She turns to me. “Go to him. Save him.”
She pushes me. Reaches out and gives me a hard shove that topples me backward, staring in disbelief as I slam down onto the ground, pain knifing through me, the flashlight flying from my hand. When I lift my head, everything’s dark.
She tricked me. Damn it—I knew better. Eliza was William’s fiancé. She’d loved him, and she had every reason to hate me, every reason to push me down that hole.
I reach for the flashlight, but only touch down on bone. I rock forward, tears filling my eyes as I howl in rage and despair.
When my voice breaks, I still hear my howl, echoing as if through the entire house. It stretches longer than an echo should. Higher pitched, too. And it’s coming from the other side of the wall.
“Enigma?” I croak.
That isn’t possible. I know I left her locked in my room.
Thunder rolls through the house, and I back against the stone wall.
“Bronwyn?” The thunder becomes running footfalls.
I know that voice. I know my name in that voice, as little sense as it makes to hear it in my world.
“Enigma!” William says. “I cannot hear her with your yowling.” The kitten stops as he says, “Bronwyn!”
I bang on the wall. “I’m here. I fell down the hole in the passage.”
“Hold on. I’ll get an ax.”
I say no, just get a rope, and I’ll climb out, but he’s already gone. Then I call again, to tell him where to find an ax in my garage, because that’s where he must be—in my time somehow. He’s already gone, though, and so I sink to the ground, and when I do, a smell rises, one that wasn’t there before.
The smell of death.
I reach out one tentative hand toward the femur I dropped. My hand touches bone, but it isn’t the smooth knob from before.
It’s darker than it was earlier, and when I look up, I see the hole is covered.
William didn’t cross over. I did.
I remember Eliza’s words.
The kitten. Of course. Clever kitten.
Go to him.
Hearing me screaming, Enigma had crossed through the stitch to get William’s help. The problem, of course, was that I was still on my side. Eliza solved that with her shove, literally pushing me through time.
It only takes a few minutes for William to find an ax, and then he makes sure I’m well away as he chops through the wall. As soon as the hole is big enough, he rips it larger, calling, “Bronwyn!” as if I might be gone.
I stagger forward, and then he’s halfway into the wall himself, his arms going around me as I fall against him, sobbing.
35
William and I sit on the floor in his parlor. I huddle against him, his arms locked around me until I can breathe again, think again, move again. When I attempt the last, I gasp in pain.
“The fall,” he whispers.
He kneels beside me, feeling my arms and my chest. He has me breathe as he examines my ribs, and then he tests my limbs. I could tell him they’re all fine, but I want a few minutes to bask in his anxious ministrations.
How long has it been since anyone cared when I hurt myself? Since I could stub my toe or wrench my shoulder and have someone cluck over me, offering painkillers and bandages. It’s such a simple thing, a childish thing, but it’s meaningful in a way I never realized until it was gone, one of the thousand things I lost when Michael died.
So, I accept William’s coddling and his promises of cold compresses and hot tea, and I only draw the line when he insists on bringing the doctor.
“How would you explain me?” I begin.
“I don’t care. I’ll pay the physician enough that he won’t, either.”
I shake my head. “No offense to Victorian medicine, but I’ll visit a doctor in my world. For now, you’ve treated enough horses to diagnose a broken rib or sprained ankle, and I have neither. There’s something more pressing we need to discuss.”
I pause. Then I throw my arms around his neck, hugging him tight, my face buried against his shoulder as I compose myself for what will come next.
Cordelia thinks that William murdered her. Murdered Teddy and Eliza. She came to protect me, warn me against him. Yet here I am, hugging him as if none of that ever happened.
Because she is wrong. Mistaken. My task here is to set Cordelia straight. Lift the burden she’s suffered under for nearly two