Just over four hours later, I watched as a silver sedan pulled into the driveway of the lake-house where Michael had taken me, and my mother, father and sister all got out, looking towards the house for some sign of me.

"Don't –"

But it was too late. I was already out the door, running to them, bursting into tears for the hundredth time that day as they threw their arms around me and hugged me so tight I could hardly breathe. We didn't speak right away, even though we tried. The emotion was too high, too strong.

"I'm OK," I blubbed, when my mum stood back to examine me. "I'm OK. I'm not hurt."

"Oh my God," Katie whispered. "Oh my God, Em. You scared the hell out of us, you really did. We were starting to think you were –"

I was pulled into another hug, then, before the word 'dead' could be spoken aloud, and the tears were so copious the collar of my jacket was damp with them.

I want to say we went inside and spent the evening together in front of a roaring fire, happy and safe. I want to say they accepted my insistence that I wasn't ready to talk about what happened – not because it was bad, but because I didn't know how to, just yet. I want to say being with my family again made everything right.

But it didn't. Because before we'd even finished being reunited, a white van came roaring up the road and turned into the driveway of the lake-house, sending a shower of gravel across the ornamental bushes planted on the verge. And before it had even come to a stop, a man was jumping out of the passenger seat. In his left hand was a microphone, and he was followed only seconds later by another man – that one with a camera.

"Inside," my dad said, as my family gathered around me, blocking the men from seeing me. "Right now. Inside!"

"Emma Willis?" One of the men shouted as we began to run to keep ahead of them. "Emma? I'm Rick Jones from the River Falls Vanishing podcast. We were just wondering if you –"

I was ushered into the lake-house and the door slammed behind us. At once, both my father and Michael Rappini were in each other's faces.

"I told you not to tell –" Michael started angrily.

"None of us said a bloody thing!" My dad roared. "You called them! You got us out here so they could ambush –"

"No," I broke in. "No, dad. Michael didn't call anyone."

"Maybe they followed us?" Katie said, putting her arms around me and giving me another hug. "Maybe they – maybe they had one of those tracking things on the car?"

But it didn't matter how they'd found us, because they had.

"We should leave," my mum said. "Come on, let's leave before more of them –"

"No," Michael Rappini shook his head. "No, it's too late. It's a single road up here for the thirty miles – there'll be a pack of them headed here already. If we leave, this is going to turn into come kind of OJ Simpson style –"

And at that exact moment, we all suddenly heard the sound of a helicopter hovering overhead. I turned to my parents, afraid, and although they tried to reassure me I could see in their eyes that they were just as worried as I was.

"We're going to have to deal with this," Michael told us. "We're going to – we'll have to make a statement."

"I don't want her on camera!" My mother exclaimed, to agreement from my dad. "We'll give a statement – we're used to it by now. But not Emma. She's not ready, you can see that for yourself. Damnit, we left Jennifer back in River Falls."

"Who's Jennifer?" I asked miserably, as a searchlight – a searchlight! – from the helicopter illuminated the lake to the back of the house.

"Our media liaison," my mother replied. "She's the one who deals with these vultures for us. But Mr. Rappini said not to bring anyone, so –"

Michael didn't let her finish. "I only said that because I thought you understood how important it was not to allow anyone to follow –"

"I told you NO ONE FOLLOWED US!" My dad bellowed, and I caught my sister's eye, then, and saw that she understood as well as I did that things were well and truly beginning to fall apart.

As if the reporters and the helicopter weren't enough, the sound of a police siren approaching soon made itself apparent. When he heard it my dad began to march back to the door, seemingly intent on greeting the police officers, and my mum and sister and lawyer had to physically hold him back.

"No, Mr. Willis. Sir, no, please – it's a good thing the police are here, they can help control –"

"Like hell it is!" My dad yelled. "We've been dealing with that pack of incompetents for weeks now, Mr. Rappini. They aren't here to help. No, they're here to harass my daughter, to try to get her to confess to something she had nothing to do with! This is private property, we can ask them to leave."

"No, sir. We can't do that."

