“I know,” Amy said. “People today think we have the market cornered on beautiful men.”
“Speaking of which,” Faith said, “how did you and Tristan spend your last two days together?”
Amy smiled. “I want to hear how you’ve spent your last sixteen years. I see you’re married but, somehow, I don’t think it’s to either Eddie or Tyler.”
Zoë looked up from her drawing pad. “Don’t tell me she’s right.”
“She is.”
Zoë lifted her glass to Amy in tribute.
“Okay, that’s enough about me,” Amy said. “I want to hear about you.”
“If Tyler hadn’t died—”
“Been killed by your mother,” Zoë said.
“All right, but I don’t like to think about that,” Faith said. “My mother was a woman of deep passions and I’ll never know what really happened that day, but I’m sure it was spur of the moment. I’m sure she didn’t plan to kill him.”
“Dead is dead,” Zoë said, her eyes on her drawing.
“Yes, and that’s why I went back,” Faith said. “If it hadn’t been for Ty’s premature death, I wouldn’t have gone back to change anything.”
“You’re kidding,” Zoë said.
“No. After I came back from living in a place where I was a useful woman, I knew what I wanted to do with my life,” Faith said.
“And there were the seeds,” Amy said. “You were concerned about them. They’d made it through one transport, but you weren’t sure they’d stand another one.”
“Exactly!” Faith said.
Zoë looked at her. “Are you telling me that you would have given up a chance to take away all the dreadful things that had been done to you just for a plant?”
“Yes,” Faith said.
Zoë shook her head at her. “I’m almost glad Ty was killed if only to make you go back and rewrite your life.”
“Me, too,” Faith said. “I needed my youth to give the balm time to grow.”
“Start when Ty came through your window,” Amy said. “You told us that if you had a chance to do it again, you’d be packed and ready to leave with him.”
“I was packed all right, but I wasn’t leaving with any man.” She looked at Amy. “Can you figure it out?”
“I think…” she began, then looked up. “I think the problem was that you thought you had only two men to choose from. One was a motorcycle-riding hillbilly, and the other was a tea-drinking rich boy.”
Zoë looked at Faith.
“Is she right?”
“Perfectly,” Faith said. “After we returned from the eighteenth century, I realized that I could never be happy with either man. If I married Ty, even knowing what I do now, I knew I wouldn’t be happy with him. I had a vision of his working fourteen-hour days, seven days a week.”
“All to prove that he was as good a man as Eddie,” Amy said.
“Yes,” Faith said. “I’m not sure what made me see it, maybe it was that back in Tristan’s time, as Amy calls it, it was the first time that I was truly free. That sounds funny when you think of the centuries involved. We think women are free today, but were subjugated back then. For me, it was the opposite.”
“But then, in this time, you had two mothers telling you what to do—for your entire life,” Zoë said.
“It’s going to be hard to believe, but I think the mothers had very little to do with it,” Faith said. “I think I grew up loving that two boys were in love with me. I thought about my childhood as best I could without wallowing in emotion and sentimentality.”