Page 18 of Time for You

Suddenly, it was like there was a ticking clock over everything they did. Daphne could tell he was relieved, and she was, too. Really. Henry deserved to get back to his own time, to his family.

And it would be nice not to be responsible for him anymore, either.

Granted, he was a lot more self-sufficient now, and had even started regularly making them meals when they got back from long shifts.

It was mostly simple stuff—eggs, pasta, french toast—but it was nice to come home to.

He was working hard to understand modern life, and while he had sadly stopped using as if constantly and incorrectly, he was coming along.

In fact, if Daphne hadn’t known already that he was a time traveler, she never would have guessed.

But even though Daphne felt like she was understanding Henry better these days (likes: Kraft Mac and Cheese, showers, and Austen adaptations; dislikes: violent movies, quinoa, and the buzzer that let them know the dryer was done), she still felt like there were parts of him she didn’t fully understand.

“Why aren’t you married?” she asked one night, having had about half a glass of wine too much. They were sitting on the small balcony that opened out from her bedroom, a soft spring breeze tickling her flushed cheeks. “You’re like, old enough.”

“Why aren’t you?” Henry replied, and okay, yeah, she liked his voice. It was low and rumbly in a way she felt deep down in her belly.

“It’s not that weird for a woman to be unmarried at my age anymore.”

“And it’s not that ‘weird’ for me to be unmarried at my age, either.”

“No, but it’s more likely you would be,” she argued. “Right?”

Henry sighed into the glass of white wine he’d been nursing. “Right.”

“Okay, so, why not?”

“Why aren’t you?”

“I asked you first,” she said.

Henry sighed again. “I haven’t found someone, I guess.”

“You guess?”

Henry looked at her, his eyes narrowed. “You’re being unbearably nosy.”

“Humor me,” she said. “You haven’t found someone, you said, but then you qualified it. Why?”

“It wasn’t that I’ve never met anyone, as you’d put it. But marriage wasn’t an option.”

“Why?”

Henry leaned his head back against the chair. “It’s a long story. Can I just leave it at that?”

“Fair enough,” Daphne said. “But can I ask you another question?”

“Sure,” he agreed.

“What do you miss the most? Aside from your family, of course.”

He thought for a long moment. “The quiet. And the stars. Even in the city, the lights weren’t as bright as these are, so there were more stars. And no infernal motors.”

“Infernal motors?” she asked with a grin. “What are you, eighty?”

“Somewhere around my sesquicentennial, actually.”

Daphne snorted, and Henry shot her a smile that did something unexpected to her heart. “It sounds nice,” she said honestly.

“It is, in some ways.”

“Only some?”

“Only some. I don’t know how to explain how strange and wonderful it is to me that you can prevent almost any disease.”

“Not any,” she protested.

“But most. My father died of influenza, and before we moved to our current house, we lived in a middle-class neighborhood that was not too far from housing for laborers. The things I saw, Daphne, the things I know happen every day—you can’t imagine it.”

“I probably can,” she said softly. “I spend my days surrounded by pain.”

“But there’s hope here. We have some, but not like this.

Back home—most of the people you see, they wouldn’t have made it to a doctor, much less have a chance.

And the babies ...” He shook his head.

“Children die all the time. My own mother lost a babe before me, and she is considered lucky for only having lost one. Here, it’s so rare, and I don’t know if you understand how miraculous that is. ”

Daphne hadn’t thought about it like that, or at least not in-depth.

She believed in medicine and knew that the twenty-first century was able to save people who would have died even sixty years earlier.

But she’d never really thought about the way things had changed since the nineteenth century. She cleared her throat, suddenly tight.

“But you miss it, don’t you?”

There was a long, long silence. The air between them thickened, and Daphne found she was holding her breath. “Some of it,” he said finally.

Do you still want to go back? The words were on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask them.

Suddenly, the thought of hearing him say yes, I can’t wait felt painful.

“That must be hard,” she said instead, falling back on one of her Doctorsona’s favorite phrases. It felt cheap, like a cop-out.

“It is. Not as hard as it was at first, though,” he said, with a look that felt meaningful.