"You bloody well can and you bloody well –"

"STOP!" Katie suddenly yelled. "Just stop! All of you! Listen. Emma's in a bad way. I'm going to take her – Mr. Rappini, is there a room where I can be alone with my sister? – I'm just going to take her away from this for a moment, if nobody minds."

I let Katie lead me away when Michael told her where the first floor bedroom was, and noticed that my knees felt funny as we walked down the hallway. My whole body felt funny, actually. Tingly, weak, numb. I stumbled slightly as we walked into the bedroom and Katie wrapped her arm around my waist.

"It's OK, Em," she whispered, kissing my cheek. "It's OK. I'm sorry that it went like that, just now. Everyone is so worked up. Mum and dad are basically insane now, the media is insane, everything is insane."

I started to cry again, then. So did Katie. We wrapped our arms around each other and stood sobbing in the dark bedroom for 5 minutes.

"I'm so happy to see you," my sister told me when she could talk again without breaking down. "I'm so – Emma, I'm so relieved, I –" she wiped her eyes, "I thought you were fucking dead. We all did."

Hot, terrible guilt seized my heart at seeing my sister like that. It was my fault she'd suffered. All my fault. And all of it for a phone! A phone that now lay decaying and forgotten in the middle of some 9th century forest. A phone I'd almost destroyed my family over.

"I'm sorry," I choked out, sinking to my knees. "I'm so sorry, Katie. I'm so sorry."

"It still feels like I might be dreaming," she said kneeling down beside me. "I'm still scared I'm going to wake up in the hotel room in River Falls and realize it was all a dream, and that you're still missing. I've dreamt about you almost every night – about this moment, about seeing you again. You're real this time, right? This is real?"

I nodded, still too overcome with emotions – guilt, yes, but joy, too – to say anything coherent. All it seemed I was capable of doing was apologizing over and over and over. Eventually Katie stood up, sniffling, and helped me to my feet.

"I don't want to go back out there," I told her. "Just – not yet, OK? I can't face it."

"Let the lawyer take care of the reporters. You don't owe them anything," my sister replied, sitting down on the edge of the bed and pulling me down beside her. "They've been hounding us ever since we got here – since before we got here, actually. Someone from the Daily Sun showed up at the house on the day it was announced that you were missing. You wouldn't believe some of the crap they've pulled – one of the US evening shows offered me a quarter of a million dollars to give them an exclusive interview."

I pulled away, shocked. "Really?" I asked. "A quarter of a million dollars? But that's so – that's so much! What did they think you were going to tell them?"

Katie looked away when I asked her that, and gave me a dismissive little shrug instead of an answer. My interest was immediately piqued, and not in a good way.

"What is it?" I questioned her again. "Why do you have that look on your face?"

"Because I'm just so happy you're back, Em. And I'm scared for you to find out any of the awful things people were saying after you went missing. I don't think it's a good idea to talk about those things, not now. Maybe in a few days when –"

"Katie!" I stopped her, morbidly curious now. "What is it? What could anyone have possibly said about a missing person? I'm not traumatized or anything if that's what you think. I'm actually fine. So just tell me."

Katie hung her head briefly before looking up at me, her eyes ringed with dark circles and her nose and cheeks red from crying. "They thought you did it," she said quietly, so quietly that I had to lean in to hear.

"They thought I did what?"

"They thought you killed your friend – Paige Renner. And that you, uh, that you –" she broke off, crying again.

"They thought I killed Paige," I repeated, aware that the police had, at one point at least, had a few suspicions about my involvement in Paige's disappearance. "OK. I mean, the FBI talked to me about it, but I just thought it was because I was her friend and they really didn't have any clues about what happened. So – what? It got out that the police had suspicions?"

