Beatrix’s heart thuds against her ribs.
“Do you want to survive to see the moment you are so broken, so desperate, that you call out to me for salvation?”
“Yes,” Beatrix says, even as she wonders if she does.
The faerie is gone in a blink, and Beatrix is alone. She grabs her book bag from the foot of the bed and flees the hotel room, gripped by a sudden urge to be with people.
Beatrix steps out onto the street and slips on a pair of sunglasses, hiding her eyes behind dark, round lenses. She walks to Central Park, to the familiar comfort of the woods.
It is strange to find a forest inside a city. A wild, stubborn piece of the past that refuses to let go. She follows an asphalt path to a swooping stone bridge with an ornate railing, this one made of gray stone instead of white. It still feels like she is stepping back in time as she crosses it.
She sits on an empty park bench and pulls Oliver’s journal out of her book bag. She flips past his entries until she finds the blank page she is looking for. Woodstock. She doesn’t know what Oliver would have written about if he had been there, so she writes about what Woodstock was to her. An ending.
She looks up from the page and notices a woman has sat on the other end of her bench, reading a book. The woman glances at Beatrix and offers her a polite smile. Beatrix returns the gesture. Her eyes snag on the book’s title.A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
The woman glances at the cover. “Yeah, have you read it?”
Beatrix shakes her head. “No, but I saw a performance a long time ago.”
“I heard it’s a movie now.”
Beatrix laughs. She can’t help it. “What would Shakespeare think of that?”
“He’d probably love it,” the woman says.
Beatrix nods. In a way, he has survived as long as she has.
The woman returns to her book, and Beatrix returns to hers. She puts Woodstock in the past with Shakespeare and Carnevale and Paris. She reads the words written across the top of the next page in Oliver’s handwriting—a place and a time and a promise of adventure. The rest of it is empty, waiting for her to choose.
Beatrix closes the notebook and tucks it into her bag. She retraces her steps and crosses the bridge again. She stops at the center, as if it were the Rialto Bridge, as if New York were Venice, as if Oliver had just uttered her name. Changed her life.
She’ll have to start over.
She brushes her thumb along the smooth edge of her iron ring, a habit born 464 years ago.
Oliver is gone. The faerie is gone. She can only swear an oath to herself now.
She pulls the ring from her finger, clutches it so fiercely it digs into her palm. Her left hand feels naked without it.
She won’t be that other Beatrix.
She won’t become a ghost.
She won’t lose herself like the faerie.
She opens her hand and lets the ring slide into the water flowing beneath the bridge, watches as it sinks into the murky depths. It had served as a reminder of her humanity, even when she was on the brink of losing it. Now, its absence will remind her of her promise.
The faerie cursed her to survive, but she will live.
March 19, 2102London, England
Beatrix knew this day would come. Every time she turned a page in Oliver’s journal from the future to the past—the past growing heavier, the future disappearing beneath her fingertips—her heart sank. Every dotted page filled with her fine cursive served as a brutal reminder: Time is marching on, moving relentlessly, endlessly forward.
Knowing has done nothing to ease the ache in her chest, the burning in her eyes, the closing of her throat. Knowing doesn’t stop her tears from splashing across the open pages of his notebook.
The last pages.
She had seen wondrous sights and met amazing people, but she hadn’t found him. And now, watching her tears streak across the page, turning the black ink colors, it feels like he has left her all over again.
