Page 63 of The Book of Lost Hours
Moira stared at him in shock. Who was this person?
Ernest, the diplomat. Ernest, the peacemaker, orchestrating a movement and stealing from the very department his father had founded.
Dismantling the whole system bit by bit.
No longer a soldier, but a rebel. All because of her . Jack had been wrong.
“Yours is the last one,” he said, nodding at her wrist. “So you see? I’m already a dead man walking.”
“So is that why you really came here?” she asked quietly.
Ernest swallowed, some of the anger giving way. “No. I came because I… because I had to see you.”
No, he needed to run, Moira thought. Once the others found out the watches were gone, they’d sound the alarm.
They’d notice when Ernest didn’t come into work the next day, and they would assume.
He would be hunted down and killed for treason.
The very thought made Moira’s ears ring with terror.
He knew his time was running out and yet he’d still come to see her, knowing she might very well turn him in herself.
She could see it in his eyes, the hesitation as both of them wondered what the other was going to do next.
She acted first. She took the watch from her wrist and held it out to him.
“Here. Take it. And get the hell out of here.”
He looked down at the watch, hesitating.
She thrust it against his chest. “What are you waiting for? Take it. If you go now, you might have time to get away. You can hide in the time space. If you stole the watches, no one would find you there. You and your rebels can figure something out.”
He reached for it, his hand trapping hers. “What are you doing?”
“What I’ve always done. I’m trying to protect you.”
“Why? You should already have a gun to my head.”
“I’m not going to be the reason you get killed.”
“Why not?”
Moira let out a gasp of frustration. “Do you really still have to ask?”
A tense silence passed, the air between them wound like wire and coiled tight. He looked at her with a kind of yearning on his face, one that he was furious at himself for, but a yearning all the same.
“Ernest, please,” she said.
The wire snapped. He latched one arm around her waist. She inhaled sharply as he pulled her close and kissed her.
His kiss was passionate and firm, but still soft underneath it all.
He lifted her up in his arms, sweeping aside everything on the countertop, setting her on the edge of it.
He murmured her name in her ear as his hands reached for the buttons of her shirt.
“Lisavet,” he said in that old familiar tone. The voice she heard every night as she lay awake, haunted by memories.
She could feel the anger just underneath the surface of his embrace, but it only added fuel to the fire sparking between them.
An aching flame that she had carried with her for fifteen years.
Her mind raced with possibility. All this time he had been fighting for her, and she for him and neither of them had known it.
Lisavet Levy had never been a nuisance but a real and tangible threat.
Not because she saved memories the others chose to burn, but because she had become an idea.
And ideas were much harder to kill, so Jack had gone after her instead.
Her spirit, her conviction, her belief in her own cause.
She had fallen for it, letting him plant his own ideas in her head instead.
Moira pulled Ernest as close as humanly possible, cursing all the years she’d spent working against him when they could have been doing this together.
They folded into each other as the storm outside the window intensified.
Hours later, they lay side by side in bed.
Ernest had his arms around her, laying searing kisses on her shoulder.
Stealing a few more moments of their reunion before the inevitable.
“What happens now?” she asked. “To you, I mean.”
Ernest’s arms tensed. “I, uh,… I’m not sure.
This wasn’t how this was supposed to go.
We had it planned. I was supposed to have plane tickets booked for me and Amelia to get away.
Somewhere to South America. It was supposed to happen in the summer so I could make it look like I was just taking my normal vacation.
But then I saw the memories in the book, and I had to come see you.
I figured you would turn me in, anyway, so I just—” He broke off, running one hand through his hair.
“My god, this is a mess. We haven’t even found a solution to part two of the plan. ”
“Part two?”
“Eliminate all access to the time space. Even ours. So nobody can ever interfere with it again.”
“That seems rather extreme.”
“It’s the only way to make sure we keep control out of the wrong hands. Without that, there’s no point. They’ll just figure out a way back in. I was working on a plan before all this happened.”
Moira reached out to run her own hand through his hair. “Then let me help.”
“How?”
“We have until morning before anyone realizes the watches are gone.”
“Lisavet…”
“I’m in this with you now, Ernest. Let me help. We can come up with something.”
He leaned down to kiss her softly. “Okay. But you have to promise me something.”
“What?”
“No more secrets. From now on, we have to be honest with each other. Promise?”
There was a long, weighty pause. Moira bunched the edges of the sheets in her hands. She sat up.
“What’s wrong?” Ernest asked, taking in the look on her face.
“There’s… one more thing I need to tell you. About Amelia.”
W HEN E RNEST left Moira’s apartment that morning, he did not do what they had discussed. Not right away.
He was supposed to disappear. That was the plan he and Moira had concocted.
That he would go to the secret second apartment Moira kept downtown.
He would stay there, hidden. At the same time, Moira would tell Jack that Ernest had been killed, assassinated by another timekeeper.
Ernest had given Moira his watch so she could pretend that the Russians had sent it to her as proof of his murder the way the Americans had always done to them.
As much as it pained him to give it up, he knew he couldn’t risk being seen in the time space by members of opposing governments once word got out.
Moira would go to Boston. She would watch over Amelia, protect her from Jack and the others, and eventually, she would explain to Amelia the secrets she and Ernest had both been keeping.
Meanwhile, Ernest would work through part two of the plan, and when it was time, they would run. The three of them together.
In his absence, the department would do what they always did when someone was killed inside the time space and a body couldn’t be recovered; they would stage a funeral anyway, closed casket, of course, to keep grieving family members from asking too many questions. To give them closure.
It was the thought of his funeral, and the idea of Amelia attending it alone, that drove Ernest to go, not downtown like they’d discussed, but to Boston.
To Pembroke Academy where Amelia was just starting another semester.
He didn’t care that he was supposed to be gone already.
He had to see her. When he arrived, he parked his car and stood outside of the dining hall until he saw Amelia emerge.
She looked grumpy as she usually did when forced to wake up early and he smiled at the sight of her sleepy scowl.
He could see it now that he knew. The nose, the high forehead, the pale, moonlit skin.
Traits he’d always assumed had come from Elaina’s Irish Catholic ex-lover, but that he now knew came from Lisavet.
At fifteen, Amelia was beginning to look more like her mother in spite of the red hair and blue eyes that were his.
His daughter. She was his daughter. To him, that changed everything.
He had always loved her as though she were his, that wasn’t it.
Rather, it was his own actions that he now viewed in a different light.
He should have tried harder when she was small.
Pushed to be a more constant presence in her life even when Elaina shoved him away.
He should have done more to keep her safe from the perils of her young life.
He had refrained then, assuming that he had no business inserting himself in the life of someone else’s daughter.
But he was her father. His anger at Moira, at Lisavet, resurfaced again.
He didn’t know how he’d ever forgive her for Amelia.
For keeping him in the dark all these years.
He watched Amelia cross the quad to her first class, wishing he could go to her. But he was supposed to be dead.
Half of him feared that trusting Moira was a mistake, while the other half knew that Lisavet would not do anything that might endanger him or their daughter. Either way, he didn’t have a choice. There was nobody left to trust but her.