Katie was nodding. "Yeah. And then it got out that the police thought you killed yourself. Out of guilt. I never believed it, Em. Mum and dad never –"

"Wait," I chuckled, because it was so ridiculous I couldn't do anything else. "The police said I killed myself out of guilt for apparently murdering Paige? The police said that? Since when do the police speculate –"

"Oh they never said anything official," Katie told me. "All they ever said officially was that they had no witnesses and no clues, but they talk to reporters off the record. Things got out, the way they always do. I'm not sure you understand what a big story this is – the news back home is interviewing psychological experts and police psychologists about this almost every night – and that's in the UK! I don't even know if it was the River Falls police who talked to the press – everyone's an expert these days."

I lay back on the bed, which felt as soft and bouncy as a cloud after weeks of furs on hard wood. "So what you're telling me," I said to my sister, "is that the whole world thinks I did something terrible to Paige Renner? And her baby? And her dad, too, I suppose?"

Katie lay down next to me. "That's not even the half of it, Em. Nobody knew what to think. The police were as baffled as anyone. I mean –"

"What?" I asked when she hesitated, assuming it was more bad news about the monster people suspected I was.

"Well, uh – where did you go?"

I should have been expecting that. And I was – just maybe not so soon, before I'd had time to figure out a story. I closed my eyes and let out a long, slow sigh.

"You know what, Katie?" I asked. "I literally don't even know where to start with that question. I don't."

She turned her head and looked at me, confused. "Well you said you weren't traumatized, right? You said you were fine. So whoever it was that, uh, that took you, they –"

"Nobody took me. Not at first, anyway."

"Nobody took you? Em if nobody took you then... why didn't you contact us? Why didn't you let us know you were –"

"I couldn't."

On one level I was aware that I was digging myself into a hole, answering Katie's simple questions. On another, the memory of what had happened to Paige when she faked amnesia was still fresh in my mind. No one was going to fall for that again – and I wasn't going to a psych ward.

"You – couldn't? What do you – Em, I don't understand. You've been gone for a month! Are you saying that in all that time –"

"I couldn't," I repeated flatly. "There was no internet, no phone service. There was no way for me –"

Katie sat up and I saw that although she wasn't angry, she was on the verge of it. "Emma I don't even know what you're talking about. What do you mean there was no internet? Do you have any idea what mum and dad have been through since you went missing – or since you left or whatever it was that happened? Where the hell were you?"

It occurred to me at that moment that if anyone on earth was going to believe a story about time traveling and Vikings, it might be my sister. She's always been a little – well, a little woo-woo. A little prone to believing ghost stories, to blurring the lines between the natural and the – apparently – supernatural. I rolled over on my side and looked Katie in the eye.

"Do you still get your tea leaves read?"

"What?" She replied, annoyed because she thought I was changing the subject. "Emma what the hell are you –"

"Just answer me. Do you still get your tea leaves read?"

"Sometimes, yeah. So what? I know you and mum disapprove, I know you think it's silly. Are you sure you've got nothing better to do right now than make fun of me?"

"OK, so you do. And I'm not making fun of you. I'm seriously not – in fact this might be the least likely I have ever been to make fun of you for believing in that stuff. And do you still think you saw a ghost that time in Wales, when we were kids?"

"I did see a ghost."

I smiled at that, at Katie's stubborn insistence, as strong as ever, that she had seen a ghost in our hotel in Wales during one of our summer holidays. And hell, who was I to say that she hadn't seen a ghost? I'd just time-traveled to the 9th century and back – Katie and her ghost had nothing on me.

"OK, you saw a ghost. I believe you."

"No you don't. I know you don't. Why the hell are we talking about this?"

I was still looking my sister straight in the eye. "Because I've seen way more than a ghost, Katie. And I'm trying to figure out if I can risk telling you or not."

Katie sat up straight and looked down at me lying on the bed, her expression skeptical. "What do you mean? You mean where you've been? You mean, uh, that it's something –"

A knock on the door interrupted us and my mother walked in with Michael Rappini. Both of them looked at me.

"What?" I asked, knowing it was pretty unlikely they'd come to tell me that the media and the police had packed up and gone home.

"We're trying to figure out what to do," my mum said. "The police are here, and –"

"You don't have to talk to the police right now," Michael butted in as politely as it's possible to butt in. "They want to talk to you, Emma, but you're not under arrest and they can't force you – not this soon anyway. I would advise setting up a meeting with them sometime within the next day or two, though – things have already gotten way out of hand with this situation."

