Beatrix stops. “Yes.”
“And you’re over two hundred years old?” he asks slowly.
She turns back to him. “Like I said, I know how it sounds.”
Oliver’s brow furrows, as if he’s calculating exactly how mad she is. “Completely delusional. But I won’t be born for another four centuries, so what do I know?”
The weight in Beatrix’s chest lifts. “How is that possible?”
“It will be easier to explain in about three hundred years,” Oliver says. “I can tell you that no faeries are involved, so I think that makes me being here slightly less impossible than you being here.”
She raises an eyebrow. “I didn’t realize it was a competition.”
He grins. “Only if I’m winning.”
She turns Oliver’s coin over in her hand, both real and impossible. Like her. Like him.
“Should I call you Lady Woodward?” he asks.
Beatrix looks down at her elaborate dress and laughs. “No, it’s Lancourt now.” Beatrix Woodward was dead, so she told the first person in London who asked for her name that it wasLancaut. Time has changed it, like it changes everything. “And I’m still a thief. The costume belongs to Lady DeSallowe. I’m her maid.”
“Too bad,” Oliver says. “Lady Lancourt has a nice ring to it.”
“Then you may call me that, Lord…?”
“Rhodes,” he says with a laughable attempt at a bow. “At your service.”
“You’re not a scholar from Cambridge, are you?”
“I said I was fromnearCambridge. And I am.” He smirks at her. “The one in Massachusetts.”
“The colony?” she asks, surprised.
“How about I get back to you on that in about sixty-five years?” Oliver says. “As far as being a scholar, I graduated a few weeks ago from a university that won’t be founded until 1852.”
Beatrix shakes her head. Anyone else would either sound mad talking like that or drive themselves mad trying to keep it all straight. “What are you doing here?”
Oliver runs a hand through his hair. “That is harder to explain.”
“It can’t be more difficult than a faerie’s curse,” Beatrix says.
He leans heavily on the bridge’s rail, and she leans next to him, just like they stood that day in London.
“Before. When you were…”
Human. Mortal. Like me.
Oliver sighs. “Did you ever feel like… like you blinked and a year had passed?”
Beatrix looks over at him sharply.
“And then two years. And then ten, and you don’t know what the hell you’ve been doing, where it’s gone—like your whole life is flying by, and everyone else doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, and you—you’re just—” He struggles to find the right words, the ones that capture that desperate, panicked feeling that used to squeeze her tight until she feared she’d never breathe freely again.
“Standing still?”
Oliver’s shining eyes meet hers. He nods.
May 25, 2202Boston, Massachusetts
