Chapter Twenty-Nine

I wake gasping and grabbing for my throat. When my fingers touch fabric, I panic, thinking it's the cord. Then I realize I'm touching bandages, and I'm not lying on the cold dirt of the tunnel floor. I'm in a bed.

I exhale and relax.

Lord Muir didn't kill me. Someone stopped him. Mrs. Wallace woke up or someone came into the tunnel and Muir fled, and I'm at the town house, recuperating. My eyelids feel leaden, but I crack them open to catch a sliver of dark curling hair and brown skin.

"Duncan," I croak.

My voice is strange. From the strangulation, I guess. I force my eyes open another fraction, looking up at the face…

At the face that does not belong to Duncan Gray. It's a man I don't recognize. I struggle up.

"Whoa, whoa!" the man says. "Easy now, Ms. Atkinson." He smiles. "Glad to see you're back in the land of the living, but you need to take it easy."

He has a thick Scottish brogue, but it's wrong. The cadence, the word choices, the phrasing.

Then I realize exactly what the man said. What he called me.

Ms. Atkinson.

I bolt upright and stare at the man in scrubs, a gleaming modern hospital room behind him.

I've returned home.

I'm in my own time.

No, no, no. I have to get back. I have to see whether Mrs. Wallace is all right. I have to tell Gray who attacked me. I need to…

I need to…

The thought sputters out as something floods through my veins. It should be relief. I am home. I am finally home.

It's not relief.

It's horror.

My shock knocks me back onto the bed, my horror mingling with overwhelming guilt.

All these months of desperately wanting to go home, and now that I am here, all I can think is that I want to go back.

I rub my eyes. It feels strange, as if I'm moving a body that's not mine. Except it is mine. I look down and see my hands, my arms, and they are as foreign to me as Catriona's had been six months ago.

I don't notice the doctor leaving. I'm only dimly aware that the room has gone silent. Then the door bursts open.

"Mallory!"

My mother rushes through, with my dad right behind her. She grabs me in a crushing hug… and I fall against her and start to cry.

The next half hour passes in a blur. I'm in shock, not quite able to believe that I've come home. I don't ask any questions. I just hug my parents and cry on their shoulders and hug them some more.

"I don't think I've gotten this many hugs from you since you were a little girl," Dad says as I lean against him, inhaling the familiar smell of his aftershave. "I could get used to this again."

I hug him fiercely, my eyes filling.

"Hey, now." He takes my chin in his hand and wipes away my tears, and I see his own eyes misting behind his glasses. "You're okay, sweetheart. Everything is okay."

I blink past the fog of shock and force my brain to begin working again, processing that I'm in a hospital.

Have I been in a coma for six months?

My fingers reach to touch the bandages at my throat. When I talk, it hurts, meaning I wasn't strangled six months ago.

"How long—?" My voice rasps, and I try again. "How long have I been out?"

"Since the night before last," Mom says.

"The night before…?"

"You'd gone for a jog and someone tried to…" Mom's voice catches. "Tried to…"

"Strangle me," I whisper. "That was the day before yesterday?"

Mom nods.

It's been less than forty-eight hours since I left.

"And I've been unconscious ever since?" I ask.

Mom and Dad nod in unison.

So Catriona was never in my body. I was attacked and found, and my comatose body was brought to the hospital, and then Mom and Dad arrived—

My head jerks up. "Nan. Is Nan…?" I swallow. "Is she…?" Another harder swallow. "Am I too late?"

Mom's gaze drops, and I wait for the dreaded answer.

"She doesn't have much time left," Dad says gently. "But no, you aren't too late."

"I need to see her. Now."

I'm heading to the hospice. Mom's driving because we're in a hurry and Dad's "left side of the road" driving skills are even worse than my own. Dad had crawled into the backseat of the very tiny rental car, and I was too numb to balk.

My grandmother is alive. I'm not too late to say goodbye, and that is a dream come true except…

Except that it means the past six months have been nothing but a coma dream. Isla, McCreadie, Alice, Simon, Mrs. Wallace… and Gray. All figments of my sleeping brain.

That's the only explanation. I've been unconscious in a hospital bed while my brain told me this wild and wonderful story.

And none of it is real.

None of them are real.

I can't even hold on to a shred of hope that I really traveled through time, because the ending proves it was just a dream. I'd been in a tunnel, held at gunpoint by Mrs. Wallace, and I'd literally just finished telling her how I got there when I was strangled again and ended up back in my own time.