"So they're still here? And the media, too?"

Michael and my mum both nodded.

"Well I don't want to talk to anyone," I told them. "Not to the reporters or the police, I mean. I don't want them to see me, I don't want them taking photos. I remember what Paige went through – and what I went through before I left. Can we just stay here?"

My mother and my lawyer exchanged worried glances.

"I know you're probably very tired," my mum said. "So we can stay here for tonight. We'll need to – well, we'll need to make some decisions on how to handle, uh, all of this. But for now, darling, maybe you should just get some rest. We'll think about everything tomorrow, alright?"

No part of me felt ready to deal with what was happening. I wanted to crawl under the plush bed, curl up into a ball with the dust bunnies and stay there forever. Don't get me wrong, I was happy to see my family – mainly because I knew it meant they were no longer worrying about where I was – but it all felt incredibly overwhelming. Even little things – like the electric lights, which seemed to be more dazzlingly bright than I remembered them, or the sound of the helicopter over the lake-house – were contributing to the feeling that I was somehow out of control, caught up in a swollen, flooded river without any means of controlling where it carried me.

Ragnar would know how to handle this.

I almost laughed out loud at the thought of Ragnar charging the reporters, smashing cameras with his axe, lopping off heads willy-nilly. But I didn't laugh, because it wasn't really funny. It was also wrong. Ragnar wasn't stupid, or a savage. He would know what to do, because knowing what to do was what he did, it was what he was good at, and the reason he led a clan before he was even twenty-five.

Not that my confidence in Ragnar mattered. He wasn't there. He was thousands and thousands of miles and centuries away from me, in a place I didn't plan to ever see again. I missed him, there in the bedroom of the posh house owned by my lawyer's friends. I missed Jarl Ragnar, and I felt as lost without him as I had ever felt in my life.

* * *

After a shower – a shower I had to run at lukewarm, because the hot water suddenly felt too scaldingly hot for my skin – I emerged smelling so strongly of melon and kiwi body-wash that it made me gag. Katie looked up from her spot on the bed – we'd decided to spend the night together that night, just like we had when we were little girls.

"Are you alright?" She asked, concerned.

I nodded. "I'm fine. That body wash just smells so – ugh, so strong."

Katie gave me a look. "You didn't smell too bad, earlier. Did they have body wash in ghost land, or wherever it is you've been?"

She was keeping her tone light, but I knew my sister was dying of curiosity. As I remembered dying of curiosity myself when Paige Renner told me she had a big secret to tell me.

I saw down on the bed and nestled my face into the towel I'd wrapped around my wet hair, so fluffy and soft. Was it the right thing to do to tell Katie about where I'd been? I didn't know. I couldn't know. Surely there were people in the world who wouldn't react with disbelief? Some people believed the Earth was flat. Others that aliens had built the pyramids. My problem was I didn't know any of those people. My sister was the only one with even slightly odd beliefs, and even then I wasn't quite sure how devout she was when it came to having her palms read.

"Why do you look so serious?" She asked a few minutes later, when I still hadn't decided if I was about to make the biggest mistake of my life or not. "You're back now, Em. You've got nothing to be afraid of. There are at least twenty cops outside right now."

"Goodness!" I exclaimed. "Are there?"

Katie grinned. "Yeah. Mostly just wrangling the media, but they're out there. And they declared a no-fly zone over the house, so we don't have to listen to that bloody helicopter all night."

Twenty police officers. A no-fly zone. A media swarm. It was nuts. It was especially nuts to me, because I knew none of these people were ever going to know what had actually happened to Paige Renner, or her son or her father – or me. The only person who could tell them was me, and I had no plans to do that.

My own sister, however...

"So," I started awkwardly, because I wasn't sure of the etiquette involved in discussing time travel. "About the tea leaves –"

"What is with you?!" Katie laughed. "Why do you keep asking me about getting my tea leaves read? If you don't want to talk about what happened, Em, I understand. We don't have to do that right now."

