Page 72 of Time for You
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 havefaster 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.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Henry looked at the hand-drawn map in his lap as the countryside smeared by. George’s former paramour lived in London, but she had, as he’d claimed, known a lot about constellations and moon phases and “all that woo-woo shit” that everyone liked to tease Ellie about.
“How did I not know about Maria?” Henry asked George. Anne sat across from them, frowning down at a piece of paper.
“You’re easy to read and shockingly terrible at noticing things.”
Henry grinned. “That makes me sound like an awful friend.”
“No, just a very oblivious one. But do you think what Maria said sounds right?”
“I do, yes. The book she had was an earlier version of the one I found. The map in it isn’t as detailed as the one I saw in the future, but the title and theory are the same.”
