Page 5 of Time for You
She studied him closely, trying to figure out what the hell was happening, but until she got him a CT, there wasn’t much she could do.
“No, you’re not dreaming,” she said, as kindly as she could manage, given how annoying he was.
“But like I said, I’m a doctor. A doctor , not a nurse, and I think there’s a chance you have a traumatic brain injury from our crash.
If you can keep walking, we’re almost to the hospital, where we can treat you. ”
“Do I have another choice?”
“I can’t force you. If you’d rather make your way on your own, you can.”
He looked around again. “It’s really the twenty-first century? Not the nineteenth?”
“It is.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.”
He inhaled sharply and straightened. “Then I guess I haven’t any other options. After you, my lady.”
James was at the triage station when she walked in, Mr. Time-Traveler-Traumatic-Brain-Injury lingering a few feet behind her, eyes wide. “You missed us that much, huh, Dr. Griffin?” James called.
“Bike accident,” she explained, and held up her scraped elbow, just barely visible through the now-torn sleeve of her hoodie. “My injuries are superficial, but I think he’s going to need some scans. He’s a little confused.”
James nodded. Honestly, the nurses handled far weirder things than the doctors did, and often bore the brunt of the way the emergency department was used as a substitute for actual mental health treatment. “Name?” he asked.
“Henry Frederick MacDonald,” the man replied.
“Birth date?”
“January 5, 1856.”
James paused. “Can you repeat that?”
“I suspect a TBI,” Daphne interjected. “Like I said, there’s been some confusion.”
“She’s referring to the fact that I’m from 1885,” Henry said with surprising humor.
James, ever the professional, didn’t raise an eyebrow. “That must be very confusing for you. Why don’t we get you back to a room right now? If Dr. Griffin is willing, she can show you the way.”
Honestly, Daphne had been planning on ditching him once he was through triage, but she felt a splinter of guilt. She’d crashed into him, and now he thought he was from an entirely different century, so the least she could do was hang out while he waited for a slot in CT to open up.
Daphne held the swinging doors open. “This way, Henry,” she said, and he followed her, surprisingly obedient.
His eyes bounced from side to side as he tried to take it all in, and whatever the hell she’d done to his brain—or whatever had been wrong in the first place—was pretty serious.
The usual signs she would have looked for weren’t present, since his speech was by all accounts coherent, if arrogant as hell, and his pupils were equal and reactive, but obviously something was majorly, majorly wrong. And not just with his personality.
She led him into a triage room, with wide glass doors that faced the main part of the ED, and pulled the internal curtain closed, holding up a hospital gown. “Change into this. You can leave your underwear on, and the tie—wait, do you have underwear?”
His eyes widened and he flushed again. “Why on earth are you even asking, my lady?”
“It’s relevant. Are you wearing anything under your clothes?”
He swallowed and attempted to speak several times before managing it. He was really, truly shocked that she was asking about his underwear, it would seem. “I am wearing all the proper attire fitting a gentleman of my station, yes.”
“Okay then. If it covers your whole body, take it off. If it just covers your genitals, then you can leave it on.”
Henry looked about ready to faint. “Good heavens, the future is far more vulgar than I would have thought.”
“Not my fault you’re wearing something that looks like you belong in Hamlet .
But anyway, tie goes in the back, and I’ll come back in when you’re done.
If you need help let me know, and I’ll find someone to help you,” she instructed.
He hesitated, and she sighed. Probably best to play along for now, until they could get him some treatment—or a bed up in Psych.
“Look, I know you probably have doubts about my competency, or whatever, but I promise, here in the twenty-first century, women are perfectly capable doctors.”
He looked down at the flimsy gown with a frown. “It’s not that. It’s that I must protest that Hamlet jibe.”
“Is that really what you need to do? Now?” Daphne asked, wrinkling her nose in annoyance.
“I’m a respectable businessman, not an actor.”
“Understood. Now change.”
He hesitated again. “This gown, it’s—this is very thin. And you’ll be back in? While I’m wearing ... this?”
“Would it help you to know there’s nothing I haven’t seen?”
