Page 9 of Here in Your Arms
“I know,” Emmy said with a sigh. “It’s a lot to take in.”
“It’s more than a lot,” Rose snapped. “It’s impossible. I think you should let me off here. I don’t—”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Emmy said, ignoring Rose’s plea to get off the horse, “that of course it wasn’t possible. I thought I’d bumped my head, or that I was dreaming, or that everyone around me was staging some complex, pointless—cruel!—joke on me. But... you’ll see.”
“No, I won’t,” Rose countered sharply. “Because this isn’t happening. It can’t be happening.”
“I know, I know,” Emmy readily agreed, her voice calm, almost gentle. “It’s science fiction, right? But, Rose, I’ve been here for two years. Two years. Although, actually, I’d been sent back to my time, and then I prayed and hoped and waited to be brought back again.”
“You... wanted to be here?” Rose asked and immediately rolled her eyes at herself—asking such a thing, which was nearly as much as suggesting she believed any of this nonsense.
“Absolutely.” Emmy turned her head slightly, her gaze drifting toward the man riding parallel but a bit apart from them.
Emmy’s husband, Brody.
He’d barely spoken a word to Rose but watched everything.
“I didn’t want to be anywhere else,” Emmy said, her voice softer yet, wistful.
Rose tried to wrap her mind around it, but nothing made sense. None of this made sense.
“Okay,” she forced out. “Fine. Let’s pretend for just a second that you’re telling the truth, that this—this whole thing is real. You’re saying people can time travel? And you’ve said a few things that has me...I’m expected to believe you traveled through time as well?”
Emmy glanced over her shoulder, her expression calm but firm. “I did, that’s how I know what you’re going through and I’m saving you hours and days of confusion, wondering what’s going on, by just putting it out there, as unbelievable as it is. I recall specifically—frighteningly—how scared I was.”
“How did you do it?”
“I didn’t do it,” Emmy was quick to clarify. “Someone—or something—did it to me. I don’t know how it works, not really. But I do know that one day, I was walking through a small village in Scotland in the year 2019, and the next, I woke up here."
Rose froze. Her grip on Emmy’s cloak tightened. Good God, but there was so much to process.
"Wait a minute,” she snapped. “Twenty-nineteen?”
Emmy nodded. "Yep. Twenty-nineteen."
Rose stared, her mind struggling to process. "You—you're from the future?"
"To you and them,” Emmy replied, nodding toward the men riding along with them.
Something in Rose’s chest tightened, a sharp pull of panic. "Oh my God," she whispered. "Do they time-travel in the future?"
Emmy barked out a laugh before shaking her head. "No. Or at least, not that I know of. It’s not like people in the future are just jumping through time like it’s a vacation destination. Honestly, I’d never heard anything about it—except, maybe the same as you, in the movies, all that science fiction stuff. But, Rose, it’s had me thinking over the last couple of years—what if all the hundreds or thousands of people who’ve gone missing, say just in our time, weren’t actually dead in their car in the bottom of some lake, or buried in a shallow grave by some madman...but actually alive and well, just in another time?"
Rose gaped at her. "That’s insane.” She sunk a little in the saddle, deflated by another bewildering, depressing thought. Emmy sounded so normal, so matter-of-fact, like she was explaining how to balance a checkbook or bake a casserole—except she was talking about time travel.Time travel!And she wasn’t saying it like a crazy person, either, with wild eyes or a doomsday sign around her neck. She was calm. Rational.
And completely out of her damn mind.
Loonier than a pet cuckoo. Off her rocker. A few records short of a full jukebox.
Emmy shrugged and said patiently, “Rose, it’s in your best interests to suspend belief of everything you think you know. Honestly, it will just be easier on you if you simply open your mind to the possibility. We just don’t know everything about life, about fate, about true magic, about...oh, God, so many things.”
Rose opened her mouth, then shut it. Her mind reeled.
No.No, no, and no!
She was tired, cold, overwhelmed. This was shock, pure and simple. It had to be. The most likely explanation was that she’d suffered some sort of breakdown, or accident, or medical event, and none of this was actually happening.
She swallowed, forcing herself to stay rational. “I’m sorry, Emmy. You seem very kind, but...I just can’t believe this—any of it.” She wondered what kind of fool would believe such baloney.
