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You have thirteen missed calls.
Eva Stratt turns off her phone and opens the door to a crisp breeze, longing for a warmth the sun is ill-equipped to give.
It’s not very surprising anymore—rare is it to find a sunny day during these times, Eva knows more than most. She mourns for every day that the fog sticks to her skin, for the mist her breath becomes when she breathes, for the count projected on her television that chips away at her faith, eleven point nine light years away.
She’s long stopped looking skyward whenever the news declare another tragedy. That is not where her eyes need to be. They do not need her guidance from far away. She’s made sure of that.
It’s a waiting game. A coin toss in another solar system that won’t come down to declare their fate until it is halfway to too late. God willing, she said once. She believed it then and she believes it still.
Eva Stratt is not so arrogant to believe herself a pillar.
She had been called many things—Dictator of the World still manages to make her roll her eyes when she hears it—but no one alive will claim her to be a pillar. Some philosophy hopeful might call her a trolley operator or a well-meant enjoyer of older myths would claim her to be an Atlas, but her burden had only been as heavy as the nuisance politics played in the construction of the Hail Mary.
She can stand her ground in a courtroom. Yell at a representative in all three languages he knows for wasting her time with frivolous things like diplomacy. Spit through gritted teeth that she would much rather have the billionaire from a first-world country simply fork his money over than have Eva Stratt demand the bank give it to her themselves, which yes, she was allowed to do because she was Eva fucking Stratt.
She can do all of this, because she was given the power to do so, but what she cannot do is build a rocket ship. She cannot build thousands of spin drives like Engineer Dimitri. Cannot delay the cooling like Dr. Leclerc. Cannot breed Astrophage like Dr. Gra—
…
…
Eva Stratt is not the pillar of the Hail Mary. That honor belongs to the Petrova Taskforce. The best and brightest humanity has to offer—they are the ones holding the planet together. They are the ones who will save them.
Her skeleton crew drifting across the cosmos will wake up and save them.
(And then they will die. They will die because it was three against eight billion. They will die because Eva Stratt could not save them any more than she could save the sun.)
The least she could do is make things easier for them.
That means surviving prison. She claws her way out of every court room with a damn good lawyer at her side and a hell of a defense on the other. She gets thrown in a cell anyway, but after attending a World Tour’s worth of court hearings and listening to a judge’s gavel bang the same single note at every end of it, she supposes she can’t be truly resentful that they jailed her in a rather nice facility in her home country.
She is “broken out” (because, truly, why would anyone ever believe she wouldn’t walk, one way or another?) by a friend of a friend from the Taskforce, and she is put back to work, if only from the shadows. She has been demoted from the public face of the Petrova Taskforce to a puppeteer from the sidelines, and sometimes being that instead feels much easier.
She works with climatologists and agriculturists and engineers and scientists who aim to revolutionize the world one gram of Astrophage at a time. She signs off on seed bank initiatives and fabric production projects, and Eva hopes to their prayer in the sky that it’s enough to offset the growing unrest among the people.
She grins and bears the upturned noses when she demands for funding and resources. She ignores the half-whispered barbs thrown her way.
She doesn’t care. They can complain all they want. They can paint her a villain in every junior high history class so long as there’s a future to write her in in the first place.
Sometimes, though… she thinks about getting a second.
Someone to share this weight with her.
Someone to trade insults about the upper echelon with when they get aggravating.
Someone to simplify the science to her when she’s on her third migraine on a Tuesday afternoon.
Someone to simply… stand in silence with. Someone to miss the sunset with.
Then she remembers what happened the last time she had a second, and the idea burns out faster than a candle in a breeze.
Eva does not enjoy thinking about her First Officer. What he was and what he is and what he will be. Ryland Grace in his classroom and in her Taskforce and in the infinite space.
If she allowed herself to think about him, maybe she’d say that she misses him. That her brain is her weapon but her heart is her cage. That she can feel for him but she could never love him. Loving means too much and it means too little.
Eva Stratt is impenetrable, people say. She does not let people in, and not even Ryland Grace can change that. It’s why she sent him up to space without blinking. It’s why she was the only dry eye at the space crew’s memorials.
She never lets anyone get to her.
(He slips through the cracks anyway.)
There’s an urban legend in Japan about a café in Tokyo that can take people back in time.
Eva doesn’t usually believe in urban legends. She prefers hard facts and concrete evidence. She had a bit of a phase with different mythologies when she was a young girl, but time and responsibility had sucked out any joy and comfort the supernatural could have given her.
But she heard of Funiculi Funicula from one of her engineers as they were working through the logistics of making an Astrophage-powered hospital.
Much like how it was on the Gansu, Stratt knew everything about everyone, and if she didn’t, her security would know for her. Gossip circles and secret trades had never quite been hidden to her, and she was aware that most people aboard knew this as well.
(It’s how she knew to utilize Grace’s twin brother against him when the opportunity presented itself in the form of an ill-timed headline on an Australian news station—)
(“I’m sorry. I-I can’t do it. I don’t want to leave. I need–I need to be here, please, to bury my brother—Stratt, he’s the only one I have left, I can’t—”)
Such is the case for Mr. Kumira, a rather brilliant biomedical engineer from Tokyo whom had been welcomed among the staff while Eva was locked behind bars.
He had been quite afraid of her during those first few months—avoiding her eyes during meetings, stumbling over his words whenever she spoke to him directly—but he had mentioned a sickly younger sister one time as his cause for joining the fight, and Eva quickly had someone look into her.
Akari Kumira was currently at one of the better hospitals in Japan under quarantine for a new strain of pneumonia brought about by the Global Cooling, her weak immune system from adolescence following her well into adulthood. She’s on her way to recovery right now, but it was foggy for a while whether she’d survive it.
Though people outside of the Taskforce call Eva heartless, she liked to believe she was quite merciful. She provides several benefits for her people, making sure that they don’t suffer from factors outside of the Taskforce and therefore get in the way of their performance. A grieving scientist or engineer is of no use to her, she tells them.
After paying off Ms. Kumira’s hospital visit, Mr. Kumira thanked her profusely and began thawing out, so to speak, around her. He was quite chatty, she realized. A lot of her people are—it seems that the title of “greatest minds” were often synonymous with some eccentric quality she doesn’t care enough to name.
It was during one of these tangents that Eva found out about Funiculi Funicula.
“I went back in time, once.” Mr. Kumira said after a lull in conversation. “During the worst of Akira’s examinations. As cruel as it sounds, I wanted to see a version of her that wasn’t tied down in a hospital bed.”
Eva hadn’t known what to say to the man, the conversation becoming more vulnerable than she’d like, so she hummed something vaguely consoling and steered the topic back to the task at hand.
She doesn’t know why, but the time-traveling café in back-alley Tokyo stuck with her.