It is as if my brain knew it was about to wake up, and it had to finish the story fast, so it came around full circle to the beginning.

I want to curl up in a ball and sob for something I've lost. Something I never actually had.

My brain only wanted to entertain me while I slept, and instead, it feels like a betrayal. Like those dreams where I finally got on the major-crimes squad or I met an amazing man or discovered the doctors had been wrong about my grandmother's cancer. It's waking up to the disappointment of realizing my dream-come-true was only an actual dream.

I look back and poke at the oddities and tell myself those prove it was fake. I just happened to land in a progressive family? People I would like as friends? A suffragette chemist and her forensic-scientist brother and their police-detective friend? That should be proof enough that I dreamed it. Pass through time for real, and I'd have ended up the wife of a lout who spent every cent on booze while I worked my hands raw and popped out squalling children.

I had fallen into a fantasy Victorian life. But even knowing that, it still feels real.

When we reach the hospice, I gather my grief and stuff it away for later. Nan is still alive. I've spent what felt like six months thinking I'd missed her last days, and I hadn't.

How many times did I imagine walking these halls, seeing Nan's door ahead, my step quickening as I realized I wasn't too late after all.

I find my smile then. I head down that hall, walking and then striding and then breaking into a run that has my dad laughing behind me. I wheel into the room, and she is there. A tiny woman on a huge bed, surrounded by flowers and books and half-eaten boxes of chocolates.

I run in, and she's resting with her eyes closed. They open, slowly at first and then popping wide as her face lights in a smile, arms reaching for me.

"Mallory," she says, and I burst into happy tears as I run to embrace her.

It's evening. I'd arrived around lunchtime, and Mom made me go out to dinner with Dad. Now I've come back, and we've made Mom go out for a late dinner with Dad. My father is never one to turn down multiple meals.

Nan has been asleep since I got back, and I'm trying to read one of her books, but I haven't turned a single page. I'm actively avoiding thinking about Gray and Isla, which is taking all my mental energy, like holding back a dam.

"What's wrong?" Nan's voice says softly.

I startle from the fake-reading to see her watching me intently.

"You're doing an excellent job of hiding it, as always," she says. "You and your mother put on a good face until you think no one's watching, and then it falls away."

I stand and roll my shoulders. "Tired, I guess, despite sleeping for two days straight."

"There's something else. Something making you sad."

I tap the tray of pills at her bedside. "Huh. No idea why I'd be sad."

"There's no reason to be sad about that. I had an incredible life, and I'm ready to say goodbye. It's leaving others behind that's the hard part. What else is bothering you?"

"I…" I struggle for words, and then I blurt, "I had a dream. While I was in the coma."

She tilts her head, sharp eyes studying me. "One that made you sad."

I roll my shoulders again, as if I can slough off the melancholy. "It was a good dream. Weird and strange, but good, and I thought it was real and… and it's not, and I'm having a bit of trouble dealing with that. Which is…" I wrinkle my nose. "Also weird and strange."

"What did you dream?"

My lips quirk in a smile. "That I fell through time, into the body of a Victorian housemaid working for a forensic scientist."

Her eyes glitter. "Now that does sound like fun. Tell me more?"

I lift one shoulder in a shrug. "It was just a dream."

"So you'll tell me later?"

"Sure."

"How about next Tuesday? You can sit at my graveside and tell me the whole story."

I glower at her, but she only smiles back. Yep, I really did get my love of the macabre from Nan. Her death isn't something I want to joke about, but this isn't about my comfort, is it? These next few days are all about her.

"Tell me a story, Mallory Elizabeth," she says. "A story about my granddaughter falling through time." She takes a chocolate from an open box and then pops a tiny pain pill with a sip of water. "There. I'm ready. Entertain me."

I get as far as the death of Annis's husband before my parents come back from dinner. I stop there. I'm fine entertaining my grandmother with my weird dream, but I don't want to get into it with my parents. Besides, Nan is almost asleep, and the nurses come to give her a little something extra for the pain. Then Mom stays with her while I return with Dad to our rented flat, and I take the sedative the doctor prescribed because there's no way I'm getting to sleep without it.

