The clock in the grand hall of the Thorne Estate didn't chime; it breathed. It was a heavy, mechanical lung that counted the seconds Dellus had stolen from the heavens.
Dellus stood by the floor-to-ceiling window, his reflection staring back at him with the smooth skin and sharp jawline of a man in his twentieth summer. He adjusted the cuff of his silk sleeve, his hands steady, though his mind felt like a library after a fire, mostly ash, with only a few charred sentences left to read.
He was sixty years old today. He had been twenty for forty years.
"Sir?"
Dellus didn't turn. "Did you find her, Marcus?"
His butler, a man truly aged with stooped shoulders and thinning hair, sighed. It was a sound Dellus had heard every day for four decades. "The investigators returned from the southern ports, my lord. There is no record of 'Julia' matching your description. But then..." Marcus hesitated. "Your description is... becoming thin."
Dellus closed his eyes. He tried to summon her. He knew there was a girl. He knew her name was Julia. He knew that the smell of crushed clover made his heart ache so violently he could barely breathe. But her face? It was a smudge of light. Her voice? A distant ringing.
He had sold another year of his past last night. He could no longer remember the colour of his mother's eyes or the sound of his father's voice because he had disowned him. He was a man made of the future, with no foundation beneath his feet.
"Keep looking," Dellus whispered. "Spend whatever is necessary. I will stay this age until my bones turn to dust if it means I can see her walk through those doors."
At the edge of the estate, standing before the rusted iron gates, Julia tightened her grip on the leather-bound book hidden beneath her apron. Her knuckles were white.
She looked at the towering spires of the Thorne mansion. To the world, she was a girl of nineteen seeking employment as a scullery maid. To the archivist, the shadow that lived in the corners of crossroads was a debtor.
She reached into her pocket and touched a small, silver locket. Inside was a portrait of a young man with laughing eyes and a nobleman's crest.
"I found you, Dellus," she whispered, her voice trembling.
She opened her diary to the very first page. The ink was faded, but the words were hers: July 14th. He told me he would wait for me at the willow tree. He promised that time would never touch us. He called me his 'Everlasting'.
Julia felt a sharp, stabbing pain in her chest, the price of the "cheat". Every time she read her memories to keep them from disappearing, it took a little more of her physical strength. She was young, but she felt as though her soul was made of glass.
She stepped forward and pulled the bell.
Minutes later, the heavy oak doors groaned open. The butler, Marcus, looked her up and down with weary eyes. "The position for the housemaid is for those with experience and discretion. This is a house of silence, girl."
"I am hushed," Julia said, keeping her head low so he wouldn't see the tears threatening to spill. "And I am very patient. I have been searching for a place like this for a long time."
"Name?"
"Julia," she said. She waited for a reaction. A flinch. A gasp.
Marcus merely nodded, scribbling on a ledger. "Follow me. The master is in the gallery. Only speak to him if he speaks to you first. He is... preoccupied."
Julia followed him through the cold, marble halls. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird. They passed a hallway lined with paintings – portraits of women with golden hair, dark hair, blue eyes, and brown eyes. None of them were her. He had been trying to paint a memory he had already sold.
They entered the sun-drenched gallery. There, standing by a half-finished canvas, was the boy she had kissed in the hayloft forty years ago. He looked exactly the same. The same tilt of the head, the same broad shoulders.
Dellus turned. He looked at her.
Julia stopped breathing. She waited for the recognition. She waited for him to drop his brush and scream her name. With a single glance, she waited for the forty years of wandering to come to an end.
Dellus looked right through her.
"Marcus," Dellus said, his voice deep and unfamiliar, stripped of the youthful warmth she remembered. "Is this the new assistant?"
"Yes, sir. Her name is Julia."
Dellus paused. He looked at her again, his brow furrowing for a fraction of a second. A flicker of something passed behind his eyes, a ghost of a ghost. Then, his face hardened into a mask of polite indifference.
"A common name," Dellus said, turning back to his canvas. "Make sure she stays out of the light. I'm trying to remember a specific shade of amber, and her presence is distracting."
Julia bowed, her hand trembling against the diary hidden in her skirts. He was there. He was right there. And he was completely, utterly gone.