Now, nearly a year and a half later (six months before her Hail Mary wakes up in what she hopes is their salvation), Eva Stratt stands in the entrance of an old, underground café in Japan when she should be in a plane heading to Russia to meet with Dimitri about something or other.
To say that Eva doesn’t know why she’s here would be a lie and a blatant disregard of her intelligence. She knows why she’s here. She knows why she booked this flight despite the rarity of a pilot during these unpredictable weather patterns.
She wants to see Ryland.
By God, despite it all, she wants to see him.
Just see him. If for nothing else.
She just wants to be in the same room as him. Just exist where he exists. Just to see him breathe as he should be breathing, if she had let him stay.
And perhaps it is cruel, for her and for his memory, but Eva is cruel. She had to be. She would like to not be, but she is—she is very cruel, she wants to see Ryland again, so she will.
She barely registers the descending stairwell, barely the ding of an old, worn bell, barely the scent of coffee mixing with the freshly baked pastries.
Eva Stratt sits down on a two-seater table by the wall and tugs down on the beanie that used to hold someone else’s head.
What a life this is, she sighs. She hardly understands how she ended up in a world where a red streak of light connecting the sun to Venus would lead her to believing in an urban legend for the simple notion that it could be true.
This is the life she chose, unfortunately, thus it will be the life she takes charge of.
Lost in her own thoughts, she hardly notices the woman beside her. “Excuse me, Miss…” Eva turns her head swiftly to the side, meeting a mild-mannered woman balancing a cup of tea on her tray. Upon meeting eyes with Eva, the woman’s own widened by a fracture. “Oh, um, English…?”
Eva shakes her head, switching languages with ease. “Japanese is fine.”
The woman’s shoulders loosen, and she gives Eva a gentle smile. “I’ll be with you in a second, then, Miss.”
“I’m not in a rush,” she waves her off, letting her place the tea in front of another customer seated at a table adjacent to hers.
While the customer’s back was turned to her, she could vaguely make out the fit outline of a man underneath what seems to be a leather jacket containing the words Miami Vice Stunt Team right there in the middle. He thanks the café’s waitress with slightly accented Japanese and Eva feels her heart drop at the vague familiarity in his voice.
Oh.
Oh, no.
Eva Stratt is not one to fear things so easily. What makes her afraid can be forced away through logic and precise hypothesis, and Eva was very good with those.
But if she is correct (and, regrettably, she usually is), then this man in front of her is Colt Seavers.
Oh, Eva. She wills every string of faith she believes in to not let him see her. How foolish to think you can have what you want and wish.
The woman comes back to her, seemingly undeterred by Eva’s sudden paleness as she takes out a small notebook. “Sorry for the wait, Miss.” She smiles kindly “My name is Tokita Kazu, I’ll be taking your order today. What can I get for you?”
Forcing herself to look away, she faces Kazu with a faux calm expression. “… Just brewed coffee to start, please. With one cream and two sugars.”
Kazu writes it down on her pad and smiles, again. “Alright. Give me a few minutes to get that going for you.”
Nodding, Eva hums her understanding as Kazu leaves with her order.
As she waits, she takes the time to look around the café. There aren’t a lot of people around except for her, the staff, Colt Seavers, and a teenage boy sitting alone in a far corner away playing with a handheld console.
She bites her lip and considers her options.
Eva has never truly met Colt Seavers. She merely knows the basics about him. He was born Colton Grace and adopted his step-father’s surname as a stage name for his stuntman career. He was the identical twin to Ryland, all of twelve minutes separating them with Ryland as the elder. He had a successful eighteen-year career as a Tom Ryder’s, an American movie star’s, primary stunt double until he fell in an accident roughly two years before the Hail Mary launch. After multiple months in physical therapy, he started working as a valet for a family-owned restaurant for a few months before getting scouted back into a stunting job that would later have him accused of murder.
Though Eva had used the murder-suicide plot hatched on Colt against Ryland to get him aboard the Hail Mary, Eva had still used all the resources at her disposal to get the case dismissed as soon as she was able to. She believes she would have had it done regardless of his innocence. It was the least her guilt-ridden mind could do.
In some twisted way, it was her final gift to Ryland. She would make sure his last living relative will never want for anything, even if she will never personally meet him.
Well, that had been her original plan.
But now, she’s here, and so is Colt Seavers.
She is not sure who sticks out more in this quaint little underground café in Tokyo.
Eva remembers seeing Colt Seavers on television, once. Just before the news switched back to tallying the deaths caused by the sun’s dimming. He and his wife, Jody Moreno, had an interview together explaining the behind-the-scenes to Mrs. Moreno’s directorial debut, Metalstorm.
“When Metalstorm had been nothing but a little thought in the back of my head, I had a bit of a back-and-forth with Ryland about the aliens I wanted to include.” The Director had laughed, a small thing that didn’t quite reach the eyes. “Now, this was before all the—all the Petrova Line business he kept busy with a few years later, but if any of you science types would notice, Aliena’s people and planet are nearly one hundred percent factual! I’m being serious, study them!”
To which Colt Seavers had chuckled back, saying “That’s Ry for you.” He said his name like it ached to push out of his tongue, yet he smiled as if the mere act of saying it at all was a feat greater than any pain. “Once he got into it, there was no stopping him. Probably got a kick out of making a ‘scientifically accurate and biologically feasible’ alien race for a sci-fi movie.”
Then, when Eva bought the movie on streaming a few months later, she lingered quite a bit on the end credits which honored Dr. Ryland Grace as their science consultant.
Somehow, Eva spent more time in that one, little blurb floating upwards the screen than she did on the big In Loving Memory Of… segment afterwards.
Metalstorm now sits in her most-watched list of movies despite Eva never truly knowing what the space opera is about. She keeps it there even when it’s nonsensical; even when it does nothing but pain her, if only because she longs to hear an imagined voice in her ear explaining the made-up alien race a junior high school science teacher invented with his brother’s girlfriend.
If anyone could miss Ryland Grace more than Eva Stratt, it would be Colt Seavers. If anyone would have more right to miss Ryland Grace than the woman who killed him, it would be his twin brother.
And if she is correct in her assumption that he’s here for the same reason she is… then in this, as well, would he have more right to Ryland than Eva ever would in her entire lifetime.
She will not take this from him, Eva decides. Not after she’s taken everything else.
“One brewed coffee for you, Miss. One cream and two sugars.” Kazu returns with a hot mug, placing the tray flat against her stomach after putting it down in front of her. “Would you like anything else?”
She nearly shakes her head—nearly asks her to make a to-go cup for her coffee, her appetite ruined for the rest of the week. She wants to leave and run like she’s never wanted to before.
Things could never just be with Ryland, can’t it? She can’t love him because loving him would mean too much and too little. She can’t save him because he’s the one that’s supposed to save them. She can’t miss him because somebody else misses him more.