I'm back in Nan's room before dawn, sending Mom to breakfast with Dad. Nan had a rough night. The end is coming fast, and she's putting on a good face, but I can only imagine the pain she's in. She half wakes once or twice, seeming confused, only to slip back under. She's still sleeping when Dad takes me for his second breakfast, but when I return, Nan's awake and even alert, tapping away on her iPad while Mom dozes.

"Take your wife to bed, Glen," she says to my father. "I don't want to see her again before two P.M. That's an order."

Dad smiles and gently wakes Mom and gets her out of the room. Then I take her place beside Nan's bed.

When I yawn, she glares over at me. "Do I need to send you to bed, too?"

I heft a giant coffee-chain cup. "Nope, I'm good. I haven't had a cappuccino in…" I trail off and struggle for a smile. "Well, three days, apparently. It just feels like months."

"About your story, I want to know more about your friend Duncan Gray."

I groan. "He's an imaginary friend, Nan. Like Angus when I was five. Remember Angus?"

"Dr. Duncan Gray," she says, making me groan again. "Born August 12, 1838, in Edinburgh. Son of Irvine Gray and his wife, Frances. Attended the Royal High School and then the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated with degrees in both medicine and surgery, though he was never licensed to practice."

"Because he dug up a body to confirm a theory on cause of death." I sip my cappuccino. "Are you just going to recite my own stories back to me?"

"Did you tell me his birth date, Mallory? Or where he went to school? I don't even think you told me what his degrees were in, besides being medical. As for why he wasn't licensed, you definitely didn't tell me that story, but now I want it very much."

I go still, lifting my head from my coffee cup. I stare at her. My brain is sluggish this morning from last night's sleeping pill.

Nan waves the iPad. "There's not much here, but even a non-detective like me was able to track down that much."

"I… I must have read about him somewhere. While studying forensics."

She reads from the iPad. "Sisters Isla Ballantyne, chemist, and Lady Annis Leslie, who took over her husband's business after his death from poisoning at the hands of… Well, you know who killed him, I presume, though I'm a bit disappointed to have this spoil that story for me."

I can't speak. My mouth is dry, my brain suddenly blank.

"Is anything I just said incorrect?" Nan asks.

I still don't answer.

"I have read you the facts," she continues. "You believe you must have stumbled over some mention of Duncan Gray and then put him into your dream, which means you imagined all the details. Which ones that I recited are wrong?"

I struggle to focus. "Wait. It said his mother was Frances Gray. That was his adopted mother in my dream."

"Yes, in your version, his father brought him home, as his illegitimate child, and his wife raised the boy as her own. Which has me thinking I would like Mrs. Gray very much… and would like to curse her husband to the second circle of hell. But I am reading a brief biographical note focused on his place in science, where they would not delve into the exact nature of his parentage."

When I still hesitate, she says, "Describe your Duncan Gray. What does he look like?"

I stumble over the words, spitting out bits and pieces. She turns the iPad around.

"Like this?"

There, on the screen, is Gray. He's older, maybe in his early forties, graying at the temples, but it is definitely him, and seeing that photo…

I burst into tears.

Even as I do, my hands fly up, covering my face in horror at the sudden outburst.

"Well," Nan murmurs, "I always did tell your mother that it would take a very special sort of man to capture my Mallory's heart. I just never thought she'd need to travel a hundred and fifty years into the past to find him."

I wipe my eyes. "It's not like—"

"It's not like that, yes, yes. He's a friend, and he's only part of the reason you were happy there. You aren't drowning in despair because the man you love is a figment of your imagination. It's the loss of everything. Which is true. It's Isla Ballantyne and Hugh McCreadie and Alice and Simon and even Mrs. Wallace. It's that world and that life. But it's also, in part, that man."

"I'm not drowning in despair."

Nan rolls her eyes heavenward. "God forbid you admit it. Or admit how you feel about a man." She meets my gaze. "A man who is very real."

"Was very real," I say, my voice suddenly a whisper. "A hundred and fifty years ago. What else does it say—"

"Nothing." She flips the iPad over and holds it down. "You will not look up any of that. Promise me."

"I—"

"I'm a dying woman, and I'm entitled to my deathbed promises. This is the first of two. You will look up nothing regarding Duncan Gray or anyone else you knew from that world."

"What's the second?"

"Agree to the first."

"Fine. I'll look up nothing. Now the second promise?"

She meets my gaze and holds it, seconds ticking past before she says, "That you'll go back."