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“I don’t know, Harte.” Esta worried her lower lip with her teeth. “That’s changing so much. Anything could go wrong. It could change everything. We could destroy Dakari’s future.”
“Or we could give him a future,” Harte insisted. “He could be his own man, free from the Professor. And if we do it right, nothing else has to change.”
“There are too many variables,” she argued.
“Are there?” He drew her hands into his, and she felt the warmth of his magic sizzle across her skin. “Give me your past, Esta, and I can make sure Dakari keeps it on track.”
Realization hit. “Your affinity.”
He nodded.
“But that would take away his choice, his free will.” She shook her head. “I can’t do that to him.”
“He’s going to end up dead on Nibsy’s floor, Esta.” Harte’s grip around her hands tightened. “We can give him a future. We can make sure that even if Nibsy makes it through alive, Dakari knows what’s coming. We can make sure he survives.”
She could protect him. She could make sure Dakari wasn’t time’s victim.
“It might not work,” she said, chewing her lip as she watched the line of carriages.
Harte leaned in close to her until he could smell the soft scent of her hair. “But what if it does?”
SOMETHING BORROWED
1902—St. Paul’s Chapel
As her mother adjusted the gauzy tulle around her face, Ruby couldn’t help but think about how strange it was to be both solidly in your own body and somehow apart from it. She felt quite numb. The past three days had been a blur, and now that she was there at the church, dressed in the confection of silk and lace that Clara had selected, it all seemed so very absurd.
How quickly her life had changed, but not only in the last three days and not only because of the impending ceremony. If she were being truly honest with herself, her life had changed in the span of a single second. When her lips had touched Viola’s at the gala, everything had come into focus. For the first time in her life, Ruby had the strangest sense that she could finally breathe.
But then it had all been ripped away.
Maybe if she had never kissed Viola. No… perhaps if she had never met Viola, there would not be this sinking feeling of regret. But there was no going back, no way to rewrite the past and make other choices. Now there was only the aisle before her, leading to a future that would not be terrible. She knew that. She was not marching toward her death or even toward a future filled with pain or suffering. She was simply walking toward Theo.
Somehow, though, that didn’t seem to matter.
There she was, standing in the narthex of St. Paul’s chapel, waiting for her own wedding to begin, and she would have rather been anywhere else. With her veil casting a white haze over her vision, Ruby could suddenly see more clearly than she ever had before. She’d never really intended to marry Theo. She’d always assumed something would come up to get them both out of their promises.
But nothing had. Now there was no escaping the path she’d put them both upon. Soon the organ would trill its opening notes and announce that any possibility of claiming the life she had once hoped for was officially at an end.
Her mother lifted the tulle over Ruby’s face long enough to place a cool kiss on her cheek before she went to take her seat in the church, and then it was only Ruby and Clara’s humorless husband, Henry. Because of course there would be a man. She was not even permitted to give herself into this new future.
The organ began to trill the familiar tune, and Henry offered his arm.
Ruby looked down at it and truly considered running. But she had never been one to run from something—only toward. And with her life suddenly unrecognizable, where would she even go?
“I don’t believe I have to tell you how happy it makes all of us to know you’ll finally be taken in hand,” Henry said softly as they stepped into the open door and waited for the crowd in the church to rise. “Although I often have my doubts that Barclay will ever be man enough for that particular job.”
Ruby swallowed down her anger and turned to him with what she hoped would look like a blinding smile to anyone close enough to see. “Dearest brother,” she said through her clenched teeth. “Isn’t it funny? We had the same fears about you on Clara’s wedding day. But I doubt Theo will be half the disappointment to my family as you have been.”
She could feel his arm tighten as her barb hit its mark, but Ruby stepped forward, starting down the aisle and forcing Henry to follow.
St. Paul’s was a beautiful old chapel, with its white columns and arched vaulted ceilings overhead. At the other end of the aisle, waiting on the marble steps that led up to the great altar, was Theo, looking impossibly handsome in his morning coat—and impossibly nervous as well. He loved her. She knew that. He loved her enough to go through with this mad plan of hers, but what they were about to do here before god and these witnesses would end all other possibilities. Headstrong as Ruby might be, she was not fickle. Nor was Theo. They would take their vows seriously, and once they were wed, neither of them would be untrue.
They would not be miserable, but Ruby also suspected they would neither be truly happy—not as they might have otherwise been.
When Ruby had taken the first step into the church, the aisle seemed endless, but in no time at all she found herself standing at the altar next to Theo. He wore a smile, but his eyes betrayed the more complicated truth of how he felt. She imagined hers did the same. She understood the sadness in his expression—a bittersweet mix of affection and pain—because she felt the same echoing emotions. Before she realized it was time, Henry was already taking her hand and placing it upon Theo’s. The rector was beginning to speak.
She met Theo’s eyes through the haze of ivory tulle. We don’t have to do this, she wanted to say. You don’t have to do this.