Eva Stratt is not a simple woman. She’s Eva Stratt, the World’s appointed Dictator and Whipping Boy. She makes choices in two seconds that world leaders would flinch at for two decades. She is above trivial things. She is above being emotionally compromised.
She thanks Kazu for the coffee and asks her to “Please add the man in the leather jacket’s bill to mine”, because she is precisely not simple. She always has to be too damn complicated.
Kazu seems taken aback, looking between her and Colt Seavers. “… Do you two know each other?”
“No.” She says too quickly, surprising herself and Kazu. “… Just paying a good deed forward.”
Because that’s all she could do for Ryland now. Just pay his not-sacrifice forward over and over and hope it’s enough.
Kazu softens a little, her gentle smile coming back. “You’re very kind, then.”
Kind?
(She thinks about that day. The guards she paged chasing him down like a wild, cornered fox. The doctor she hired to pierce his neck with a sedative that will knock him out instantly. His last words on Earth, a plea for his bodyguard-turned-confidant to not do what she trained him to do.)
Perhaps not.
Perhaps she never will be.
Ryland was kind, but he could no longer be kind on Earth because of Eva. So perhaps her little acts of kindness will just have to do until he sends back his final one.
Eva does not respond, and it seems Kazu doesn’t expect her to, either.
She leaves Eva be, and Eva looks down on her coffee. She takes a sip and sighs. Oh, well. At least their coffee’s nice. Perhaps the trip wouldn’t be a total waste.
There have been many coffee cups aboard the Gansu. Usually a pair of them would find their way in her hands at least three times a day. The appointed space for the cafeteria know to give her coffee in the rare occasion that she visits. Her trips across the world have given her a taste of just about every culture of a simple brewed coffee there is.
The Funiculi Funicula’s coffee is not the best, but it’s one of the more homey ones she’s tasted. Eva knows, vaguely, that the café was a family–owned place spanning several centuries, and it showed in its architecture and in its flavors.
If people came to the café for the urban legend, then perhaps they stayed for the menu.
Eva busies herself with her mug for a while, taking off her gloves and feeling the heat on her palms. Once she leaves, it’ll be a while between here and the plane to Russia before she feels this kind of heat again, so she’ll take it whenever she’s able.
At some point does she decide to handle some of the less urgent messages in her email, pulling out her tablet and reading automatically. A confirmation of the monthly budget that she signs off on; the angry vomit of words from a congressman from the United States; the latest projections from her climatologists that ruin her week further. They’ll have to bring Antarctica up to Dr. Leclerc again. He’ll request his next sabbatical after that, and Eva will give him a month.
Despite the headaches they produce, Eva is quite good at her job. Perhaps someone could do it with way less environmental damage, but the person who can do that will have also killed more than Eva has.
She loses herself in her quiet endeavors so thoroughly that she doesn’t notice how the table in front of her is no longer empty and that its previous occupant is now much closer than she remembers.
“You’re Eva Stratt.”
She doesn’t jump, necessarily, but it’s a near thing.
Colt Seavers, as previously advertised, stands above her with his hands in his jacket’s pockets. He looks surprised to see her—his eyes (so, so similar to Ryland’s, if not for the way Colt’s reflect the deep sea rather than Ryland’s brightest skies) widened by a fraction. Dumbfounded, if she were to describe him.
Eva swallows, closing her tablet and placing it face-down on the table. Shifting easily to English, she replies: “I am.”
“You paid for my drink.”
A beat.
“I did.”
His eyebrows twitch downward, confused. “… Why?”
Some misplaced attempt at making up for a loss that wouldn’t’ve happened if not for me. An apology to a man eleven point nine light years away. Trying to clean hands that were bloodstained even before I could touch anything else.
She doesn’t say any of that. She can’t say any of that. Instead, she takes a sip of her lukewarm coffee and tries not to meet Colt’s eyes too firmly. “We have a mutual friend. One I haven’t seen in… quite a while.” Because I killed him.
Eva surprises even herself with the vulnerable edge in her voice. It’s only a little mortifying.
In contrast to earlier, Colt’s eyebrows shoot up—his genuine surprise earlier increasing to bewilderment. If it had been anyone else but Eva Stratt, she would have been offended. But alas.
Feeling slightly awkward in his stare, Eva tilts her head at the empty chair in front of her. “Would you like to sit down?”
He doesn’t nod, exactly, but he does sit. Having him at eye-level nearly takes the breath away from Eva.
They look uncannily similar.
Every inch she allows her eyes to take in is undeniably Ryland’s—the shape of his eyes, the curve of his jaw, the roots peeking out of his hair—all of it, and yet…
Yet they could not look any more different.
Where Colt’s physique boasts a life well-lived in gyms and practical film sets, Eva remembers Ryland being softer around his edges. Perhaps if they met earlier—during Ryland’s early years in academia, possibly—then she’d see more of her Ryland in Colt. She’d see his confidence on academic stages in Colt’s posture at a red carpet after being the first stuntman to win an Oscar. She’d see his wild smile after a clever point in a debate in Colt’s blinding grin in the pictures he shares on social media with his wife. She’d hear the edge in his voice after a foul argument in one of Colt’s viral videos berating his former boss in a livestream.
She can try, if she truly wanted to see Ryland in him, but it simply does not click.
Even when his features mock her in the undeniable genetic exactness of his twin, Eva Stratt struggles to see them as such.
Because Colt is not Ryland.
Eva came here to see Ryland in some backwards belief of time travel, and she still prefers that option to this false alternative. She cannot pretend it is Ryland who sits in front of her because it isn’t.
She can’t lie to herself and she won’t allow her brain to believe it.
“You and my… You and Ry were friends?” Colt’s voice takes her back in the café. “Ryland Grace?”
She tries, further, to not feel offended at the underlying insinuation. “He was determined to be. I never fought him on it.” Except for the one time he needed me to be his friend and I forced myself to be his murderer.
Colt nods like it makes sense. Perhaps it does. He must know him better than anybody else. The thought of him seeing right through her and yelling at her with Ryland’s face in a tone the man himself could never muster nearly punches the air out of Eva. “He gets to everyone eventually.”
“He does,” she agrees.
“I don’t think even he notices it.” Colt scratches his beard idly, an awkward little movement. “Took him years to call Marissa his best friend ‘cause he thought she stuck around because of his roommate.”
Eva’s not sure why he’s telling her this, but she swallows the information down greedily. Marissa Pascal. Science Research Specialist at the Department of Energy. Occupies a two-seater booth at a restaurant called Murphy’s every Thursday evening.
The silence stretches for a while, with Colt staring at her for most of it and Eva staring back, but eventually he asks another question: “… Is that why you’re here?”
