Page 30 of Time for You

Silence.

That was the first thing Henry noticed. Wherever he was, it was quiet. No humming motors, no buzz of electricity, no planes roaring overhead.

The second thing he noticed was the darkness.

It wasn’t black—Edinburgh at night was never fully dark, but it wasn’t the bright, artificial white light of the twenty-first century.

A gas lamp flickered half a block ahead, and as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light, his ears started to pick up the sounds.

Wagon wheels on cobblestone, horseshoes clip-clopping, and harnesses rattling.

I wonder what Daphne would think. The thought flitted across his mind before he had a chance to quash it. Thinking of Daphne and her reaction had become second nature to him in just a few short months, but he needed to start moving past that now, somehow. It knifed through him, the ache sharp.

Henry looked around his surroundings, trying to get his bearings. Edinburgh Castle was limned in moonlight to his left, and the homes around him were spacious but not overly grand, which meant home was straight ahead, perhaps a mile.

Henry turned on his heel and walked in the opposite direction instead.

He was worried what he would find at home.

Daphne and the others may have shown him what women could be capable of, but that was in a century where their ambition and desires were at least somewhat nurtured; he dreaded returning home to discover that his mother and sisters had somehow already been thrown out of their house, destitute.

It wasn’t likely, but it wasn’t impossible, either.

The guilt of having stayed an extra few months in the future gnawed at him now that he was home.

Perhaps it had been the wrong choice, as glorious as it had been.

Perhaps he had abandoned the people he’d sworn he would always protect. Perhaps he’d been too selfish.

Henry turned right and then veered down a narrow street that felt cramped after the wide, spacious city he’d just left. If his calculations were correct, it would be close to ten at night, which meant George was likely still in his office.

Henry’s best friend was what his old—new—future?

—friends would call a workaholic. George worked as a solicitor and took his job very seriously, often staying at his small office well into the evening.

He had no family to return to in the evenings, as he was fond of pointing out to Henry, so there wasn’t any reason not to simply stay and work late.

Henry had met him when they were at boarding school ( what a barbaric thing, sending kids away like that, Daphne had said when he told her how he’d been schooled), both of them reeling from loss.

Henry had just lost his father the year before, whereas George had lost his parents to cholera just six months earlier.

An only child, he had been sent to live with a wealthy but chilly aunt, who promptly enrolled him in a school just about as far from her home as she could manage.

Neither George nor Henry had ever really felt like they belonged, and they had been fast friends since their first term.

But where Henry returned home to run his father’s business, George had needed to strike out on his own.

He was now a wealthy man in his own right, but aside from Henry and his sisters, George had no family to speak of.

The aunt had died when he was twenty, but it wasn’t much of a loss, all things considered. She had been a patron, not a parent.

As Henry had suspected, the lamps were still lit in George’s office. He considered knocking, but never had done that before, and anyway, he didn’t want to risk George thinking he was an impostor or spirit and raising a hue and cry.

Henry shouldered the door open and couldn’t help but smile at the familiar sight of George hunched over his desk in the back room, so absorbed in his work he hadn’t even looked up. Henry walked to the open door and stood there, waiting.

“If you forgot your watch again, O’Malley, your wife will skin you alive and I’ll make sure no judge convicts her,” George called, turning a page on whatever he was reading.

“Good thing I’m not O’Malley, then. Nor married, for that matter,” Henry replied.

Recognition froze George’s muscles in place.

He went deathly still and slowly lifted his head, staring at Henry with a cautious hope that hurt for him to see.

It was selfish to have stayed so long. He’d known that all along, but somehow hoped—he wasn’t sure what, but perhaps that his loved ones hadn’t missed him all that much.

It had been a foolish hope, but he’d hoped it nonetheless.

“Have I gone mad?” George rasped, slowly unfolding his long body from his chair. “Are you real?”

“Very,” Henry said, his grin deepening. Leaving Daphne hurt like hell, but he had missed his friend, too. “I’m back.”

George nearly knocked over a candle on his desk in his haste to get over to pull Henry into a tight hug. “What—how—where the bloody hell were you?” George stammered.

“It’s a long story.”

“Then tell it,” George ordered, holding his hand out to a velvet-covered chair.

Henry had been in it countless times, waiting for George to finish his work so they could walk back to Henry’s family’s mansion together.

Sitting in it, with the comfortingly familiar flicker of gaslight and candles, made him curiously homesick.

He wasn’t sure what he missed, the future or the past. It was all so godforsakenly confusing.

“I went to the future,” Henry said bluntly.

George blinked. “Pardon?”

“Where I was, when I was gone. I went to the future. Time-traveled, as it were. But I’m back now.”

“You cannot be serious.”

“Alas, my friend, I am.”

George stood, walked to the sideboard behind his desk, and poured a healthy glass of whisky. He downed it in one gulp, then poured another measure, before pouring another glass for Henry. “You’re going to have to start from the beginning.”

So he did. George listened without questioning him.

Henry found himself telling the story as though Daphne were just one of the kind people who took him in, not the woman he’d fallen in love with, but he didn’t have time or, as Brittany was fond of putting it, the “executive function” to figure out why he was doing so.

“Women doctors are common?” George asked disbelievingly when Henry was done.

“Indeed,” Henry confirmed. “And they get quite cross if you are surprised by that fact.”

“I’ll have to remember that if I ever go to the future,” George said dryly. “Are they ... pretty?”

Daphne’s face flashed before him, but Henry blinked it away. “Some are.”

“And you’re quite sure you time-traveled? You weren’t locked in a madhouse and have only just escaped?”

Henry reached into his knapsack and drew out one of the photographs he had promised Daphne he wouldn’t bring back to the past. Not the one he knew he couldn’t survive without but the other one, the one of them in the formal outfits at the hospital gala.

Vibol with his arm around Michelle’s waist, Brittany and Ellie in the middle, and Henry and Daphne on the other end of the line, all of them beaming at the photographer.

George studied it, his brow furrowed. It wasn’t that he had never seen a photograph before, but rather the way it was printed.

“It’s in color?” he asked after several long seconds.

“Not colored after the fact, but—” He flipped it over, judging the weight of the paper and running his fingertips along the back.

“This was printed this way. And these clothes—what trick is this?”

“It’s no trick. This is how photographs are, in the future.

” Henry paused, considering trying to explain that most of them had all their photographs on little rectangles they carried in their pockets and called “phones” even though mostly they just sent tiny, short missives back and forth, rather than talking, and decided against it.

He could explain that to George later. He had all the time in the world now.

George had stopped looking at the photograph and now studied him just as intensely. “Who did you leave?”

“Those people. They became very good friends,” Henry replied over the lump in his throat.

He’d never lied to George before and wasn’t sure why he was doing so now, but admitting his feelings for Daphne might shatter whatever reserve he was clinging to, and he didn’t want to break down. Not here, not now.

It didn’t look as though George believed him, but he nodded nonetheless. He checked his pocket watch. “Your mother and sisters have likely gone to bed, but I’m sure they’d want to be woken. I assume you haven’t gone there yet?”

“Not yet,” Henry admitted. “I didn’t want—I needed to be sure, I guess. That I really was back. And I returned closer to you,” he lied. Two lies in barely two minutes—perhaps George’s friend hadn’t really returned from the future.

“We should go, then. Maggie will have my head if she finds out I knew you were alive and kept you from her. And Henry?”

“Yes?”

“I’m glad you’re home.”

Henry had to remind himself that home no longer meant Daphne, but he nodded.