"Actually I want to talk about it," I told her, because I did. Because I was fit to burst with it. Because I missed Ragnar terribly and I wanted someone to understand that, and to listen to my stories about him, to understand who he was. "I just – I don't know if you want to hear it or not. I mean, I don't know if you'll believe it."

Katie narrowed her eyes at me. "You wanted to know about the ghost in Wales. Right? And now you're asking me about tea leaves again."

"Well did you?" I responded. "See a ghost, I mean?"

"Yes," she told me, slightly defensively. "I did."

"And is that – is that the only thing that's ever happened to you like that? You just saw it you said, right? Did it – did it do anything? Or, uh, say anything?"

My sister studied me for a few moments before speaking again. When she did, her voice was quiet. "You're not joking, are you Em?"

I shook my head. "No. I'm actually not joking."

"I saw granny, too. Granny Fletcher, the night she died. Remember mum and dad were back at home that night, because the doctors said she wouldn't go for a few more days? Well I woke up – I don't know why – and she was there, at the foot of my bed. I wasn't scared. She didn't say anything. She just looked at me, like she was sad at first and then, just before she left, she smiled. I knew what it meant, and the next morning when mum and dad sat us down to tell us the news, I already knew."

"Really?" I asked, feeling a sting in my eyes at the thought of my grandmother. "Why didn't you tell anyone? You were so eager to tell us about that ghost in the hotel and –"

"That's why I didn't tell you," Katie replied softly. "Because I knew you would have made fun of me. Not just you – mum and dad as well."

I looked down at the quilt, momentarily unable to meet my sister's eye for the renewed feeling of guilt.

"I'm sorry," I said a short while later. "And you're right, I probably wouldn't have believed you. I'm sorry for that. I let Paige Renner down in the same way – by not believing her when she told me something... unbelievable."

My sister shrugged. "It's OK, Em. It was a few years ago now, I'm not holding a grudge or anything. I just – I know there are things I can't talk about with certain people. Things that don't make sense."

"You're more right about that than you know," I told her. "Where I've been for the past month doesn't make any sense. None at all. And it happened to Paige before it happened to me. I didn't believe her when she told me. I guess it's poetic justice that I'm in her shoes now, about to tell someone something totally bonkers and afraid you're just going to think I've gone crazy."

My heart started to pound when I realized the moment was almost upon me. I made Katie promise she wouldn't tell anyone what I was going to tell her, regardless of whether or not she believed it. And then I looked her in the eye and told her I'd spent the past few weeks in the 9th century.

"You – what?" She asked immediately, assuming – as I had with Paige – that she just hadn't heard me correctly.

"The 9th century," I repeated. "That's where Paige Renner is now, and she's not coming back. I decided I had to, so you and mum and dad wouldn't spend the –" I stopped talking when I noticed that Katie looked angry and asked her what was wrong.

"Fuck off, Emma."

That's all she said. She just told me to fuck off and rolled over on the bed so her back was to me. I guess I couldn't say I was too surprised.

"I'm not lying," I told her. "I promise you I'm not –"

"What the fuck, Emma!" She shouted, rolling over to face me again and sitting up. "Do you think this is funny? You've been gone for A MONTH! Mum and dad are – I wasn't kidding when I said this whole thing has made them crazy. It has. And me too! Only I haven't been able to show it, because I've been too busy being strong for them. And now you come back and tell me you were time-traveling? Don't even say anything else. OK? Just don't."

I lay back and said nothing for a few minutes. It was good that Katie was angry at me – anything was better than that look I knew I'd given Paige, the one that said I was going to listen, but I no longer thought she was sane.

"What do you think happened?" I asked a short time later. "There were no clues, right? Even the police didn't have anything? Not even an idea? There was no signs of –"

"The police thought you murdered Paige Renner and killed yourself," Katie replied frostily.