He gestures around them. At the sheer emptiness of the room and how it doesn’t make sense for Eva Stratt and Colt Seavers to be in the same, underground café thousands of miles away from home in a climate that keeps evolving to kill them. “You wanna see him?”
A spark of something lights up in her chest.
“Are you saying the rumors are true?” She tries not to sound so eager. She’s about to give him this honor, after all.
Colt’s eyes leave hers and trail back to the counter, where the cashier and Kazu look over at them curiously.
Kazu tilts her head, shrugging minutely as if to say, your choice. The ease in communication despite the language barrier is not lost on Eva. She wonders if this is Colt’s true first time here, like she suspects.
And so, she thinks, Colt chooses. “… As true as it gets, I think.” He shrugs, as if he did not just confirm time travel and placed it firmly on her greedy, greedy palms. “I come here sometimes. When I miss him.” He’s back to staring at her intently, a frustratingly unreadable expression sits on his face. “Do you?”
Eva blinks. Once, then twice, just to stall for time.
She does not like thinking about Ryland. She tries to never do. She looks through the papers he wrote about Astrophage and she tries not to think about how he thought himself clever during that first day, making jokes in front of world leaders. She shows governments the informative videos she made Ryland do while on the Gansu and she pointedly does not make the connection between how he speaks to grown adults in videotape and how he speaks to his precious children in his well-loved classroom.
She looks up at the sky less and less because she knows she’ll find him there. Because she can still feel his fingers gently guiding her by the chin to where Tau Ceti is most visible in that one, exact moment.
If Eva thought about Ryland, then she’ll be able to feel the gaping chasm he left behind. If she allowed herself the moment of peace he would have given her had he remained on Earth, then she’ll be able to feel just how heavy everything is now that he’s gone.
Eva Stratt is a busy woman, so she never does. She never thinks about Ryland Grace, because the world needed her at her best, and her best included Not Thinking About Ryland Grace.
But she is not needed by the world right now. She will be, once she finishes her coffee, but here, hidden away in a café most famous for its ridiculous urban legends, she is not Director Stratt.
Perhaps she could be Eva.
Perhaps only here could she miss him.
“I… I do.” Eva confesses quietly. “I didn’t think I would.” Not this much.
“Why?” Colt seems genuinely confused. “You said you were friends.”
“Well, yes, but—” I killed him. I killed him, then I’ll say I miss him? I can’t be that heartless. I already know I am cruel, I can’t be selfish as well. “—I am not used to missing people. I’ve never had people to miss.”
She swallows, again, and hopes that the collar covering her neck covers her sins too.
Eva lets her vulnerability loose on the table. Maybe it’s because Colt wears an outdated version of Ryland’s face, but she finds it simultaneously easier and harder to maintain her carefully practiced sentences.
“Can I ask you something?” Colt speaks again.
When people say this to Eva, she usually rolls her eyes. Just ask, she’d think, don’t waste my time. She suspects Ryland knew this about her, because he never really did it again after a certain point.
All of this sits in the back of her tongue, but like with everything else, she swallows it down. “Of course.”
He seems to lose himself in his thoughts. Eva is afraid of what’ll come out once he’s found them.
She promised Ryland one thing to his face. You will be remembered as a hero. She did not lie then and she will lie now if that is what Colt asks.
Perhaps it is awful to hide to truth from Ryland’s only remaining blood. Perhaps that makes her the scheming woman the media paints her to be. Maybe she deserves it.
But Ryland doesn’t. He doesn’t deserve to be looked at with spite. He will die in space and it’ll be because of Eva but in contrast to her, history will hail him and their crew as saviors. She will make damn sure of it.
So, of course, she readies herself to lie to Colt Seavers. She prepares the deception she spoke over and over again in her cell’s singular mirror. She gets ready to weed out any doubt left in Ryland’s twin brother.
What he ends up asking, however, is simultaneously exactly as she expects and also categorically not.
Colt Seavers pushes a sigh out of his lungs and asks her:
“Do you know what his last words were?”
A freight train would hurt less.
He stares at her again, but there’s an added weight here that felt heavier than the United Nation’s sentencing her to become their whipping boy. He looks at her like he’s expecting Eva to lie to him, and the worst part is that he’s right.
She will never be able to speak Ryland’s truth to anyone. Eva paid the guards off. She left the doctor with a heavy envelope. She allowed Carl to take a new name and retire, finally, from his service in the CIA. She will admit guilty to every crime a court judge can throw at her, but never to the claim that she murdered her skeleton crew.
Commander Yáo Li Jie. Engineer Olesya Ilyukhina. Doctor Ryland Grace.
They all volunteered. All of them made this sacrifice.
Eva had nothing to do with it.
She’ll make sure history never gets its facts straight.
Maybe they’ll believe her more if it came from Ryland’s brother.
“No.” She says, hiding the grit in her teeth. “Like with the other astronauts, his final words will be released when the Hail Mary reaches Tau Ceti. Out of respect to them, I did not read the letters. I will find out at the same time as everyone else.”
A coward’s deflection. Ryland Grace had no final words to impart—no hope to give to the slow-dying masses. Those letters she gave to the few archival organizations she trusted held Eva’s words on Eva’s closest approximate imitation of Grace’s voice. She knew exactly what was in Ryland’s letter, and she hated herself for it.
She tells herself it’s necessary because it is, and she would not have anyone believing Ryland is anything but the hero she promised him he’d be.
Colt Seavers looks at her, his distrust of her word blatantly clear in his eyes. Eva refuses to stand down.
“I’m not taking about his written word, Director.” There’s something sharp in his speech now, something bone-tired and extra vicious. “I’m talking about his last words.”
“What did my brother say to you when he decided to go on that space ship?”
(“This may seem like me betraying you, but it’s actually me believing in you—”
“Sure feels like you’re betraying me!”
“… Don’t make this harder, please.”)
“What did my brother say to you when he didn’t have me to talk him out of it?”
(“He left a voicemail for his brother, Ma’am.”
“Scrub his phone clean. Make sure none of it can be retrieved.”
“… Director, Colt Seavers isn’t dead.”
“He will be given what remains of Dr. Grace’s personal effects as well as the salary and recompense issued by the United Nations for Dr. Grace’s next of kin.”
“But not his final words.”
“… No. Not that.”)
Eva Stratt does not tremble around politicians. She’s stone cold. No one ever did manage to get a reaction out of her in all her years of being who she was.
Except, perhaps, today.
She digs her nails into her palms where they lay on her lap. Had they been any sharper, she would have drawn blood.
“He…” Eva pats herself on her damn back for not letting the stammer hit her voice. “He believed you were dead, when he decided.”
That strikes him where she wanted it to.
The fight seems to leave him, then. A few stray tears around where his smile lines should be. He stops meeting her eyes and simply shatters before Eva.
