When I emerged from my room, glancing around, hopeful that something happened, maybe a surprise, though I could feel it in my bones that there was nothing new. It was clear from the faces; sympathy frowns on everyone there.

Zach cooked me oatmeal pancakes with nuts and yogurt, drizzled in syrup, plus coffee. It was delicious and necessary. Quentin was back from searching and hadn't found Magnus or any sign of him. The police were still looking and planning to interview me today. Also, I needed to call my mom and dad and tell them.

I should call Grandma, though she wouldn't be any help. I felt spacey, disconnected, untethered.

My phone was lit up with notifications: Hayley, James, Micheal. Texting they didn't know anything yet.

And so that's how I spent the day — I dealt. Friends, police, staff, my parents, my new house, life, fortune, piled up on top of the basics — I ate when Zach put a plate in front of me. I drank when a cup appeared. I showered when I caught a whiff of my underarms and thought I might spare everyone the agony. Plus, he might come home, right? I should be ready.

I did these things the first day.

Hayley, Micheal, and James came for dinner and held my hand while I explained how I was feeling. Kind of lost. Really scared. Very heartbroken.

James tried an intervention. “I think you need to consider the very real possibility that the boy left you. I'm sorry Katie, you deserve so much better, but he—”

“No. He didn't leave me. Not on purpose, he—”

James's face grew irritated, his brow drew down. “Katie, you have to face reality.”

“No, I don't. I got married two days ago, and my husband meant it. He gave me everything he owned, and he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me, I know it. I just know it.” I sobbed into my hands before Hayley bustled me off to my room where I cried myself to sleep.

Second day? Scarier. Because the conversations stopped. Because the first day he could come home. Now he was gone.

By the end of the week he was way gone.

The following week it was hopeless.

People began speaking about him in past tense.

People gave me the sad looks they saved for widows. And probably I was one.

Trouble was, everyone considered me a widow, but also, assumed I should start moving on. Because I hadn't known him for that long, really. The marriage was actually arranged. There hadn't been enough time to get truly invested.

Hayley, week three, walked with me out to the beach and sat beside me on the sand, and said something like this: I should think about getting back out, seeing people, and I told her to shut up. I told her I had really fallen for him. And that he was coming home. He wasn't dead.

That's what I said.

I barely believed it though because this felt a lot like he died.

I got a pile of books on money markets, investments, and tax law thinking I needed to study up. I got another stack of books on art history because there were paintings in Lady Mairead's office, or rather, my office, that seemed important. Old and historical. I needed to get them appraised but couldn't attest to where they came from or how they got to be here. I needed to ask Magnus about them. Find out their story, because all my guesses sounded crazy. And they seemed very valuable.

But beyond studying, I was pretty damn bored without needing to do any of the normal life upkeep.

Emma ran errands and did anything else I wanted. She also cleaned and laundered the clothes. Zach cooked. I sat around feeling sorry for myself, occasionally reading books about how to be a money mogul or Renaissance painters.

I also spent a lot of time out on the beach. I took up jogging again. Quentin followed behind for safety though neither of us knew why. It was simply Magnus's orders and until he returned and told Quentin to stop we just kept following them to the letter. I searched for shark teeth during low tide and filled a little jar with the tiny black triangles and a few random big ones that I was very proud of. And I sat. At the top of the dune looking out on the ocean, at the horizon, and occasionally up at the sky watching the clouds, studying the wind patterns, waiting for another storm. Because in the weeks I had been waiting for Magnus to come home I had learned something.

The dead man from the wedding party had been carrying coins. Those coins shared a lot in common with the coins my husband owned. The coins his wealth was built on. Magnus Campbell had the best collection in the world of coins and jewels that shared those qualities.

The police interviewed me about the coins, how odd they were. I told them they had been stolen from my husband. So that was the motive: theft of antique coins.

They were searching for the attackers, thieves, for him.

But I had stopped looking because I wasn't sure how to continue. I had a hypothesis. It wasn't one that made sense, or that I could explain without sounding crazy or delusional. So I kept it to myself.

It went something like this, the dead man's coins were age-dated 1600-something. As were Magnus's.

So this is what I believed: Magnus was somehow from there, that time. That he had traveled forward to this time somehow. And he was back there, now. It was the only thing that made sense, though it made no sense at all.

Because it was impossible.

And so I hid my hypothesis. While looking for proof beyond. Magnus didn't know the rules of football. Or Magnus had never used a flushing toilet. Which might be proof enough if it weren't proving something that was categorically undeniably completely impossible.

I just had to wait for him. Remembering his assurances — “I'm coming back to you,” and hoping what he had somehow made possible, he could do again.

I hoped. Because without hope, without the ability to do what is impossible, he was the past. And it broke my heart to think about what that meant. That in the history of the world there was a Magnus Campbell and now there was a Kaitlyn Campbell and once they loved each other, but now he was nothing more than a grave. Where would that be, a dusty churchyard in Scotland? It made me cry whenever I thought of it. Was he dust? God, my heart was breaking. He was dust to me.

What had he said, the night we discussed our plans to marry? It chilled me to the bones when I thought of it — “I'm nothing but a dead man, there's no changing that.”