“No,” he said with a sad smile. “She did not.”

“I thought you hardly knew each other,” Vera said. “Why wouldn’t she like you?”

He shrugged, and his eyes glimmered as they flashed to Merlin. “Probably something about being loud and foolish.” Merlin sighed and Lancelot chuckled, but Vera did not entirely buy his unbothered response.

She hesitated before finishing with the memory in their chamber, when Guinevere was bedridden with despair.

“And that was after the battle,” Arthur murmured. She wanted to tell him that she now knew with certainty, having borne witness in this strange way, that there was nothing Arthur could have said to alleviate Guinevere’s pain. They hadn’t felt like her own memories, more like eavesdropping in someone else’s.

“It stopped there,” Vera said.

“That couldn’t have been more than a few weeks before the attack,” Merlin said. “That was more fruitful than I expected. You’re getting close.”

His hunger for answers was plain in his eyes. It matched her own drive. “When can we try again?” she asked.

Lancelot made a strangled sort of noise, but Merlin smiled. “The magic takes a toll. Let your mind rest a few days.”

Lancelot shifted in his seat, ready to argue, but Arthur beat him to it. “You’re not doing that again.”

“I am fine!” Vera protested, a blatant lie. She was sweating. Her voice was weak, especially as she got more worked up. And when she wasn’t actively speaking, she fought to keep her eyes open. “It’s working. We can actually fix this!”

“No,” Arthur said. She wanted to kick him in the shin. It wasn’t bravery to persist, it was necessity. This was her one purpose. This was the reason she existed. She could handle the pain. She had to.

“His Majesty is right,” Merlin said. “Not today.”

“Not bloody ever,” Lancelot mumbled. Vera wanted to kick him, too.

She scoffed, prepared to launch back in.

“I require a private word with Merlin,” Arthur said.

“Now?” Lancelot raised an eyebrow.

“Right now,” Arthur said as he stood, the motion deeming it final.

And that was that.

They’d been so close to unearthing the truth. How could Arthur not share her urgency? An idea stole through her thoughts, fleeting but present, nevertheless. For the first time, Vera wondered whether he might not want her to remember. And a question came on the thought’s heels: why?

Vera couldn’t get her eyes to focus when she settled into her bed to read that night. She couldn’t have even finished a page before she must have fallen asleep, but she jolted awake when Arthur came in. Before, he’d always gone right to the side room, occasionally with a detour to his desk to pick a new book. But the past two days (God, had it really only been two days?) might as well have been a decade for all that had changed.

When he saw that Vera was awake, he crossed to the bed and sat down on it next to her ankles.

She sat up straighter. This was very new. And … it made her heart flutter. Also new. She didn’t like that. His care after such deliberate avoidance left her with a pathetic sense of longing to be close to him. She would fight it with her frustration.

“I would have been fine for one more go,” Vera said.

“I have no doubt that you are capable of enduring, but that procedure should only be a last resort.” Arthur had a far-off look, the shadow of earlier. For how the three of them had reacted, Vera’s suffering in the tub must have been a jarring sight. “Merlin’s dedication to the kingdom is commendable, but it has skewed his judgment. We must proceed more carefully. He’s going to do more research on how to offset the toll the memory work took on you. We can try after Yule and Christmas.”

“We can’t wait that long!”

He fixed her with a sad, knowing smile. “It’s only two weeks.”

“I—” She was dumbfounded. Vera knew it was winter, obviously. But without checking a phone or computer every day, she hadn’t realized the date.

Arthur parted his lips, inhaling as if to speak, and then shook his head. What was he not telling her?

He looked at the book in Vera’s lap. “The Hobbit?” he asked, surprising her with the change of subject.

She nodded. Of course he recognized it. It was the only book from the desk with a mossy green cover.

“I read all the books Merlin brought for you. At first, to learn more about the world you came from. Selfishly, I just … enjoy them.”

“It’s one of my favorites,” Vera said. “My parents and I used to read it aloud at Christmastime together.”

“Would you like to—?” He gestured sheepishly with the tilt of his head toward her, then toward the book.

Warmth bloomed in her chest. “You want to read it together?”

“I’d like that,” he said.

“All right.”

Arthur started to shift his weight, but he paused. “Would you be comfortable if I sat close to you?”

Vera focused on keeping her expression even despite the way her pulse had jumped. She silently counted to three before she answered. “That’s fine.”

She scooted to the middle of the bed to make room for him to sit next to her. They were shoulder to shoulder, both sitting up and leaning against the headboard.

“We could start at the beginning,” she offered. She’d been partway through.

“No, that’s all right. Let’s pick up where you left off.”

Vera opened The Hobbit to the page she’d marked with the photograph of her and her parents. Arthur ran his thumb across the image.

“That’s you there,” he said. “What is this?”

“It’s a photograph. It’s like …” Vera thought about how to explain it. “It’s like a painting, but it’s made with light using a clever thing called a camera. Someone points it, you press a button, and it takes a picture.”

“Are these your parents?”

“Yes.” He kept staring at the photo, so she went on. “Mum’s name is Allison. Dad is Martin.” There was a pang in her gut at saying his name.

Arthur held it close to his face. “That’s extraordinary,” he said, and then his voice softened. “You look so happy.”

She did. It had been taken after her university graduation some half a year earlier, a girl who would never imagine what was to come sandwiched between Allison and Martin, her arms slung around their necks. Allison gleefully held out Vera’s diploma, and Martin wore her graduation cap lopsided on his head, the tassel dangling down in his face while Vera was caught mid-laugh. She wouldn’t have laughed at all if she’d known about the cancer already growing inside her father on that very day.

“Who made the photo?” Arthur asked.

“Hmm?” Vera said absently.

“You said someone holds the camera and presses a button. Who had the camera?”

She understood why he might be curious. In the photo, Vera seemed like she was staring right through the picture, sharing a private joke with the viewer. Arthur correctly guessed that the moment had been shared between Vera and the photographer.

“I don’t remember,” she mumbled as sadness threatened to overtake her. She felt his eyes on her and deliberately didn’t meet them.

“Shall I start?” she asked, overly brightly.

Vera held the book between them so he could see while she read aloud. Her voice came out more hesitant than it ever had when reading with her parents. But she soon slipped into the story, and out came her voices for each character. At her silliest dwarf voice, Vera felt the deep rumble of Arthur’s laughter reverberating through his shoulder. When the chapter ended, she passed the book to him. He looked at her in confusion.

“It’s your turn.”

Arthur licked his lips and cleared his throat, flustered—but he started reading in his deep timbre. His happened to be the chapter when Gollum showed up. Vera’s jaw fell open in delight as Arthur pitched his voice into a scratchy whisper for the creature.

“That is a splendid Gollum,” she interrupted.

Arthur tucked his chin to his shoulder with a grin. “Aside from my tutor and my parents, I haven’t actually read out loud to anybody.”