That tough, easy-going man she had been conversing with prior has all but vanished, leaving behind a sensitivity Eva was sure was native to Ryland only.
Oh, is she wrong.
How awful it is, she thinks, to notice how the Grace twins break down in the same exact way as the other does. Like biology had decided they needed to share this one, harrowing trait.
Colt lets out a gutted breath, his palms sliding upwards and back down his tear-struck face.
He looks… well, like shit, and Eva didn’t think this would affect her as much as it is.
She didn’t think her simple, excruciating lie would tear her apart as much as it did his twin.
Seeing Colt Seavers, the spitting image of a Ryland Grace that should’ve grown old with him, makes Eva do something she hasn’t done since the Hail Mary launched all those years ago.
She cries.
She faces away from him quickly, turning to face the wall as she frantically wipes them off.
“Sorry, I’m sorry—” Colt heaves through broken gasps. “I just, fuck, he’s really gone, isn’t he?”
Yes, Eva wants to scream, he’s gone, and it’s because of me. He’s gone because he was a coward and I wanted to be one with him as well but I love this Earth more than I could ever love anything else. I can’t let eight billion people die. It’s killing me that a quarter already has. The numbers are so, so terrifying, and I want him back if only to tell me we can come back from this, but he’s gone and it’s my fault and I hate him. I hate that he made it my fault. I hate that he made me decide for him. I hate that he couldn’t be brave for this, for me. He couldn’t even do it for his children, he couldn’t even do it for you. I hate him. I hate him.
God, I miss him so much.
She chokes all of this down, every last word lacing around her throat and threatening to squeeze. Eva does not want it there. She does not want it anywhere near her, but Colt Seavers is breaking down in the seat in front of her and she’s sincerely thinking of joining him.
God, Eva wishes Colt simply fought her. She knew how to deal with anger. She could talk her way out of any sort of altercation using her words alone—it was when tears were involved that she started losing her edge. When her mercy would force her hand and move to make up for what she’s done.
It was hard to stay vicious when the person she was being vicious towards looked so damn sad.
“… I’m sorry.” For your loss. For what I had to do.
At this, Colt lets out a dry chuckle. “You don’t even know what you’re apologizing for.”
Eva does, she knows intimately well what she’s apologizing for, but she cannot tell him. This day will be another one she chokes down on when everything becomes not enough again.
“You know, Ry…” Colt seems to gather himself, wiping his face and averting her eyes. “He used to be so… different. Louder. Meaner.”
“Kids were mean. You know how kids are.” He shrugs. “So Ryland got meaner. He was too smart for his own good and had the ego to back it up. Kids fuckin’ hated him. They’d rough ‘im up when he’d bark back. Spent a lot of time in detention with him ‘cause I knew damn well Ry couldn’t work a punch as well as he could work a microscope.”
Eva could believe it. She could almost imagine it—a younger, more baby-faced Ryland Grace, shaking his fist and heckling at a group of bullies as his brother tries to mitigate the damage. It blends into another memory—one older, one not as volatile but no less defensive—of Dr. Grace and Dr. Lokken’s first meeting and all the subsequent arguments thereafter.
Her heart aches, again, and she misses his voice, again.
Over and over, again and again.
“He had a real spark, my brother.” Colt smiles this time, a private thing perhaps only meant for himself and his twin amongst the stars, but Eva intrudes on this anyway. “People tend to assume I’m the brash one ‘cause I throw myself off buildings for a living. Clearly, they’ve never met Ryland.”
Eva laughs this time, catching Colt’s eye when he finally snaps back up. “He’s very stubborn when he wants to be.”
“Exactly!” He thrusts a hand towards her, nodding profusely. “They think he’s so sweet and mild-mannered just ‘cause he’s a middle school teacher and he crochets his own cardigans. He’s an asshole, man! Swear to God!”
She laughs freely for what feels like the first time in a decade and a half.
People nowadays like to call Eva stoic. She is the shadow Dictator of a freezing world, puppeteering action from behind the curtain and feeding approval to the poor bastard the UN assigned in her absence. She fosters camaraderie but does not participate in them herself. People think her unapproachable.
But there was once a time.
A time where she’d share a drink over the crashing waves, letting her silence comfort a dying commander. A time where she’d indulge in a playful debate about some nonsensical pop culture scandal from five years ago to bring an engineer back to shore. A time where she’d nod her head in approval of a love never meant to last, if only to make a scientist live before she lets him go to die.
A time where she’d sing in front of a crowd that feared her more than they knew her, and her eyes would carry what the lyrics left behind.
No, Eva Stratt doesn’t think she’s felt light like this since the day her prayers launched into the sky.
It’s odd, she thinks—to gain this feeling back because of someone so intimately similar to her greatest sin.
Colt’s smile dims, just ever so, and Eva feels the world around her again. “I thought it’d get worse after Denmark. When those hoity-toity scientists from the Jurassic era ganged up on him and beat him down in a way people never succeeded in trying before.”
“They, uh. They messed him up, you know?” He scratches the back of his head with a faraway look in his eyes. “Sent him down where even I couldn’t reach. It was… real scary for a while.”
She didn’t know that. Perhaps she could’ve inferred, but Eva did not like wasting time like that.
“He was still angry—I don’t think he ever stopped—but more than that… I think he was just tired.” Colt shrugs, running his hand down his arm in a soothing motion. “He wanted the science, he wanted the recognition, and he wanted to be right, I know he did… but it wasn’t all that different from our ol’ schoolyard bullies. It chipped away at him, I think.”
He swallowed, smiling gratefully at Kazu when she comes back with a tea for him. Eva hadn’t realized she had returned, only regarding her with a shake of her head when the young woman offers another round of her coffee.
“He loved teaching.” Colt’s hand shakes when he takes a sip. “Loves. Loves teaching.”
Eva indulges him with a nod, because isn’t it true? Ryland does love teaching. He is not dead yet to stop.
“I wouldn’t say it healed him… I could tell sometimes that he thought about coming back to academia, but he loves those kids. They saved him.” A smile makes its way back to his face, smaller this time, but reverent all the same. “He had this stupid bit about it—used to say that he had superpowers, that he could see the future—”
“—He sees them every day at eight-fifteen.” Eva finishes, her own smile beaming.
Colt beams back, a new light in his eyes emerging. “Yeah. Every day at eight-fifteen.”
He lets her sit in that for a while. She thinks back to when Ryland first told her that joke, when she had been particularly tired after a difficult day and expressed a vulnerable moment of doubt in the project. If their prayer would work at all.
Ryland stood by her door, closing it gently and placing her coffee cups by the edge of her desk.
He started talking about his students. Some of them were in university by that point, and he said they send him letters of their gratitude every once and a while.
Eva did not care much for children. She’s never wanted them. She’s known this about herself since she was old enough to conceive the concept. No man or woman would ever be able to convince her to want children of her own.
