Page 17 of Past Lives
He cocks his head, entirely unconvinced. “Liar.”
I set my glass down. “Angus,” I say, “do you believe—” I stop. I almost said, Do you believe some people are fated to meet?
I stop. I almost ask if he believes in fate. Instead: “Do you believe in déjà vu?”
He shrugs, staring at the fire. “Maybe. When I first moved to Seattle, I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d been there before. Every corner, every pub. It rattled around in my head for months. I figured it was just old dreams. Or maybe static in the brain. Why?”
"Because I keep having dreams. About her. About us. Dreams that feel like they keep going after I wake." I take a deep breath, air heavy with woodsmoke. "Last night, I was on a beach. The wind was so cold my teeth hurt. Maya was there, but I couldn't see her face. I heard her voice, but couldn’t find her. I kept looking, but she was always out of reach."
He frowns. “Sounds more like a nightmare.”
“Maybe. But when I woke up, I could smell the ocean and her perfume. When I stood, my legs ached, and my throat was raw from screaming.” I look at him, hoping for some comfort or even just a word. “It felt real. Like I was really there.”
Angus watches me, unmoving as a boulder. Eventually, he asks: "You think she’s a ghost?"
“No,” I say, annoyed. “But it’s like we’re tied together. Like—I don’t know. Like we knew each other once, and we’re supposed to remember, but neither of us can. Maybe that’s what the dreams are.”
He whistles again, softer. “You sound mental.”
“Yeah.” I rake my hands through my hair. “I know.”
But he studies me a long time, longer than is comfortable. “You know, Nana always thought people in love had met before. In other lives, or other shapes. She said the feeling was a kind of memory.”
I nod, remembering. Grandmother’s dry hands, the way she pressed lavender between our palms, insisting that if we smelled it often enough, we’d never forget our home.
“Do you believe that?” I ask him.
Angus shrugs. “I believe in love, but I don’t know what it means. If you’re fixated on this girl, why are you here with me?”
I don’t have a good answer. Honestly, I don’t have a safe one either. The truth is, I’m afraid of the dreams and what they might mean, and of what Maya Banks could be if I let myself find out. I didn’t come to Aviemore just to sell land. I came to avoid fate for a little longer, hoping that distance would help me see things more clearly.
Later, I go to bed in the small guest room, whisky still on my lips. Angus’s words echo in my mind. I dream again: the beach is black, the wind comes from the North Sea. I stand above a rocky cove, searching for someone. Her name is on my tongue, but I can’t say it. She’s somewhere in the dark, either weeping or laughing—I can’t tell. I want to jump, to pull her to shore, but something deep and old keeps me in place. My feet are tied with heather and wire.
I wake up, my heart aching like a gull in a storm, cold sweat drying on my chest in the darkness of Angus’s spare room. I know it was just a dream, but the smell of the ocean fills my nose—a mix of salt, seaweed, and something old and strange that clings to my skin as if I’d just come out of the North Sea. Angus fries eggs and porridge and plays Johnny Cash on the old radio, as if both our nerves can’t process the silence any longer. The snowfall outside is the fine, relentless sort that never seems to accumulate but erases all detail and color from the landscape, reducing the world to smudges of gray and white. We eat in companionable silence, our spoons ringing faintly against the chipped bowls.
After breakfast, he drives me into Aviemore to meet the solicitor, Mrs. McPherson, a heavyset woman who smells of rosehip tea and laughs quietly. The meeting is short and so friendly it feels like it was meant to happen, as if we’re just following a script. Angus signs the papers, I sign, Mrs.McPherson stamps them, and just like that, a hundred acres of bog, pine, and stone are no longer mine.
We linger in the parking lot, not wanting to leave. Angus lights a cigarette, shielding it from the wind, and offers me one. I take it, more for the company than because I want to smoke.
"You should go after her," he says eventually, blue smoke spiraling from his nostrils. "Who knows, maybe she’s waiting for you."
I can’t laugh. Instead, I mutter, "What if she's not? What if..." An entire cosmos of questions blooms behind my teeth, but I swallow them. "I think she’d rather not be found."
He grins, a bit wild in the calm morning. "Doesn’t matter. You don’t seem like the type to let good trouble go unsolved."
I want to argue, but I don’t. The truth is, part of me is already heading north, following an invisible path through the country. It’s not just her travel plans—I memorized them after hearing them once in that BBC interview, the words sticking with me like a map: Inverness first, then along the coast through the Black Isle, past Cromarty and Dornoch, all the way to the Orkney Islands. "The further north I go, the clearer my dreams become," she’d said, not as a boast but as a private joke, maybe even a dare. Is she laughing at me? Or is she leaving clues for someone lonely enough to follow?
I drop the cigarette before I finish it and crush it into the ice. "I’ve got a train to catch," I say. Angus nods, looking satisfied. We shake hands, quick and hard. He doesn’t say goodbye, and neither do I.
Chapter 10
Virginia Colony, 1777
The fieldsoutside Yorktown were all mud and thunder. Rain poured down in dark sheets, and the air smelled of gunpowder and decay. Henry Callahan crouched behind a stone wall, breathing shallowly, his boots soaked, his hands so numb he couldn’t feel the trigger. Across the pasture, redcoats moved in sharp outlines as the fog lifted and the shooting started for real.
Even now, his thoughts drifted home. He remembered the slant-roofed farmhouse and its long shadows. He pictured the kitchen where Mary Brooks worked at the hearth, her hair wrapped in muslin but always a little wild. A worn lantern hung above the door, its dim light shining through the storm, a beacon for his return.
He remembered her as a child, elbowing him in the ribs, her laugh quick and bright, long before the world divided into Patriots and Loyalists. Before, the road to Yorktown stretched from their valley like a fuse. Now she was his secret, his one good thing. In the gray dawn, he would have sworn their names belonged together, older than the war itself.
