Page 142 of Once a Villain
“Whose idea was that?”
“Yours.”
“Terrible idea. Awful.” Aaron kissed her with each statement. “I’ll have to make it up to you later.”
“I think I hear the boat,” Nick said, a smile in his voice now too.
Joan tilted her head and heard it too—the insect buzz of an engine on the river.
It was Ruth who arrived first, though, with a huge basket. “I broughtsomuch food.” She flopped onto the blanket with a groan. “Everyone has to eat it; that basket washeavy.”
“We will,” Joan promised. She started unpacking it—six different kinds of sandwiches and little savory tarts. Scones, jam, cream, cherries, strawberries, raspberries. “How did you carry all this?”
On the river, Jamie and Tom’s narrowboat was drawing into the Olivers’ private dock. Frankie and Sylvie jumped off first and came over to investigate the food.
Ruth retrieved a container of cold chicken from the basket and stripped pieces off the bone for each of the animals. “You’re late!” she called to the boat.
“Sorry,” Jamie said cheerfully, tying the rope to the dock. “It’s a lot harder to be on time when you can’t time-travel to the exact moment.”
A year, Joan thought. A year since anyone had been able to time-travel.
“Therearethings I miss,” Aaron said, pushing his pale hair from his forehead.
“Being able to choose the weather?” Ruth suggested.
“Garum and silphium,” Tom said.
“Always having access to perfectly ripe fruit,” Jamie said.
“The 2380s,” Tom said. “Those are going to be some good years.”
“You’re saying too many things,” Nick grumbled, and Aaron looked over at him, expression softening, like it only ever did with Joan and Nick.
“The cost was too high,” Aaron murmured to him.
“Far too high,” Joan agreed.
They all missed being able to travel, though, she knew. Aaron dreamed, sometimes, that he was in Londinium. That he was in the Victorian era. In the future. Sometimes, he woke with yearning in his eyes.
I’d rather be here, he said sometimes afterward.I might miss it, but I’d far rather be here with you.
Joan dreamed too. She dreamed of Holland House before it had burned. Of St. James’s Park in the 1990s. Of Limehouse in the 1800s. But most of all, she missed the ripple and shift of the timeline itself. She hadn’t known how comforting it had been until it was gone.
“We gained more than we lost,” Aaron said now, seriously.
That was true. This was a brand-new timeline; not the original, and not any that they’d lived in before. And it wasgood. Joan’s mother was alive here, and so was Aaron’s. Joan’s dad was here. Nick’s family. The Lius. The Hunts. The Graves... Even the time that Joan and Nick had taken from themselves to travel seemed to have been returned. The families still had theirindividual powers, and Aaron’s mother had used hers to check; she’d looked them over carefully, and promised that they both had a whole lifetime of years left.
And there was this precious, wonderful thing between Joan and Aaron and Nick. Joan had never imagined they could be happy like this.
Eleanor, though, was truly gone. Maybe she’d been swallowed by the void. Or maybe the timeline had erased her completely. Not even their own mother remembered her now. Not even Gran. Only Joan, and the people here today....
“Shall we?” Joan asked the others now.
She’d brought a little wax-paper boat with a candle that Nick lit now with a match. Joan put the boat on the river, and they watched it float slowly downstream, the spark of light already spluttering out.
It was strange, perhaps, to want to remember someone who’d done so much harm to her and to the people she loved. But Eleanorhadbeen Joan’s sister once upon a time.
Later in the afternoon—so late that the sun had begun to dip—they all dozed in comfortable silence. Sylvie had warmed to Frankie over the months, and she lay now with her head on Frankie’s back, purring.
