Page 33 of Time for You

It was a typical Scottish fall day—warm but not hot, with the sky an uncertain mix of sun and clouds, as if the sky woke up that day and couldn’t decide which way to be.

A grey cloud would scud in front of the sun and everything would cool slightly, but then the sun would slide out the other side of the cloud and Henry would feel just a tad too warm.

Arthur’s Seat provided a stunning view of Edinburgh itself, and on a Sunday morning, despite his mother’s scandalized protesting, Henry felt far closer to God here than he ever had in church.

Or perhaps he had simply grown accustomed to the twenty-first-century habit of sleeping in on Sundays rather than going to church, and this was his compromise.

For the nearly three months he’d been back, he had spent every Sunday up there, rather than in the pews with his mother and sisters.

There were only a few others scattered around the top of the Seat, everyone else more afraid for their mortal souls, apparently.

Church bells clamored distantly, and Henry stayed where he was, sitting on a lone boulder, watching the shadows of clouds chase each other across the city.

He was spending more and more time like this, lately.

Maggie wasn’t just assisting him with MacDonald’s Imports, as she kept insisting; she was running it, with Lydia serving as the second-in-command.

Henry’s name needed to be on documents to keep it safe, but otherwise he was entirely superfluous.

He had thought the relief of being back with his family would help with the gut-wrenching ache he felt every time he thought of Daphne, but instead, he just felt worse.

His family loved him, but they didn’t need him, not the way he had assumed.

And he loved them, but he didn’t need them—he needed Daphne.

Even worse, he wanted her, and he couldn’t stop thinking about his mistakes.

Maybe he should have told her how he felt earlier, long before he thought even she suspected her own feelings for him, but it had felt too soon, amid the chaos of him learning an entirely new way of life.

But maybe if he’d done so, he could have returned to the nineteenth century, set his affairs in order, and then returned to the twenty-first. Then again, perhaps that wasn’t the ironclad plan it appeared, as just a few weeks after his arrival in the twenty-first century, Maggie and Lydia might not have yet figured out their strengths for running the business.

It was just all so damned complicated, and Henry couldn’t help but feel like no matter what he had done, it would have been the wrong thing.

Footsteps approached behind him and stopped. “It isn’t like you to brood like this,” George said.

“I’m not brooding.”

“You are,” George argued. “It’s understandable, though. I’d brood too if I left the love of my life behind in a different century.”

“I didn’t—”

“Tell me? No, you didn’t, but you didn’t have to tell me about Sophia, either. I still knew, didn’t I?”

George was the only one privy to that particular heartbreak of his, and had in fact figured out Henry’s true feelings for Sophia before he’d even admitted them to himself. “How did you know?”

George flicked the tails of his coat behind him to sit next to Henry on the rock.

“You’ve told us a lot about the people you met in the future, but Daphne remains an enigma, which tells me either you didn’t know her well—unlikely, given that she ran you down, and she looks like a Renaissance painting of Venus. ”

“And I have a particular affinity for Venus?” Henry asked wryly.

“You have a particular affinity for pretty women , and calling Daphne merely pretty feels like an insult.”

That much, at least, was accurate. “It doesn’t matter. I can’t go back there.”

“Why did you come back here, then? If you loved her?”

“My family needed me. Or I thought they did. But that was just me being an arrogant ass, as Daphne liked to call me before—well, before. They didn’t need me to save them. Maggie and Mother have the business well in hand, better than I ever did, and I’m left wondering what I’ll do with myself now.”

“Be a man of leisure? Plenty of men don’t work. You and I are some of the only boys we went to school with who don’t just live off their estates.”

“I don’t want that, though. Don’t laugh, but in the future, there are a lot of jobs open to everyone, not just women or the poor. I started cooking, and I found I liked it.”

“There are chefs here, you know.”

“I know. But—” Henry sighed. “It’s not the same.”

“Without her,” George finished.

“Precisely.”

“I won’t say you made the wrong choice coming back, because I mourned you, brother.

It was unspeakably awful, thinking I’d never see you again.

But if I never saw you again but knew you were doing the thing you loved with someone you loved, well, I wouldn’t like it, but I could make my peace with it. ”

“I can’t go back, George. Not for another seven years, and I made her promise to move on and not wait for me. I wouldn’t want her to, even if I thought I could go back in seven years.”

“What if you went sooner?”

“There isn’t an opening for seven years,” Henry said, irritated that George wasn’t grasping the central problem.

“Not from Edinburgh to Minneapolis, no, but what if there was one that went elsewhere in America? You said people in the future have faster ways to travel than we do, so what if we just got you to the right time and continent?”

“We?” Henry asked, not daring to hope that the rest of what George had suggested was possible.

“Anne came to my office yesterday with a theory. And she found an equation on a loose piece of paper in that medical textbook.”

Ellie’s equation. He hadn’t thought much about it, since it was only to get him back, but if anyone could figure out a theory to reverse it, it was Anne.

Henry cracked a smile, his first genuine one in weeks. “Of course she did.”

“She needs more information from you, what you remember from what you learned, but once she knows how the time veil works, she thinks there’s a way to get you back to the right time, if not the exact right place.”

“What we need, then, is a Woo-Woo Girl.”

“A what now?”

“Ellie called herself that,” Henry said, grinning at the memory. “Someone who knows a lot about astrology, cares about the signs, phases of the moon—that sort of thing.”

George nodded thoughtfully. “I think I know just the woman.”