“Ruthie! Oh God, Ruthie, it’s you…” Camille crushed me against her warmth; I clung, wracked by shuddering cold, reeling with disbelief, unable to process what this meant.
Milla…
My lips moved but no sound emerged.
“She’s freezing, help me get her up there, hurry!” Camille wrapped me in her coat as she issued instructions, bundling it around my shivering body.
Mathias gathered me in his arms without another word and carried me up the bank toward the glowing lights of Shore Leave. My home. My family’s home, which I thought I would never see again. Quivering with shock and cold I huddled close to the warmth radiating from Mathias; he shouted for help as he jogged over the snow-slushy yard.
“Mom!” Camille raced ahead, slipping on the porch steps.
My chest heaved and stuttered, cracking apart with the force of my emotions. Mom, Aunt Jilly, Tish, Clint – all of them streamed outside, a river of love and life to surround me. To sustain me. I had returned to them. I had tried to die and was instead returned to them. My lips were blue and numb, my skin a sheet of thin ice, but deep in my chest my heart had started beating again.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Landon, MN - March, 2014
“WE HAVE TO GO BACK.”
“I can’t let you leave yet.” Mom wrapped both hands around one of mine when I insisted that returning to the past was the only option. “My baby. My Ruthann. You’ve already been taken from me and I can’t let it happen again. Not yet.”
I interlaced our fingers, unable to argue with her. “I know. I’m not going anywhere tonight.” At that point the conversation had been so intense a pause seemed overdue, and entirely necessary, and I stood to wrap my arms, and the quilt, around my mother.
The big, classroom-style clock over the pass-through door had now edged past midnight. I was dry and blessedly warm but still required a blanket over my shoulders to ward off the chills. Rather than retreat to the house we stayed in the cafe; the amount of caffeine pumping through my veins would probably prevent sleep until next week. But I had no intention of sleeping. Explanations had blown around us like miniature tornadoes for the past two hours. Absorbing everything which had occurred in my absence was impossible but the most crucial information had been exchanged. We were now armed with information to reverse what Fallon had done to the timeline. Or, so I prayed.
Table three, our perpetual gathering spot, was surrounded by chairs, coffee rings decorating the ivory plastic surface beneath our elbows and forearms. Mom and Aunt Jilly left to traverse the slippery path leading to the main house; I hated to see them retire to bed, craving the security of their faces and voices, but it was late. Sleep deprivation would help no one. Tish, Clint, Robbie Benson, Derrick, and I crowded around table three while Mathias and Camille sat together at the booth a few feet away; they could not bear to stop touching.
Derrick Yancy, the least sentimental of anyone present, was positioned straight across from me; I found I appreciated his blunt, almost cynical, attitude. He leaned forward once again. “How certain are you that we can reach the correct moment in time?”
I hesitated and his eyebrows lowered; there was no point lying. “I’m not certain at all. But if what I believe is true, we can come close. I’ve never had a particular date or year in mind when I’ve…traveled. I’ve always been pulled. But I believe that pull exists for a reason. I would never attempt this if I didn’t think we had a chance of reaching the right destination. If we focus on a particular moment, it’s my hope we can be pulled there.”
“And that moment is June thirtieth, 1882?” Tish pressed. “The day Blythe Tilson was killed and the night of the fire at the Rawleys’ homestead, right?”
I nodded. “But that’s cutting it way too close. If we jump from Minnesota, we’ll land in Minnesota. We have to give ourselves enough time to get where we need to go. For me, that’s Montana, and for you,” I indicated Derrick, “that’s Iowa City.”
He exhaled slowly through his nostrils, reabsorbing what he had agreed to do.
Please, oh God, please, don’t back out on us, I thought.
“Two weeks, you think? Will you be able to find them?” Camille’s intensity escalated another few notches. I knew she really meant ‘Will you be able to find Malcolm?’ I had told her everything I could about him but she wanted more. Despite unfathomable circumstances, including his marriage to another woman, Camille had not moved an inch from her position on Mathias’s lap; he kept his arms locked around her waist. Their need for physical contact only intensified my desperate longing for Marshall but I refused to let aching thoughts chisel away my self-control.
I’m coming for you, Marsh. I will find you, I swear to you. I will make this work.
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to start from those locations in the first place, rather than the other way around?” Robbie asked, lightly tapping his empty coffee mug on the table. “I mean, isn’t it like a hundred times easier to travel by car or plane than by, like, I don’t know, donkey cart? How did people travel around then? It sounds fucking horrible.”
“I don’t know about you, but I’d rather we went together,” Derrick admitted, focusing again on me. “I’d prefer a traveling companion who knows the time period.”
“If we left from different places, we’d have no way to know whether the other one made it there,” I agreed. “Robbie’s right about the inconvenience of travel, but two weeks should be plenty of time. Trains run east to west in