“Not particularly. That’s actually quite intimidating,” he said with that same flash of humor from earlier. “But I suppose I’ll need to trust you, mustn’t I?”
“Yep. Now change,” she said, and stepped out to give him some privacy. After five minutes, she started contemplating asking if he needed help, but just when she decided to, the curtain swooshed open.
“Is this truly what people in hospital are required to wear, or is this some sort of elaborate joke?”
Daphne turned, and for the first time since she rode her bike straight into him, she got a good look at Henry MacDonald, erstwhile time traveler.
He was tall, probably just over six feet, with his shins and calves bare and sprinkled with dark-brown hair.
His hair was dark brown with hints of red, and curly in a messy, vaguely appealing sort of way.
He was just ripped enough that she could tell through the shapeless blue gown, although not in Anders’s I spend all my free time at a gym sort of way.
She brought her eyes up to his face—a nice face, she had to admit, with a strong jaw and high cheekbones—and found him watching her with the tiniest smirk, like he knew what she was thinking.
“Why don’t you lie down?” Daphne said authoritatively, to hide the way her ears were burning. “I’m going to start ordering some tests.”
Henry did as she told him to, and for the next thirty minutes, he stayed patiently in the bed, following her instructions, even though just about everything bewildered him.
The more she explained, the quieter he became.
She was sort of relieved by that—he really was irritating—but also a little concerned.
A spark in his eyes seemed to have gone out, which honestly seemed like a worse sign than his time-traveler story.
She thought about asking if he wanted to watch TV, but given how deeply rooted the I’m a nineteenth-century gentleman fixation seemed to be, she figured that would probably give him an aneurysm, if he didn’t have one already.
Despite his wariness, Henry sat through multiple blood draws and a round of X-rays, which at least confirmed he didn’t have any broken bones.
CT was backed up, as usual, and the results from the lab wouldn’t be ready for more than an hour, which meant waiting.
He had some scrapes that should be seen to, but she didn’t want to start on that only to get interrupted by Radiology.
And Daphne didn’t like how quiet Henry had gotten.
In a doctor-assessing-a-patient way, not that she wanted to talk to him.
But they had a little time to kill, and they could either talk or sit in increasingly louder silence.
“Do you have any family, Henry?”
“Why? What sort of ‘test’ would require my family’s presence? Will you be needing their blood as well?”
“I’m just making conversation. If you’d rather sit here quietly, we can do that, too.”
A long silence followed, long enough that Daphne decided he would rather sit quietly, but then he spoke. “I have a mother and two sisters. I—think. I did in my life in Edinburgh, at least.”
“No father?” Daphne winced internally at her own bluntness.
Usually, she was better with patients, but Henry had her off balance for about half a dozen reasons.
Mostly because she’d decide he was the absolute worst, and then he’d go and make a quip that made her reconsider. And Daphne loathed uncertainty.
“He passed when I was eleven.”
“Oh, uh—sorry.”
“It was a long time ago,” he said softly, and then smiled wryly. “A very long time ago, apparently.”
That. There. He had no business being charming, while also being weird and irritating.
“What about friends? And what do you do? Like, your job?”
“I have a friend named George, who has been like a brother to me since school. And I own an import firm. MacDonald’s Imports.”
Daphne snorted quietly. “Any chance you import ground beef and buns?”
He frowned. “We do some foodstuffs, yes, but not meat. Is there a reason?”
“Sorry, it’s a joke. There’s a popular, um, restaurant here with a similar name, that’s all.”
“Ah,” he replied, and the resulting silence was at least a little less awkward and deafening than the ones that had preceded it. “And pardon me, but given all—this,” he said, waving his hand toward the monitors next to the bed, “am I really to believe you don’t have a way to get me home?”
“We could get you to Edinburgh.”
Henry sat up. “Why didn’t you say so? We need to go, immediately. Like I said, my mother and sisters—”
“We need to make sure you’re healthy first,” Daphne interrupted. And also, who the hell knows if you really do have a mom and sisters.
“Then as soon as we’re finished, I must insist you take me home. To my time. Not to whatever version of Edinburgh you have now.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Why not?”