But she cannot lie and say she did not envy Ryland for his superpower. How she longs to see the future as he does—how she begs to find hope in their future as he finds them so easily in his classroom.
“I don’t know what to think of you, Director.”
Colt snaps her out of her memory. He looks at her again, but instead of the hostility from before, it’s simply… pensive. Like he’s not quite sure what he’s looking at.
“You may call me Eva.” She offers. His eyebrows pitch up. “I’m no longer a Director.”
“Bullshit.” Colt scoffs. “Everyone knows you’re still running shit. Just ‘cause you’re in hiding, or something, doesn’t mean you’ve up and gone.” He waves a hand in the air just as she’s about to retort. “Whatever, that’s not what I want to talk about.”
She lets him continue with a nod of her head.
“I can’t figure you out.” He takes another sip from his tea. “People call you all sorts of shit, some of them are ugly; a lot of them are really ugly, but I know better than anyone that the court of public opinion is a real piece of work.”
Eva thinks he’s talking about Tom Ryder, and how it took a while before Colt could show his face in public again after Mr. Ryder’s murder plot was exposed. Eva knew this well—she had realized then that she could not sway the public like she sways a courtroom. She could dismiss Colt’s case, yes—make sure all was well accounted for, but she could not save him, truly, from everything else.
It stopped feeling like a personal failure after a while.
“I’m not dumb. I know you’re pulling strings somewhere to make my life easier.” He counts off on his fingers. “They ask for my ID at a pharmacy and suddenly every prescription is free. I haven’t paid for physical therapy in years, they wouldn’t let me. Every time I wanna get some documents for something or other, suddenly everyone’s real nice and compliant and I get them several weeks earlier than usual. I’m not even touching how Tom Ryder, Hollywood’s Golden Boy, managed to get a complete sentence that not even his best lawyers could reduce. I know that’s not part of the astronaut benefit.”
As the list gets further down, Eva thinks to herself, I should fire someone for this.
“So, please, tell me. No bullshit.” He leans forward. “Why go the extra mile? What’s Ryland got to do with it? Why are you here? Why do you want to know about the time-traveling coffee shop? What’s in it for you?”
Eva places her hands back on her cup, feeling how cold it’s gotten.
She does not fault him for asking. She doesn’t quite understand it herself.
If time travel is real, then there must be better uses for it than visiting a not-yet-dead friend from long ago. She could use it to determine the success of the Hail Mary. She could travel to the day the Beetles are projected to return at the earliest and determine her next steps from there. She could save so much time by leaving her doubts behind the second she travels to the future.
So why, indeed, does she want to go back instead of forward?
“I care for him.” The closest approximation of her reason tumbles out from her mouth. “So much more than I thought I would.”
Colt stays silent, as if her answer is not enough, and Eva sees how it couldn’t be.
“Dr. Grace and I couldn’t be any more different.” She sighs, running a hand through her hair. “He’s very… much. I approached him because he was brilliant and because he was recommended, yes, but he was still… a junior high teacher.” The words feel like thorns down her throat. “I had other candidates to choose from, but I was advised to look for someone…” Expendable. “… nearby.”
Colt doesn’t quite believe her, if his tense shoulders are anything to go by, but she keeps going.
“It was supposed to be done, after he named Astrophage. I thought a disgraced academic would be satisfied with being the first man to make contact with alien life and ride off that high for decades to come but he—stayed. He demanded I keep his lab intact and practically pried the three dots from my hands.” She swallows a cold sip. “He said it was for his children.”
“He figured out how to breed Astrophage, then he just… kept working.” Eva says, almost in awe. “Even when he was undermined. Even when I forced more work on him that rivaled only myself. Even when his work took him away from you.”
Once she’s started, she finds it hard to stop. “Then there was—There was an explosion. Our science team, gone, just like that. A milligram. A goddamn milligram nearly doomed us all, and he—”
The truth chokes her. The lie does as well. It wraps around her neck and squeezes her words shut.
She does not want to continue. Eva wants to leave. Russia is waiting for her. Dimitri is waiting for her. The world is waiting for her.
But against all odds, Eva Stratt only waits for Ryland Grace.
“He was brave.” She lets out a small gasp. “He was—He’s brave, Dr. Grace. He was informed of your condition a few hours prior and he said—” I need to bury my brother, Stratt. “—he said he wants there to be a world to bury you in.”
The lie tastes like ash on her tongue.
“He’s gone, and I wish he were not.” Eva finally confesses to someone other than the empty cavern where her heart previously occupied. “I wish things were different, but they aren’t. I am here when he isn’t. I want to see him, but I cannot, so I chased an urban legend and hoped it was real enough to settle me for the next six months.” For the rest of my life, too.
She lets out one final, all-consuming breath, the fight leaving her body after years of beating down her soul.
Eva ceases to care. Damn it all. She’s said her piece, she’s said her lies and truths and her whatever-else. Her hands are stained again but she cannot help that any more than she could help anything else. She is done. She is done.
Colt Seavers may draw his own conclusions. Eva has given him plenty to work with. It should be enough. It needs to be enough.
Eva buries her face in her palms, propping her elbows on the table and clenching her fingers around her hair.
Around her, there is a whispered conversation.
Had she been sound of mind and not utterly exhausted, then she might’ve caught Kazu’s voice and Colt’s steady request for a simple brew. Had she been sharper, then she would’ve noticed how the café got infinitely quieter since then.
All she feels is a hand on her shoulder a few minutes later.
When she raises her head, Colt is looking at her with a serious expression. Somewhere along the depths of his eyes, though, is kindness.
“Come with me,”
Perhaps it is what she needs now.
“Kazu, if you will.” Colt leads her further inside the café, right where the teenage boy sits. “This is where the magic happens.”
Kazu places a pot of hot coffee on the boy’s table and an empty teacup to go with it. He nods in acknowledgement, but otherwise doesn’t look up from his game.
“There are rules to time travel. It’s important that you know them all before going back.” Kazu starts, first refilling the boy’s cup yet leaving the other one empty. “The first is that you may only meet with people who have been in this café before.”
Eva’s shocked expression must show on her face, because Colt’s softens his smile to calm her. “The summer after he started teaching, I invited him out to watch me film in Tokyo. He heard about the rumors from one of his students and did some investigating.”
That settles her somewhat, a single nod signaling Kazu to continue. “The second rule is that you cannot change the present.”
“Oh.” Eva breathes. It’s not as if she was planning on it, but to hear it so bluntly…
Kazu regards her with a pitying look. “There was a surge in customers when the Petrova Line took a turn for the worst. People wanted more time with their loved ones. They got… emotional… when we said time cannot be changed.”
“That’s around the time I came back here.” Colt interjects. “People were getting restless, and when people get restless…”
“They get desperate.” Eva continues, eyes widening in the implication.
