“I’m not sure if the Robert who is getting off that train is the same one they saw get on it.” A deep furrow creases her brow.
Beatrix takes her hand. “He’s still their brother, injured or not. They’ll be glad to see him.”
“It’s not his leg that worries me,” Mary says. “The things he’s seen? The horrors he’s lived through?” She shudders. “I can’t imagine.”
Beatrix thinks maybe she can. She has never seen a war like this. No one has. But she has starved in the cold on the London streets, and she has seen bodies stacked in the gutters. She has been the only one left behind when everyone else she loved or cared for or hardly knew at all has died. She has wondered if she should count herself lucky or cursed, or maybe just forgotten.
She squeezes Mary’s hand. “He’ll be glad to see them, too.”
Beatrix walks behind the children as they dart up the road to the train station, her hands shoved deep into her coat pockets. She ushers them all onto the electric tram before she realizes her mistake. They will have to wait for the train, and they are buzzing with energy. She gets off at the next stop, and they follow her like a row of ducklings—through the center of town, past the old medieval wall and the minster. When the station comes into view, the children race one another toward it.
They still have to wait. The children assure Beatrix numerous times that it is the longest ten minutes of their lives, but the train arrives exactly when it is meant to.
Elsie squeals at the sight of her brother in the doorway of the train car. He is tall and broad, with close-cropped brown hair and the same brown eyes as Elsie and his mother. Then all the others are shouting his name, waving him over. He grins, hoists his pack higher, and limps through the crowd to them. His siblings rush him, all hugs and questions.
“Give your brother some room to breathe.” Beatrix laughs.
Robert notices her for the first time, standing off to the side, trying to avoid the crush of little bodies.
Elsie looks between them. “That’s Beatrix. She lives in your bedroom.”
Robert laughs. “That is certainly a new development.”
“I’m your mother’s boarder,” Beatrix explains. “I help her with the children.”
Robert’s brow furrows.
“She’s fine,” Beatrix adds quickly. “She’s at the house. She had some things to finish up before you arrived.”
Robert nods. “Pleasure to meet you, Beatrix. You’ve got your work cut out for you with this lot.”
Beatrix smiles. “I think you’re right.”
She sits behind them on the tram ride home. Robert glances at her occasionally as the children tell him about everything he’s missed in his months at the front. She smiles politely in return, but that ache has started in her chest, the one that begins as a single pinprick, a stinging reminder of what she cannot have. And maybe a single pinprick is not so bad, but a hundred—a thousand—hurt.
She excuses herself from dinner. Mary tells her not to talk such nonsense; she has already set a place for her. She busies herself in the kitchen when the meal is done. Robert insists he misses the washing up and convinces the others to pitch in, too. She tries to sneak away when the family gathers in the sitting room. Elsie begs to sit on her lap in front of the fire so she can watch Arthur and John play cards with the deck Robert has brought them.
Robert smiles fondly as he watches Elsie doze against Beatrix’s shoulder a few minutes later, his injured leg propped on the low coffee table. “Looks like you’re stuck with us.”
When even the older children have begun to nod off, Mary calls an end to the night. “Off to bed,” she says with the first genuinely happy smile Beatrix is sure she’s ever seen her wear.
Mary scoops Elsie off Beatrix’s lap, and the little girl doesn’t stir. “You’ll be ready for your own soon,” she says with a wink. She turns away and carries her daughter up the narrow staircase.
Her words hit Beatrix like a punch in the gut, knock the air out of her lungs. Her face falls, her mask slipping out of place as the truth tears through her, the pinhole perforations giving way.
“Beatrix?” Robert looks at her from the couch, his brown eyes flooded with concern. “Are you all right?”
“Excuse me.” She pulls herself to her feet, takes her coat from thestand, and slips out the front door before he can see the tears shining in her eyes.
The winter air stings her cheeks as she walks to the pier. There is no moon, and the black of the ocean bleeds into the black of the night sky in an endless, inky dark. Beatrix wishes it would swallow her.
It’s all Oliver’s fault. He cracked through the stone walls she had built around her heart. Maybe he weakened them for others, too, each visit leaving her more lonely—more vulnerable—than the last.
She wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand. It has been more than sixty years since he left. He still haunts her.
How pathetic.
She takes a deep breath, fills her lungs with the salty sea air. She’s not in London anymore. He’s not here anymore. She is.
