Page 10 of Time for You
“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 onprofession, 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 explainingeverythingwas starting to grate on her.
Henry narrowed his eyes at her. “Pictures of mybrain?”
“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?”
