Chapter Eight

CHAPTER EIGHT

WE DIDN’T SPEAK much the next morning.

But we were together.

It started with a chance meeting at breakfast—except it didn’t feel like chance anymore. Not with her. She sat beside me without asking. I poured her tea without thinking. Like we’d done it a hundred times before, in some other life, some other world, some quiet dream we both half-remembered.

She told me her favorite color.
(It changes, apparently.)
I told her I’d never had one—until now.
(She rolled her eyes but smiled anyway.)

We walked the deck after that.

She asked questions.
What I did. Where I lived. What I loved.

I lied, of course.

Not because I wanted to—but because what was I supposed to say?
“Oh, I’m actually from a different century. I traveled here through a cursed pawn shop because some immortal trickster gave me two weeks to find you or lose my soul.”

Yeah. That’d go over great.

So I gave her pieces.
Sanded-down truths.
Nothing false, but nothing full.

And she did the same.

We were two people playing at the edge of a truth neither of us could say out loud. But that was okay. Because every second felt like it mattered. Every glance. Every breath between footsteps. Every flicker of wind in her hair.

It was Day Four.

And I was falling in love with a woman I might’ve loved before.

At one point, she looked at me and said:

“You feel like déjà vu.”

And I almost told her everything.

But I didn’t.

Because some part of me knew:
If I told her too soon, I’d lose her.
Not because she wouldn’t believe me—
But because she would.