“Yeah.” Colt nodded solemnly. “Jody and I stayed here for a few months. She finished off her movie and I acted as Funiculi Funicula’s security for a while.”
“It’s not so bad now.” Kazu gestures towards the empty café. “It’s hard to get a plane nowadays, so the only people who come here now are our regulars before the Petrova Line. Tourists don’t bother anymore.”
Eva feels her heart squeeze, her hands itching to reach for her tablet.
“Rule three and four,” Colt steers them back, determined to keep them on track. “In order to return to the past, you have to sit here, and in that seat alone. You mustn’t move away from it.” He juts his hand out to the boy fiddling with his console. Eva makes a move to speak with him, but Colt blocks her path. “Kid’s a ghost. He’ll put a curse on you if you disturb him. Ask me how I know.”
Eva’s eyebrows shoot up again, looking towards Kazu, who only nods solemnly. “He came here to visit his grandparents. He was young—too young to keep track of the time limit. He overstayed his welcome in the past and now he’s stuck here.”
“Time limit?” She swallows down the lump in her throat.
“Oh, yes. That’s the final rule.” Kazu says. “There’s a time limit. If you surpass it, then you become the ghost that replaces him.”
Eva covers her mouth with her palm, sitting in the weight of Kazu’s warning.
This is absurd. Insane.
But Eva believes in mad scientists and puts her blind faith in Hail Mary’s. What’s another leap of faith?
“Okay.” She nods, once then twice. “How can I sit there?”
“You’re sure?” Colt regards her seriously, scanning her face for any sort of vulnerability. “Ryland wouldn’t know you. It wouldn’t be the version of him you know.”
“I know.” Eva responds, resolute. “I don’t care. It’s still him.”
Colt takes a beat, then nods as if she’s gained a bit of his respect. “Okay. Then we wait.”
“We wait?”
She waits for a lot. She waits for Dr. Leclerc’s call about the climate. She waits for the UN’s chosen Petrova representative to sign what she’s already signed. She waits for her Hail Mary. She waits for their salvation.
(Deep down, she waits for a message, as well. Angry and incensed and betrayed and hurt. She hopes Ryland wakes up and hates her enough to send something back. How selfish.)
“Okay.”
The boy places his console down and stretches, standing up to go to the bathroom.
Eva’s been scrolling through her mail, her mind too occupied to comprehend a single word. Colt reads a script across from her—Mrs. Moreno’s latest, she assumes.
The second the boy stands up, Eva shoots up from her seat as well, flanked immediately by Colt with Kazu following close behind.
Eva sits in the chair, the absence of warmth from its previous holder surprising her for all of two seconds before Colt rattles off a date for her to focus on.
“When you return to the past,” Kazu aims her pot to cup before her, her tone grave. “You must drink the entire cup before the coffee gets cold.”
Eva nods, her leg bouncing anxiously. Drink the coffee before it gets cold. She can do that. She’s had decades of practice. “Understood. I’m ready.”
Kazu nods at her, tipping over her pot and finally letting the liquid flow.
Eva focuses on the date Colt gave her, repeating it over and over in her head as the world becomes smoke around her.
There’s a drop in her stomach the more she looks at the swirling wisps her environment becomes, so she closes her eyes quickly so that she doesn’t toss up her accounts before she could formally prove this miracle right.
When she opens her eyes, the world is… not so different. She blinks off the dizziness, trying to take in what she hopes is the past.
It must be. Colt isn’t here anymore and Kazu is serving a young couple a considerable distance away.
Eva looks up at the small windows the café offers and her breath is caught in her throat.
There, right there, is sunlight.
High enough in the sky to streak down just perfectly on Eva’s table. She reaches out for it tentatively, feeling its subtle heat from far away.
Oh, how I’ve forgotten you.
Eva doesn’t spend much time in the open anymore. She is needed where the sun is at its lowest—she is needed where her hands can get soiled under freezing dirt. Where offices and conference rooms after dark welcome her for the choices she makes to keep the world alight. The sun on her skin is a foreign body on Venus. It is not meant to be there, yet it is, and she is starved for it.
For a single second, she forgets what she’s here for. She forgets who she’s here for. She forgets and she remembers when she was young and the sky was still hot enough to burn.
But the bell rings, and her attention is taken to another beaming figure.
If the warmth of the sun took her breath away, then seeing him in all his living presence punches her lungs black and blue.
It’s you.
He is… different. So very different, but she knows who he is anyway. Ryland carries his body by the depth of his palms, timid and quiet like a man freshly thrown out of the last ten or so years of his life. His glasses sit awkwardly on his clean-shaven chin when he takes them off to examine the café’s pastries.
Eva’s heart squeezes alongside her broken lungs.
She misses him.
Oh, God, she can’t do this.
Her hands automatically grip the coffee cup in front of her and she gulps a hot quarter of it down her throat, forcing her body to act and move as it should. She ignores the bitter taste, not bothering with the creams and sugars laid out before her.
She can’t look at him and pretend it isn’t a corpse she’s seeing. She can’t exist with him and act like it isn’t her fault he can’t. Worst of all, even if she could, it will kill her anyway. Because this Ryland Grace does not know her. His eyes will hold no recognition for her. No recognition nor warmth nor the facsimile of love she deluded herself to believe he held for her—she is nothing to him.
This was a mistake.
She shouldn’t have—This was a waste—
“Oh, thank God. I was about to shi—crap myself trying to read the plaques.” Ryland sighs in relief loudly by the counter, practically draping himself across his brother’s shoulder. “Just get me a—”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll get you your demonic black coffee and a blueberry scone.” A younger Colt Seavers rolls his eyes, shrugging Ryland off. “Go get us a seat, you tourist.”
“Colt, we’re both tourists.” Ryland rolls his eyes right back at him, though he followed his twin’s request easily enough.
“Nuh-uh. I’ve been here for months working a job. You’re the one freeloading off my accommodations.”
“Whatever!”
She can’t help but greedily stamp his voice down on her skin. Eva memorizes the rise and fall of his tone—that distinct American accent she hasn’t quite forgotten yet but had gotten disturbingly close to.
Eva isn’t getting any younger. She does not have the benefit of a medically-induced coma to age her a mere four years instead of the thirteen she’s trudged through. Her wit is sharp and she likes to think she keeps her memory sharper, but Eva’s been living day-to-day for a long time.
She grips her cup again, feeling its warmth dull a bit. She makes no move to drink again.
Eva must have been staring too long, because suddenly, Ryland is staring back.
He’s in front of her, and he’s looking at her, and it’s so so different because he does not know her, but to be looked at at all after more than a decade is better than nothing—
“Um. Sorry.” He ducks his head sheepishly. “For the uh, the ruckus.”
Eva blinks once more, her shoulders trembling before a loud laugh takes control over her logic and reason.
