Theo walks through the doorway, a paper bag printed with a pharmacy logo clutched in one hand. He drops it on the counter as his weary gaze finds hers. He freezes.
“Hi, Theo.”
He looks at her like he’s seen a ghost. Because to him, she is.
“What the hell?” Theo’s voice is laced with fear and confusion. “How—who are you?”
Zoë barges into the kitchen, Luke on her heels. He looks from Beatrix to Theo, back again. “Everything all right?”
“She was at the hospital,” Theo says. “The night our parents died. She knocked me over.”
“You don’t honestly think—” Zoë starts.
“I remember her eyes,” Theo snaps. “Her clothes were stained with blood. Security was chasing her down the hall.”
“Okay, that is pretty memorable,” Luke admits.
Beatrix remembers his eyes, too, so much like Oliver’s that she almost stopped. “I never meant to go to the hospital,” she whispers. “Just the accident.”
Theo’s eyes widen. “You were there?”
She had messed up. There was blood everywhere—hers, theirs—sharp pebbles of glass grinding into her flesh as she crawled to reach them, the wail of sirens growing louder. Closer. But what was she supposed to do? She couldn’t leave them. “When the paramedics arrived,they saw me all cut up from the glass. I thought it’d be better not to make a scene, so I let them bring me to the hospital. I healed too fast. I had to run before they realized I wasn’t injured anymore.” Right into Theo, his mind dazed, his heart crushed, on his way to give Oliver the news.
“Wait, why were you injured?” Luke asks. Zoë elbows him in the ribs.
Beatrix looks to Theo. He nods. He wants to know. “The car landed on its roof,” she murmurs. She can still see it when she closes her eyes. “I kicked in the window so I could hold your father’s hand.”
“Why?” Theo asks. His voice is barely a whisper.
“Because no one should die alone.”
“Mom?”
“Already gone,” Beatrix says. Her heart cracks at the memory of the lithe, lively woman, so still in that car. “I’m sorry.”
Theo’s eyes shine. “Did Oliver ask you to do that?”
“Oliver doesn’t know.” She hadn’t so much planned on going to the accident as she found herself knowing she would be there.
Theo runs a hand through his hair. He looks like Oliver, or maybe it is Oliver who looks like Theo when he does it. “Do you work for Aevum?”
Beatrix shakes her head. He sounds like Oliver, too, that night in Venice. “I don’t work for Aevum. I don’t work for another agency. I don’t work for the government or time travel through a university program. But Oliver already told you all that, didn’t he?”
Theo can’t hold her gaze.
“He did,” Luke admits.
“He told us everything,” Zoë adds.
She considers taking the easy way out, considers telling them Oliver’s illness must be affecting his mind. But Oliver trusted them with the truth. They should believe him, like he believed her.
“If I was time traveling to see Oliver during his excursions, why wouldn’t I time travel to his present, to be with him?” she asks.
“Maybe you have,” Theo says. “That’s why he arranged to meet you at the museum, where Zoë found you.”
“He arranged to meet me because I refused to say goodbye to him in 1965,” she says. “In my present. And then it was too late. If I was a time traveler, I would have come to him.”
Luke shakes his head. “I can’t keep any of this straight.”
