I wandered out to the end of the beach walkway and sat on the dune, looking out over the wide white sand past the deep Atlantic Ocean to the far horizon. I took this view while I was thinking about him, but I couldn't sit here like this for long. I went to the sand and searched for shark teeth because it was simpler. Searching cleared my mind, zen-like. I had been waiting for him for eight weeks. Sixty-one days. Just over two months. Over One thousand, three hundred, fifty hours.

Was I a widow?

There would be a time, soon, when I would need to decide. Because searches for lost husbands couldn't go on forever. And if I needed to search the past — I didn't know how...

I stared out over the ocean trying to wrap my head around the impossible. Magnus had traveled through time and space to get here. And now he had gone somewhere else.

I wanted him to do it again.

I was asking the impossible to happen twice.

Technically impossible, but I had watched a Ted Talk on the possibility. What if there were threads of time, woven and wrapped, tied and unraveled, and what if my Magnus, had climbed away like an aerial artist, suspended over his own time, into my time? Could I lower into his? No, because it was ridiculous, impossible, and frankly made me sound insane just thinking about it.

That's why I didn't tell anyone about my suspicions. I let them go on believing he was missing. He was. I let them go on wondering if he had left for Scotland. Probably. I let them think he might be dead now. Because it was true.

I ran on the beach. It was about three quarters of a mile to the pier and then I ran back. I stopped twice, walking and searching for shark teeth. Usually Quentin trailed me, but some days I was chatty, or he was, and we would run beside each other talking and laughing. Like today, talking about the new Will Ferrell movie and speculating about the next Avengers movie.

When we returned to the house, Quentin jogged up the walkway while I stayed on the beach, looking for shells. Then I sat on the dune, staring out over the horizon. It was about ten in the morning, but so hot I had a sheen of sweat on my skin already.

The beach was growing crowded, Labor Day weekend, last hoorah of the summer and all. I had been invited to James's house for a cookout, with Pirate's Punch. All the gang would be there, and they were a good crowd. They took good care of me. Kept me laughing. Tried to get me out of the house. But they also didn't mention Magnus. Because it was weird, uncomfortable and what should they say — sorry your man disappeared that night?

They were there, they saw it, and it was weird as hell.

They kept looking for him that night, because it wasn't possible he disappeared into thin air. But that meant something much more tragic happened and . . . No one knew what to say about it.

It would be easier on everyone if I would simply decide to call myself a widow.

Hadn't that been what Magnus wanted? He had made sure every bit of money, paperwork, all the contracts and leases, were all in my name. The final actions of someone who is dying.

“Aye, Kaitlyn. I am a dead man.”

A little girl on the beach was running toward her mother's towels. Her father had brought a shovel to the beach, a big, full-size shovel, and dug a little swimming pool in the wet sand near the lapping waves. The little girl, maybe two years old, had been sitting in it, splashing, and now wanted her mommy to join her. I watched, wondering if it might be possible to dig to the past, like some Journey to the Center of the Earth movie plot or something, maybe Dwayne Johnson would know, did he have a Twitter account?

— a deep dark cloud about a mile up the beach billowed up. I stood. A rumbling fury of a storm cloud, climbing the strata from beach to sky. It was a big storm, from nowhere, and there was a surging, flashing, sizzling, electrical storm at its front edge. I yelled up the walkway, “Quentin! Quentin! A storm, Quentin, a storm! I'm going!”

I took off at a sprint to the north, weaving through all the beachgoers as they raced away from the storm to their cars and trucks.

A few minutes later Quentin called my name from behind. I turned to look without breaking stride, and he waved at me to keep going.

We had never discussed this. Our protocol was if Weird Shit Happens lock down the house. We didn't know why but did it anyway and then felt sheepish about it after. Like that was stupid to lock down the house and go quiet because of a thunderstorm.

But I knew in my heart of hearts that the storms around Magnus's comings and goings weren't normal storms. They had an unexplainable quality. They materialized from nothing and grew to giant heights. They billowed clouds that behaved like smoke and were the color of coal fire. There was a blustering, gusting wind. And finally, an arcing electrical storm underneath. This one was acting just like that.

I was out of breath by the time I was at all close, stumbling, holding my side. Full blown stitch there now, but ahead of me under the electrical storm was a pale lump of what looked like a lifeless body. I forced myself to keep running.

The storm gathered itself up and retreated as quickly as it had arrived. And as I gained on the body I got scared, because it was lifeless and other people were gathering around, but not getting too close. The body was pale and naked and a man, and as I crunched through the shells, and arrived finally, full of gasping breaths and heaves — it was Magnus, oh god, naked, on his side, fallen, and very very very not looking alive.

I collapsed to my knees beside him. “Magnus?” His forehead had a gash across it. Both eyes were black and his lip fat and split. “Magnus?” There was blood, a big angry wound on his shoulder, and his earlobe was torn. I wiggled his arm, “Magnus?”

He grimaced, coughed, and bloody phlegm dripped from the corner of his mouth. A stranger on the other side of him said, “Look at his back.” I rose up on my knees to look over. It was gouged with deep hacking wounds, up and down and across and over and over and blood and—

Quentin ran up. He whipped his shirt off over his head and draped it over Magnus's midsection, his phone already to his ear. He looked around at the growing crowd. “Did you see anyone, anybody, who left him here? Anything?”

The people shook their heads, all blank stares and whispering.

I dropped my face to the sand eye to eye with Magnus. “Hold on, we're calling an ambulance. Hold on Magnus, please.”

His head nodded, grinding in the tiny shells. I grasped his hand and from it rolled a metal cylinder. About the size of a small energy drink can. It was warm. I shoved it into the waistband of my yoga pants and pulled my shirt over the bulge. He nodded again, barely noticeable.

Then he made a croaking sound from deep in his throat, and he stopped. “Magnus?”

I felt for his pulse, nothing, but I was no expert. Behind me Quentin's voice grew excited on the phone, “We need someone right now!”

I shoved Magnus to his back, in the sand and crushed shells, and started my best imitation of a chest-pushing CPR. I couldn't really remember how to do it, it had been four years, but I started because I had to. “Does anyone know CPR?”

No one stepped forward, so I went on, terrified that it was me, my shoddy memory of a lifesaving technique that stood between Magnus and no pulse.

Sirens from way far off were screaming, coming closer, and I kept pumping, counting, begging. “Please, Magnus, please.” Until from down the beach a lifeguard truck was flying toward us, and over the boardwalk two paramedics were racing over the dunes, and finally they all converged on Magnus. I dropped away as they set about trying to save his life.

“Will he live?”

They answered me with a brusque, “Step back, Ma'am.”

“Yes, of course, but his back, he's injured on his back.”

They glanced under his shoulder, put a mask over his face, lifted him to a stretcher, and hustled him away.