"Yeah but I obviously didn't, did I? And I bet they didn't have any evidence of any of that, did they? They didn't, because there isn't any – because none of that happened. I spent most of the past month with Paige – and her baby, and her dad and her new husband. She was the one who showed me how to get there – to the past. She's been going there since –"

"SHUT UP!" Katie yelled. "Shut up, Emma! Just – this is so stupid! I don't want to hear –"

But I'd started explaining. And I was damn well going to finish. "I met someone there," I continued, ignoring her huffing and puffing. "His name is Ragnar. He says he loves me – and I think he does. I left him there, because I didn't want you and mum and dad to spend the rest of your lives worrying about me. I didn't want –" I stopped to compose myself and continued in a wobbly voice – "I didn't want you to have to go to sleep every night imagining that I'd been hurt or killed or that I was suffering somewhere in some psychopath's basement. And now I'm never going to see him again and – and –"

I broke down again, burying my face in my hands and sobbing for the Viking Jarl who I knew was back in the Kingdom of the East Angles at that very moment, wondering where I was, wondering why I'd left him just as our two souls seemed to have begun twining themselves together into one.

My sister was looking at me the way you would look at your cat if it suddenly started reciting poetry – like she saw how upset I was, and how I seemed to believe what I was saying at the same time as she knew it wasn't believable. Not as far as she knew, anyway.

"I got a crazy idea that you might be the one to tell," I continued when I saw that she was still too baffled to speak. "Katie and her ghosts and her tea leaves and her palm readers – you always seemed to be a little more open-minded about things like – well, like this. I thought if anyone's going to believe me, Katie will."

"So is this what you're going to tell the police?" She asked finally, after a few minutes of uncharacteristic silence.

"No," I shook my head. "Of course it isn't. They put Paige Renner in the madhouse for saying she forgot what happened – not even for telling the truth! What do you think they'll do with me if I start talking about time-travel and Viking jarls?"

"Viking whats?"

"Jarls. It just means leader. Their leaders are called jarls. And forget the police, what will mum and dad say? They'll think I've been brainwashed or lost my mind or something. You know they will."

Katie nodded. "Yeah. They will. I mean – Em, I kind of do. Like, half of me is pretty sure there's a hidden camera in the room right now, OK? You – you time-traveled? That's where you've been? The ninth century? You know that sounds totally bonkers, right?"

I nodded. "Yeah, I do know. I literally do. Paige told me about it months ago, before she went back. And I didn't believe her. She didn't seem nuts, either, but I definitely didn't even consider believing her. Until she took me back there and –"

"Well can you take me back there?"

I looked up at my sister to check for a smile but there wasn't one. "What – like right now?" I asked, incredulous about how risky that was until I remembered that to Katie it wasn't real so of course there was no risk involved.

She nodded. "Yeah, right now. Not to stay, but just to show me it's real?"

I laughed in spite of myself. "I can't just go there anytime I want. I mean, not just from anywhere. I have to be –" I stopped before I revealed the location of the tree. Katie would never do anything to hurt me, but there was no reason to think she wouldn't tell anyone what I was saying, especially if she decided I was nuts and she needed to let my parents know.

"You have to be what?" She asked, speaking more quickly now, quizzing me.

"Where." I replied. "Not what – where. And I'm not going to tell you where, especially if you keep talking to me in that snippy tone, like I've got to prove this to you. Believe me or don't, Katie, it happened. It actually happened."

"Hey," she said gently, reaching out and patting my arm. "Em, it's OK. I'm not trying to be snippy, I'm just – well, I don't know what to think, to be perfectly honest. It's late. What I think we should do is try to get some sleep and talk about this – all of it – in the morning. You need to rest."

She was right, I did need to rest. I was actually very tired, but the adrenaline that came with revealing such a risky secret to another person was keeping me awake.

I nodded. "Yeah, OK. You don't, uh, Katie – you're not saying you believe me, I get it. But you're not saying you definitely don't believe me either, right?"

"No," she replied, "I'm not saying I definitely don't believe you. But I'm also not –"

"OK," I stopped her, before she could say anything else. "That's fine, that's good – that's all I needed to hear."