Lucy looks him in the eye, as if she can read the truth there. “Beatrix isn’t a time traveler, is she?”
Oliver pushes down the panic rising in him, hopes it doesn’t show on his face. He is sure Lucy already knows the answer, even if she can’t accept it. “That’s impossible.”
Lucy frowns. “It is. So, explain her.”
His mind races. How does he explain Beatrix? “There are some things rules don’t apply to,” he says slowly. “Maybe there are some people like that, too.”
Lucy looks horrified by the idea.
Oliver’s heart pounds against his ribs. “I’ll tell you everything I know about her, in thirty seconds. After I return from Woodstock.”
“What?” Lucy looks at him like he’s out of his mind. Maybe he is.
“Bend the rules, just this once,” he begs. “Let me say goodbye.”
“It’s not up to me,” Lucy says. “The chamber—”
“Override the chamber.” His heart races. This has to work.
“I can’t.”
“You can’t or you won’t?”
Her eyes search his. “Oliver—”
“Please.” His voice cracks on the word, every hope in his heart riding on it. On her.
Her gaze softens. “I don’t.”
Oliver slouches into his seat, his spark of hope snuffed out. “What is that supposed to mean?”
She taps her tablet, and the photo of Beatrix from Woodstock fills the screen. “Tell me what you see.”
The answer is there, in her eyes, in the look that is more than sadness, closer to despair. The look he’s sure is mirrored in his own eyes now.
“You can’t change the past,” she says gently.
He could spend the rest of his life trying to get back to Beatrix, but it wouldn’t work.
“She thought I’d come back,” Oliver says.
Lucy’s eyes shine in the glow of her tablet screen. “But you don’t.”
August 18, 1969New York City, New York
Beatrix drives a hundred miles to the largest, dirtiest, loudest city she can find, determined to drown herself in a sea of people. She leaves her car in a Manhattan parking garage and walks a few blocks with her suitcase until she finds a cheap hotel with a vacancy. She’d like nothing more than to collapse into bed, but the mud of Woodstock is still under her nails, her hair still tangled from the rain. She runs a hot bath and starts scrubbing.
She can’t wash it all away. The memory of sitting in the rain, of realizing Oliver hadn’t come. And the idea that crawled into her mind as she drove: She could forget him with someone new. It would be easy. She could have an hour, a night of peace, and disappear into the city. It worked before Oliver. It can work again. She can be that Beatrix, the one who survived the plague and the Great Fire and the cruelty of people who didn’t understand her. But she knows as soon as she thinks it that it won’t work. She isn’t that Beatrix anymore.
She watches her reflection in the bathroom mirror as she braids her damp hair into a crown around her head. Still no threads of silver, still no wrinkles. She could be in a London tavern or in the servants’ quarters of a grand manor, if she doesn’t look too closely at the uncanny eyes staring back at her, far, far too old for a face so young.
“Hello, Beatrix,” the faerie says behind her in the glass.
“Hello,” Beatrix replies, unsurprised. The faerie always returns when she thinks she can get what she wants.
“Are you ready to end this?”
Beatrix turns from the mirror. The faerie hasn’t changed at all, as if she’s stepped from Beatrix’s memory into the dingy hotel bathroom. She leans against the doorframe, her shining red hair too bright against thenicotine-stained walls. Her shimmering dress is far less ethereal than that night in the clearing, surrounded now by mildewed grout and mismatched tiles instead of ancient forest. She looks absurd, so utterly out of place that Beatrix might laugh if the weight of the creature’s glowing gaze didn’t steal her breath away, still.
