She settles against his shoulder. He doesn’t smell like Lancaut anymore. She breathes him in, real and here and now and hers. He wraps his arm around her.
She tells him about Woodstock. About living in New York City afterward. About traveling the world, following his journal, and about all the wonderful people she met and the strange adventures she had because she did.
She tells him she took a lesson at his mother’s dance studio, the day that it opened.
She tells him about the fireworks in Washington. How his father made her laugh until her sides ached, how his mother knew all the best spots to eat and rest and watch the celebration. How she can see both of them in Oliver now, saw him in both of them that day.
He gives her a weak smile. “I knew they would like you.”
She takes his hand. She tells him she was with them, at the end.
“Thank you,” he whispers. She wipes the tear from his cheek.
Beatrix talks until she is hoarse. Once, she thinks Oliver has fallen asleep, but when she stops speaking, he opens his eyes and asks her to continue. When she reaches the last tearstained page, she can barely read her own handwriting.
Oliver runs his fingers over it, smeared ink on warped paper. “What happened?”
“I ran out of hope,” Beatrix confesses.
His gaze darkens. “Then what did you do?”
She closes the notebook. “It felt like an ending. So, I began again. I went back to London.” Because she always goes back to London. “And then, I lived.” Made her own memories, beautiful and ugly and entirely hers.
She lays a gentle hand on his cheek. “I wasn’t a ghost, Oliver. I promise.”
Time has never moved so fast for Beatrix, like the River Wye swollen by spring rains, rushing, rushing, rushing away. She lies with Oliver for hours, curled around him on his bed meant for one, not speaking, not doing anything except existing with him. At the same time. In the same place.
They watch the sunset.
“Bea?” His voice is weaker now, fading with the daylight. She can still hear the fear in it.
She props her chin on his chest. “Yes?”
“I don’t think—” His voice breaks. “I can’t say goodbye to you.”
She squeezes his hand. “You don’t have to.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Beatrix runs her fingers through his messy curls. “Don’t be sorry. We don’t need to say goodbye.”
Oliver searches her mismatched eyes for answers.
“When I was writing my entries in your journal, I used to imagine every person in those pages was still there, still existing in their moments. Neil Armstrong, stepping onto the moon. Those dancers, leaping across the stage at Drury Lane. Queen Victoria visiting the Great Exhibition over and over again.”
Oliver smiles, imagining it.
“How else can you travel to those moments if they aren’t always there, waiting for you?” She lays her head on Oliver’s chest, listens to the thudding of his heart through the thin cotton of his T-shirt.
Here. Here. Here.
“I’m sure Lucy could give you some scientific explanation,” Oliver says. His voice rumbles through his chest beneath her, just like it used to. “But I like yours.” He wraps his arm around her.
“Think about all the times, all the places, we’ve been together. Dancing in the Piazza San Marco or on the frozen Thames. In my living room and through the streets of London. On a hotel balcony overlooking Paris. We will always be there.” Together, spinning across time itself.
Oliver’s eyes drift closed. A fear greater than any Beatrix has ever known tears open an abyss inside her. She presses closer to him, listens to the beat of his heart, wills her own to beat along with it.Stay with me.
“I will always be at the Globe picking your pocket,” Beatrix says softly in his ear. She waits for him to tell her she didn’t steal anything from him, that she was the only one who ever tried.
