Zach opened the door. “Katie! What are you — need something?”

“Nah, I was just — think I could come in? I was wondering if you could do something for me…”

“Sure, of course.” He let me through the door. It had been a while since I had been here. A month since my anniversary. And then before that my visits were very rare.

That had been one of the good things about celebrating my anniversary with all of them, they left me alone more. Stopped being as worried about me. I guess in some ways I stopped being as worried too, but it was replaced with — what next?

A lot of nothing.

Ben’s basket of toys was in the middle of the floor and some spilled over and across the rug. “Is Emma here?”

“She took Ben out for the afternoon. He has a Mommy and Me playgroup and then they were going to shop for dinner. Did you need her?”

“Nah.” I sat at one of the bar stools at their kitchen island. It was a little depressing thinking about all the amazing food Zach made out of this little kitchen. He deserved the bigger one of our last house. He squinted his eyes at me then offered some cookies and milk.

I said, “As long as there’s alcohol in my glass I’ll take anything.”

“Sure.” He looked through the fridge and then through his liquor cabinet. “How ‘bout Bailey’s? I think that will go with chocolate chip cookies.”

“Perfect.” A moment later I had a plate of cookies and a glass in front of me.

Then he leaned on the kitchen counter and waited.

I chewed and then I drank.

Then I said, “I keep thinking about something you said the other day, that you Googled Magnus. I was wondering if you could tell me what you found?”

He nodded slowly. “Not much, Katie. I don’t know if that’s good news or not…”

“Can you show me? I can look myself but kind of think I need someone to do it with me, maybe to slam the laptop closed if I find something too… you know.”

Zach’s laptop was always open on the counter anyway so he swung it around and sat beside me on the next bar stool. He ran his hand through his hair. “What I found so far is not much — let’s see, the Earl of Breadalbane.”

“I met him.”

“That is the weirdest crazy shit ever.”

“It’ll probably get weirder, maybe we should be high for this.”

“No way, it might blow my mind so much I don’t recover.” He chuckled. “Okay, so here. Here’s the Earl’s family tree…”

“I don’t know much, except Lizbeth, his niece.”

“Could this be her, Elizabeth, wait, yes, her brother Sean, and this is her mother, Mairead.”

“Whoa. So Magnus should…”

He turned the laptop to show me — Magnus. His birth year listed as 1681, then a dash — and blank. “It’s blank.”

I said, “It is. That’s good news I think, right?”

“I have no idea. But here, Mairead is blank too.”

“Okay, that means that… I have no idea. There should be a record.”

“Though it says here that if there isn’t a record it’s simply because someone hasn’t researched it yet.”

I nodded. “Yeah, so it needs to be researched.”

“That’s why I was thinking we might want to go to Scotland. We could research it.”

I gave him a sad smile. “I’d really like that. It’s on my list to do when I become a bit better at this.”

“You’re doing really great.”

“Thanks Zach, you have to say that, I’m your boss. What about Lizbeth, what does her…? I can’t say it. Just tell me.”

“She was married to Rory It looks like she had two children with him.”

“What does it say about his death?”

“Just 1702.”

“That’s when I was there.”

“Then she had a second husband, Liam. She married him in 1703.”

I grinned, “Nice. She wanted him and she got him. Good for her.”

“Except, I’m sorry Katie, she died later that year.”

“Oh.”

“And she had a son, four days before she died. In December 1703.”

“Oh no.”

Zach patted the back of my hand. “Have another cookie.”

“What was her son’s name?” I accidentally sprayed crumbs on his laptop. “Sorry. I’m not functioning very well.”

“Her son’s name was, Ainsley.”

“Poor kid, to have your mom die when you’re born. Did he at least have a long life, children?”

“Nope, he died when he was…” Zach counted on his fingers. “About two.”

I sighed. “I didn’t know Lizbeth long, but I really liked her.”

“This is about all I can find here at my laptop. We could hire someone, a genealogist or something.”

“Nice, ‘genealogist’ when did you get interested in this kind of stuff?”

“When we lost Magnus, I never thought about it before.”

“When we lost Magnus…” I slammed the last of my Baileys. “You know, here’s something, will you check the family tree for another older Magnus?”

“Really why?”

“They all called Magnus, ‘Young Magnus,’ and someone mentioned an older Magnus, but I never met him. And I don’t know… is there anything?”

Zach spent a few minutes scrolling through the page searching small type for the name. Then he realized there was a handy search bar and he typed Magnus into it and the year and picked the location and, “All I can find is one.”

“One Magnus?”

“I’ll even do a date search and include all of Scotland, yeah, see, not a very popular name in Scotland in the seventeen hundreds.”

“That is weird. I know I heard there was another Magnus that was old.”

Zach’s eyes went big. “Do you think it might have been our Magnus? That he was there, old, looped over himself, in the past of his past self? Oh shit, I’m not even high and you totally blew my mind.”

“I’m not saying that at all. That totally sounds like something out of Star Trek. But I’m also saying, ‘what if?’ While trying really hard not to sound crazy.”

Zach grinned. “I’m glad we don’t sound crazy.”

“We didn’t really learn what happened to Magnus.”

Zach closed the laptop lid. “We didn’t learn much. But this was a big step for you. I’m impressed.”