“Are you in there, Bea? Open the door, please.”
The stairs creak. Oliver makes a show of searching his pockets for the key he left on the nightstand inside the room.
Beatrix rounds the corner with a stack of folded towels. Her black dress falls to her ankles, and her hair is styled in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. Her eyes meet his, grow wide at the sight of him. She reaches for her face. The towels cascade to the floor. “You came back?”
Oliver’s stomach drops. Her ring sits on her left hand again. She must have gone to the munitions factory for her things. Alone. “Hi, Bea.”
She takes his hand and pulls him away from the door. “What are you doing here?”
Oliver can’t tell if she’s happy or angry or simply can’t believe he has the nerve to show his face again. She drops his hand and waits for him to explain himself.
“Listen, I’m sorry about what I said earlier. I shouldn’t have said I didn’t care. It was stupid. I was stupid.”
Beatrix stares at him, her mismatched eyes impossible to read.
She must have believed him then. Thought he meant what he said. “Come on, Bea, say something.”
She picks up a towel from the floor. Her hands are shaking. “You’re sorry?”
Oliver stoops to help her. “I am. Really, truly sorry. I fucked up.”
She doesn’t look like she believes him. “For what you said earlier?”
“I didn’t mean it, I swear.”
Beatrix takes the towels from him. “We need to talk.”
She leads him down the hall, pushes open a door at the end, and ushers him inside. The bedroom is smaller and sparser than the one they shared. It doesn’t even have a window. “You switched rooms?”
Beatrix drops her towels onto an oak washstand near the door. She crosses the room to the brass bed in the corner and sinks down onto it. She studies his face as if she has never seen him before in her life. “Oliver, you vanished from that other room four years ago.”
His heart skips a beat. “Four years?”
Beatrix nods. “To the day.”
He runs a hand through his hair. “No, that’s impossible. I returned to the same day, twelve hours after I left.”
“You must have made a mistake.” She reaches for a magazine on her bedside table and hands it to him.
He scans the title:Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event Described by A. Conan Doyle. Beatrix taps the corner of the cover. “It’s 1920.”
Oliver closes his eyes, tries to think through the dull throbbing in his skull, to remember Lucy’s too-bright tablet screen and the numbers he couldn’t focus on. Had it read 1920 instead of 1916? It must have.
He opens his eyes. Beatrix watches him, her brow lined with worry, even now.
Oliver shakes his head. “But you’re still here.”
“I work here,” she says. “Cleaning the rooms. The innkeeper’s wife felt sorry for me. She let me borrow one of her daughter’s dresses so I could fetch my things from the factory. Told me I could stay here and work for her if I needed a place to go. You left so abruptly, I wasn’t sure you’d come back. But if you did…” She looks quickly away.
Oliver’s heart sinks. “You waited for me?”
Beatrix won’t meet his gaze, all her attention on the ring she’s twisting around her finger. “I always wait for you.”
Her words hit him like a punch in the gut.
Four years. He’s left her forfour years. “Bea, I am so sorry.” He wants toreach for her, wants to pull her into him and wrap his arms around her. He doesn’t. He’s not sure she wants him to.
“It’s fine,” she says.