She tries to keep it down, seeing how pink her laughter makes Ryland, but it only fuels her blind joy further. She’s forgotten how squirmy Ryland could get.
It’s gotten better since his time on the Taskforce, his voice gaining an edge to it the more he realized he had to argue against people in the science community that remained way after his own tenure in academia. He hasn’t been quite so nervous since, well—
Perhaps since that day in Grover Cleveland’s parking lot.
“I’m sorry,” Eva wipes her eyes with her finger, trying to get her giggles down. “I’m not making fun, I promise. You simply—” she lets out one last puff of laughter. “You… remind me of someone.”
Quite an exaggeration.
Ryland smiles tentatively, setting another arrow upon her heart. “Ah.” His shoulders relax some, but he’s still rather awkward. “A friend of yours, I hope?”
Eva takes another sip from her cup as he talks, the beverage now a breeze away from lukewarm. She ought to speed this up, lest she wants to become Funiculi Funicula’s next ghost.
“Yes,” she nods instead. “He’s a very dear friend.”
Eva thinks this is the first time she’s ever acknowledged it, but he is. She’s certain that he is.
In front of her, Ryland pauses, looking back at his brother still perusing the large array of pastries the café boasted. “You waiting for him?”
It’s so odd, Eva thinks, to see him and have him not recognize her. Perhaps this is what it would’ve been like. Had she simply been Eva and him Ryland. Had the world never brought the star-eaters on her plate.
But it did. And they weren’t. She would have always been Director Stratt, and he would’ve been her Doctor Grace. She would be in this same position, waiting for him as the world waits for the Hail Mary.
She hums. “For quite a while now.”
Something odd flickers on his face. Eva wouldn’t say she knows how to read Ryland, but their years together have given her some things to work with.
He seems… confused, maybe. No less squirmy, yes, but there’s a little give and take that happens in his eyes. Eva observes his hesitation dance as she takes the final sips of her coffee.
For a moment, in between little laps, she thinks about not finishing her drink. Eva thinks about being selfish, again, to stay here. She thinks being a ghost must not be so bad, if it were just him and her repeating this two-minute interaction over and over again for eternity. Perhaps she’d like being a ghost. Perhaps she’d like to be a myth other than the Atlas she is now.
But the sun stings her here.
The sun does not need her here.
She thinks about Dimitri, waiting by a tarmac in Russia, waiting for Eva to do what she does best and authorize him to save the world. She thinks about Leclerc, and leaving him to his vices and guilts and fading away where she cannot shoulder the burden with him. She thinks about the classroom Ryland left behind, how the children there decrease in number every year—sometimes having no children at all—and she tips her cup back to consume every last bit of her miracle brew.
The world blurs as soon as she swallows.
“I’m Grace.” He holds out a hand, a smile lighting his face back up. “Ryland Grace.”
For a while, as the world spins, Eva stares at his outstretched hand.
Her time is ending, and Ryland’s is as well, but still she takes his hand.
It’s warm, she thinks, shaking them together as she would a congressman or a representative. He’s alive.
“Eva.” She declares quietly, memorizing his face as it blurs and blurs.
She wishes to close her eyes now. To transition back to her present yet pretend she is still here in his past. She wants and wants and wants and wants.
“It’s nice to meet you, Eva.”
Eva amuses herself, chronologically, this is the first time he’s ever said her name. Then comes reality. This is the last time she’ll ever hear it.
The world fades to black.
“Get out of my seat.” The boy’s voice is the first she hears. It has an eerie undertone she doesn’t want to define, a firmness she’d like to stay on the safe side of.
Eva nods absently, slipping out of the chair quickly as the world blurs back to what it’s meant to be.
“Stratt?” Colt holds her by the elbow, looking concerned. “Everything okay?”
“… Yes.” She folds her hands together, still feeling the warmth Ryland left behind. The warmth their sun left behind. “That was… real… right?”
Her voice sounds small. It’s never been like that before. Eva Stratt is not a woman who makes herself small.
But it’s all she feels now, rubbing her thumb over where Ryland’s callouses brushed against hers.
“Yeah.” Colt sighs, letting go of her and running a hand down her face. “It’s a lot to take in the first time.” Then, to Kazu, he says: “Can she have a drink?”
“No,” Eva shakes her head quickly, forcing the fog to drift away a bit. Clearing her throat, she switches her language. “I need to leave soon. I’ll be fine.”
Kazu and Colt exchange a weary glance. “Stratt…”
“I’m fine.” She stresses, walking back to her previous seat briskly and gathering her things. “I got what I came here for.”
“How was he?” Colt asks, as if he didn’t know when she went. As if he wasn’t right there with him, buying black coffee and blueberry scones.
Eva goes to the cashier, letting her silence hang as she pays for her drink and Colt’s. Kazu quietly rings her up, acting normally and charging her for her purchases as well as the overnight surcharge.
“Thank you.” She says, pulling a calling card from her wallet. Eva hands it over, watching as a slight confusion takes over Kazu’s face. “My contact information. If you ever run into trouble, please don’t hesitate to use it. I would like to keep this place open.”
Kazu accepts it after a few seconds of hesitance, then nods gratefully.
Then, to Colt, “Will you wait here?”
His hands are limp against his sides. His eyes flicker to the windows above and he squints to see the night sky. Colt shrugs. “It’ll be a while before the kid gets up again.”
Eva digs through her purse for her hotel keycard. “Wait for as long as you’d like. I’ll tell them to keep my room open.”
He takes it, reading the hotel’s name and turning it around for inspection. Then he meets her eyes again. “Are you coming back?”
Back here? Back to him?
Can she do that? Does she want that?
Eva doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to see him again, she knows, because she fears she’ll become a ghost if she comes back, but she’s also terribly selfish.
She’s seen Ryland. She’s touched his hand and she’s heard her name slip past his lips. Is she satisfied with that? Will that be enough to last her?
Eva doesn’t want to ask this question right now, because the answer will be no. She doesn’t want to find out if the answer will always be no.
“… Good day, Mr. Seavers.”
It’s neither this nor that, she knows Colt realizes this, but he doesn’t press further. He only steps back and sits in his own chair again, flicking through his wife’s script, again.
She wonders how long he’s been visiting him for.
She wonders if it’s possible to envy him as much as she did.
Eva shakes the thought away. What right do I have? He stays here because I took his brother away.
Selfishly, because selfishness and cruelty now come hand-in-hand, Eva buries her palm in her pocket and preserves the little warmth she was able to take for herself.
When Eva walks out the door, the air is as cold as she left it.
She thinks back on the warmth of the sun on her skin just a few minutes prior, and she takes her phone out.
You have twenty-six missed calls.
She’ll feel that warmth again. Her Hail Mary will give it back to her, and the sun will shine on them again.
So help her God.