Page 22 of The Book of Lost Hours

IT TOOK FOUR MONTHS before Ernest admitted that he was falling in love with Lisavet Levy.

In that time, he saw her at least once a week, meeting her between the shelves so she could sweep them away somewhere else.

Lately, they met almost every day. Over time, he had become aware of the strange harmony of her world.

The memories she visited most often. The eras in which she felt most at home.

His previous assumptions that she must be lonely were proven false.

Hers was a life more full than any he’d seen before.

Years of walking through time had cultivated her into a woman of endless knowledge and incalculable wisdom.

She hadn’t been to a proper school in a decade and yet she knew more than most of the academics who worked with Ernest in the department.

She had learned the languages of half a dozen countries: English, French, Russian, Arabic.

She had mastered history, of course, but she also knew math and science and could sense the interconnected strands of everyday things with remarkable intuition.

She was, in Ernest’s eyes, a wonder. A small piece of perfection.

When he finally recognized that he had fallen for her, he wondered why it had taken him so long to notice.

He realized it as he watched her lean down to pick a single rose from a bush in the gardens of Versailles.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Lisavet’s cheeks were flushed from the warmth of the sun, and her hair glowed in it like pale moonlight.

He reached out to touch the soft petals, knowing that the moment she let go, he’d no longer be able to.

His hand brushed against hers as he did so, sending a bolt of lightning down the length of his spine.

When she leaned forward to smell the rose again, he wanted to lean closer.

To press their foreheads together, to trace her lips with his thumb the way hers touched the flower petal.

“Red roses are my favorite,” she said with a smile. “What’s yours?”

You , he wanted to say. But that made absolutely no sense. Blue , he considered. Like the dress she wore. Was there such a thing as a blue rose? He couldn’t remember.

“White,” he said at last, catching sight of some over her shoulder.

She turned to retrieve one and he tried to ignore the feeling welling in his chest. To love her was impossible.

It was foolish, knowing who he was and the order he’d been given.

He’d been postponing the inevitable, telling Jack that he’d lost track of her.

That she’d caught on to the fact that he was following her and had gotten better at hiding.

For now, it worked. Jack had other things on his mind, including dealing with the Russian timekeeper who had shot him.

It wouldn’t last. Eventually, Jack would get suspicious.

He would start demanding the book be taken from her, or perhaps he’d want her instead.

To continue like this, to let himself get any closer to her, was self-destructive.

But the idea of not seeing her was equally unbearable.

For the first time since he’d enlisted as a soldier at the age of sixteen, Ernest began to question the legitimacy of the machine in which he was a vital cog.

He began to consider what might happen if he chose to break rank.

He watched Lisavet bend down to pick one of the white roses, noticing the way she chose only those flowers that looked to be on the verge of wilting.

“Have you always been able to touch things in memories?” he asked as she held the white rose up to him.

“Not always. Just for the past four years or so.”

“Did something change four years ago?”

“Not that I know of. Azrael doesn’t understand why it happened either. For a while I worried that—” She broke off, shaking her head.

“Worried what?”

“I worried that maybe it meant that I was dead. Memories go to the time space when they die, but nobody knows what would happen to someone who dies inside of it. I thought maybe I had died and walked right out of my own body without even realizing it.”

“But… you’re not? You’re certain?”

“I wasn’t for a while. Not until I met you.”

“Me? Why me?”

Lisavet reached for his hand and tucked her fingers around his palm. An echo of their first handshake. Ernest’s pulse quickened.

“Memories can’t touch people. If I were dead, I wouldn’t be able to do this.”

The idea struck an anxious chord in him. He vowed to find some way to touch her every time they met. Just in case.

That night when Ernest returned home, there was a letter at his front door with a German return address in the left-hand corner.

He picked it up right away and stepped into his apartment, bolting the door shut behind him.

It had been several weeks since he’d had the idea to write a letter to the old watch shop in Germany to see if he could figure out what had become of Lisavet’s father and brother.

Moreover, he wanted to know what the world said about the fate of Lisavet Levy herself.

If she was remembered and by whom. The letter was disappointing in every regard.

Dear sir,

Apologies for the long delay. The man who you were seeking is not at this address.

I have been the owner of this shop since the start of the war and do not know what happened to the family who lived here before me.

Public record here in Germany suggests that the clockmaker you mentioned, Ezekiel Levy, was killed on Kristallnacht and the two children were taken to camps.

There is record of a boy named Klaus Levy being killed at Auschwitz in 1943, but there is no record of what happened to the girl named Lisavet Levy.

It is presumed that she died as well. I am sorry I am not writing to you with better news.

Ernest took the letter to his desk. That was it then.

There was no trace of Lisavet Levy left in the real world.

He sat down and let the letter fall to one side.

It landed among the dozens of other discarded papers.

Notes he’d been taking after each visit with Lisavet that noted where they went and any notable things she said.

Sketches of her face, drawn haphazardly in the margins.

Among the many pages were old letters that had been written to his father from a man who owned a watch shop in Nuremberg: Ezekiel Levy.

He’d found them on his last visit to his mother’s house, where he had gone on account of his sister.

News that she was pregnant had sent his mother into a fit of rage, and Ernest had been trying in vain to convince her to go easy.

In between bouts of arguing, Ernest had hidden in his father’s office. That was where he’d found the letters.

Not long before he died, Gregory had commissioned Ezekiel to make a set of five watches for the recently expanded Temporal Reconnaissance Program.

The only people who had ever known how to make these kinds of watches resided in Germany and those who still had the skills even then were few and far between.

The original school in Glashütte where they were made had been bombed by the Russians in the first war, and those that survived composed the entire Russian arsenal.

The remaining watchmakers had been hunted down by Nazis in the decades that followed and forced to make more watches.

When the war ended and the Nazis knew they had lost, the watchmakers were killed, their memories burned inside the time space.

Ezekiel had delivered the watches in the early months of 1938 and hadn’t written again until August when he’d asked Gregory for help.

He had been approached by the Nazis about his work and needed a way out for himself and his two children.

Gregory had responded, offering him a job and an apartment in exchange for his services as a watchmaker for the TRP.

Things were all set to receive them, but Ezekiel Levy decided to wait for the opportune moment.

He waited too long. Now all that remained of him was a few fragments.

Scraps of memories, like these letters, that existed only because Lisavet had managed to salvage them.

But the rest, including the knowledge of how to make a watch that could bend the folds of Time, was gone.

In addition to the copious notes Ernest took on Lisavet herself, he had begun trying to piece together the mystery of her solidity inside of memories.

It troubled him, and long before he’d asked her about it, he’d started theorizing, matching it to the science he’d been taught while training for the TRP.

He already knew the foundational theory of the time space.

His own father had been the one to connect the dots between its existence and Hermann Minkowski’s theory on Time as the fourth dimension of the universe.

The forward movement of Time, or the temporal continuum, had been identified as its own separate plane of reality, confirming what timekeepers had already known for centuries: Time was a real place.

A spatial plane all its own. Gregory Duquesne had acknowledged this when he founded the TRP, but none of the timekeepers, at least not in Ernest’s department, had gone much further than that, writing it off as an act of God.