But what it meant, exactly, she didn’t want to consider.

It was the night that Daphne always dreaded—her turn to be the resident on call.

All the residents were scared of it, since it meant way more responsibility than any of them felt capable of handling, but most of them came out of that shift exhilarated.

Uncle Pete’s Tavern was having another special, but this time there weren’t quite as many college kids stumbling in for a stomach pump and IV of fluids.

It was probably getting close to finals, so Daphne guessed they had a week or two of respite while kids tried to study, before the onslaught of graduation.

At least Hannah was the charge nurse for the shift.

She had been working in the ER for years and wasn’t fazed by anything.

If Daphne was frozen with indecision, she could usually count on Hannah to rescue her with a gentle suggestion.

The rest of the residents were always assuring Daphne that her anxiety about on-call shifts was normal, that they all felt the same way, and it must be just impostor syndrome.

But as Daphne stood in front of a nurse who needed orders for a patient (thirty-seven-year-old female, high fever and dehydration), she couldn’t help but feel like it was different for her.

“Influenza test was negative?” Daphne said, frowning.

“And no signs of appendicitis. Um, let’s do—a broad-spectrum antibiotic and .

.. wait, hang on.” They were way behind, as usual, and the current wait in the ER was three hours, minimum.

But something was humming quietly in the back of Daphne’s brain, and she needed to figure it out.

Daphne knocked on the glass door that separated the room from the rest of the ER. The woman inside looked wan, and her brown skin had a sickly, grey cast. She had the look of someone who had lost a lot of weight fairly quickly, and immediately, Daphne’s antennae went up.

She pumped the hand sanitizer on and sat down on the stool. “Hi there, I’m Dr. Griffin. Can I ask you a few questions?”

Her patient, Melissa, nodded weakly, and Daphne began the exam.

With every answer Melissa gave, Daphne’s heart sank further.

No appetite, bloating, family history of cancer.

Everything pointed to ovarian cancer, but she didn’t want to scare her before she was sure.

She kept a professional mask on and grimly ordered the proper tests, but with how long she had left on her shift—four hours—and how long it would take for Melissa to get up to CT and have a radiologist read the scans, there was almost no chance Daphne would be there to break the news to her patient.

And that, more than anything, was what made her duck into the supply closet for a quick cry. Daphne wanted to be there with patients, not just breeze in and out. And she wasn’t naive—she understood that this was, for better or worse (and usually worse), the state of health care in the US.

But right then, in that moment, she hated it.

There weren’t any cases that hard for the rest of her shift, although that didn’t mean it was easy.

The patient she’d been thinking about on her awful date with Anders was back, still with the persistent cough.

She was an elderly woman, and Daphne couldn’t help but smile a little at her name when she saw she was her next patient.

The ER had a lot of frequent fliers, some because of conditions that were hard to manage, and some because they had nowhere else to go for help.

Mrs. Green was a little bit of both—chronic health problems and crappy insurance that meant she couldn’t see a specialist. “In a few years I’ll get Medicare and it will be easier,” she had told Daphne many times.

“Hey there,” Daphne said as she walked in. “What brings you in today, Mrs. Green?”

She coughed again. “Same as always, dear. How was that date of yours?”

For one confusing second, she wondered how Mrs. Green knew about Henry, and then for one more confusing second, she wondered what they had done that could be considered a date. Then she remembered—Anders.

“Not great,” she said ruefully. “He was more interested in himself than me.”

“That’s too bad. But I’m sure there’s someone else out there,” Mrs. Green said between coughs. Unbidden, Daphne’s mind went to Henry. “Oh, so there is someone,” Mrs. Green continued. “I saw that little smile.”

Daphne shook her head. “It’s complicated.”

“How complicated?”

“He’s not from here,” Daphne said, pulling out her stethoscope and listening to her lungs. “Okay, another breath,” she coached, and listened intently.

“So? They’ve had airplanes for a long time, dear.”

Daphne’s lips tugged up slightly. “Like I said, it’s complicated,” she said, and then realized exactly what she was implying.

That maybe, if things were different, she could find herself falling for Henry.