to be done. She would move on, put one foot in front of the other like she did when she fled Lancaut. She could stay in America. Start over.
Then yesterday her birthday dawned, sunny and bright and beautiful, and she never even got out of bed. Because her birthday reminded her of Paris, and Paris reminded her of him, and maybe she really was pathetic.
She lay alone in the bed and sifted through every moment she’d shared with him. She told herself she was searching for answers, but it was reasons she was looking for. A reason to harden her heart against him, to take those wonderful memories and tarnish them, wear away the sharp edges that were tearing her apart.
It wasn’t what she found in those memories that hurt the most. It was what she didn’t find: everything she never said to Oliver.
A voice from the television draws her attention. The president of the United States, placing a phone call to the moon. She shakes her head in wonder. Apollo 11 had made it to the moon and a man walked on it,and Beatrix knows it is the start of something, even without Oliver’s notebook, still lying on the floor.
“For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this earth are truly one,” the president says to the moon and the world. But Beatrix has never felt more alone.