Because once we figure out what’s wrong with you, hopefully you’ll realize you’re not from nineteenth-century Scotland. Saying that felt too dismissive, but she also didn’t want to give him false hope. “Um, because time travel isn’t a thing?”
“You have the ability to take photographs of my bones.”
“X-rays are really different from time travel, I promise.”
“You truly can’t get me back?”
“Truly.”
Henry fell silent, fiddling with the blanket over his lap. “What about you? Do you have a family?”
“A mom and a dad, and a younger brother.”
“Are your parents happy with your choice of profession?”
She didn’t love the little italics he seemed to work into his inflection on profession , but she answered anyway, since at least now he wasn’t begging her to invent a time machine. “They’re thrilled, yeah. Really, really proud.”
Henry gazed at her with an expression she couldn’t read, almost like he was considering another question, but then the certified nursing assistant from Radiology showed up to bring them up for his CT.
Daphne tried to explain to Henry what a CT was on the way there, but there was a reason she hadn’t gone into education, and that was mostly her inability to describe medical procedures to someone with absolutely zero context for modern medicine and an apparently inherent talent for getting on her nerves.
By the time they reached the CT room, she was so annoyed she didn’t even care that he looked freaked out by the machine.
“Just lie down and let us take pictures of your brain,” she snapped, exasperated.
Constantly explaining everything was starting to grate on her.
Henry narrowed his eyes at her. “Pictures of my brain ?”
“We’re in the future, remember? Now. Lie. Down. And don’t move, no matter what you hear.”
“One would think a doctor might be a little kinder to their patient,” he mumbled under his breath.
“Excuse me?”
“I said, one would think a doctor might be a little kinder to their patient,” he repeated defiantly.
“I’m being plenty kind. Now lie down.”
“You didn’t say please ,” he replied, and Daphne was almost ready to screech in frustration when she noticed the gleam in his eye.
“Are you seriously fucking with me? Right now?”
He fought a valiant battle against a smile. “I can’t say I’m certain what fucking with you means in this century, but I’ll hazard a guess and say aye, I’m fucking with ye.”
His Scottish burr came through stronger than usual on the last few words, and Daphne found herself also losing a fight with the corners of her mouth. “For Pete’s sake, just get on the table, okay?”
From the booth behind them, Meghan, her favorite radiology tech, pressed the intercom. “You guys okay in there?”
Henry jumped half a foot and looked around for the source of the sound. “You lot have far too many ways of scaring a fellow, you know that?”
“We really don’t have all day, Henry. Just—please, let’s get on with it, okay?”
“All right,” he agreed and gingerly lay down on the table. “But if something goes wrong, will you pull me out?”
He looked worried all of a sudden, more worried than even the blood pressure machine had made him. Against her better judgment, her heart softened just the tiniest bit. “I’ll be right in there, watching,” she said, and pointed to the booth. “You’re safe, Henry, I promise.”
“Thank you, my lady,” he said, and she made a mental note to ask why he’d switched from miss to my lady , but they really didn’t have time to expand on his reasoning. And besides, hopefully he’d be sent off to another unit soon, for treatment of some kind.
“I hear you ran him over because he thinks he’s from Bridgerton ,” Meghan said as soon as the door to the booth clicked shut, leaving Daphne to wonder how that particular interpretation got started. She began the CT scan and glanced at Daphne. “Did he piss you off or something?”
“I did not run him over on purpose .”
“Okay, but if you did, at least he’s hot, right?”
“It’s somewhat less attractive when a man thinks he’s from a century where the idea of a woman doctor makes him faint. Which means he’s got a brain tumor, a massive TBI, or else he’s just a stone-cold weirdo.”
“Which one are we rooting for?”
“Noncancerous tumor,” Daphne replied. “Easily fixed with surgery.”
“Hmm,” Meghan said, squinting at the monitors in front of her as the images of Henry’s brain appeared. “Not sure we’ll have that luck.”
Daphne wasn’t a radiologist, but she could read a CT for basic major issues. And as far as she could tell, Henry had no hint of any sort of brain deformity, tumor, bleed, or anything else. It looked like a perfectly normal, healthy brain.
Which meant it was time for a psych consult.