The docent retreats, and Beatrix meanders through the exhibit, looking dutifully into each brightly lit case as her stomach twists itself into knots and her heart threatens to pound out of her chest. Waiting. Hoping.
The flowers aren’t a comfort. They aren’t even a distraction as she waits for Oliver and what she knows—inevitably—comes next.
Goodbye.
Because the flowers are frozen in time and fragile, glass kept behind glass. Because they remind her too much of her heart, of what it has become these last two centuries, waiting for Oliver. Waiting to shatter.
She doesn’t notice she is crying until a young woman with bubblegum-pink hair asks her if she is all right.
“Fine, thanks.” She brushes the evidence quickly away and looks up at the woman with a forced smile, as if that will prove it.
The woman’s eyes meet hers and go wide. “Are you Beatrix?”
“How do you—”
“Oliver.”
Her heartbeat falters. “You know Oliver?” She is stating the obvious, but it is safer to ask a question she knows the answer to than to ask the one sending her heart into her guts:Why isn’t he here?
The woman stares at Beatrix, her mouth slightly open, her wide brown eyes darting over her. She shakes her head. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting you to be real—here—I mean,” the woman says quickly. “I wasn’t expecting you to really be here.” She forces a smile. “I’m his friend Zoë.”
“Is Oliver—” Beatrix swallows the lump rising in her throat. “Is he all right?” He has to be all right. She still has time. He still has time.
Zoë hesitates. “He wasn’t up to coming, so he asked me to meet you. He said to give you this.” She offers Beatrix a folded piece of paper.
She takes it with a trembling hand and opens it. It’s his handwriting,but not so neat as his journal pages, unsteady words scrawled across hospital stationery.
Bea—
I hope you like the flowers as much as you liked the stained glass at the Great Exhibition. I am so sorry I’m not here to see it with you. I told you I would try to get back to you with everything in me. Turns out everything in me isn’t enough anymore. It’s torture knowing where you are, knowing you’re so close, but I still can’t reach you.
I asked Zoë to bring you to the house if you want to see me, but if this is even a fraction of what you felt every time I left you, then I don’t know how you could stand to look at me anymore, let alone want to see me again.
I can’t imagine how long this time apart has been for you, how hard it’s been. I would love to see you again, but if you don’t want to see me, I understand. Really.
—Oliver
He is giving her a choice, a way out. Because this is it, the end of everything they have shared, have ever had together. Because he has run out of time, and she never will.
She reads the note again, but the words don’t change. Whatever she chooses now—in this moment—there is no going back.
But Oliver is wrong. It isn’t a choice at all.
She looks up at Zoë. “I want to see him.” More than she has ever wanted anything in her entire life.
Beatrix stands frozen on the threshold of Oliver’s bedroom, cold seeping through her insides, her voice caught in her throat.
Apollo 11 felt like the end. So did Woodstock. So did turning the last page of Oliver’s journal. But none of those endings felt like this—like time has conspired with grief to flood her veins with sadness and fear and anger and pain and despair, all at once. Like the only thing keepingher afloat is a love so deep it hurts. She isn’t sure which will drown her in the end. Because this time, it really is the end.
She hasn’t seen Oliver in over two centuries. He is her past, lost to her ages ago. And yet here he is, just as she remembers him. Slighter. Paler. But still him. Still here.
“Oliver?”
He turns toward her without raising his head from the mountain of pillows beneath it. A gasp escapes her. His summer-sky eyes are sunken, grayer now, fading into a winter blue. The weight of his gaze on her still makes her heart leap.
“Bea?” He pushes himself up to sit in his single bed. It takes more effort than it should.
She takes a step forward, then another, not so much walking toward him as being pulled into his orbit.
