Chapter 4 #2
“Pretty much, yeah.” Kate’s voice was gentle despite the blunt words. “I fought it too, at first. Spent weeks convinced I was having some kind of breakdown, that I’d wake up any minute in a hospital bed with concerned doctors hovering over me. But I didn’t wake up. Because this isn’t a dream.”
“How do you know? How can you be sure?”
“Because dreams don’t have this much detail.
” She gestured at the solar around them—the worn stone, the flickering fire, the narrow windows that let in the pale winter light.
“Dreams don’t have smells that make you gag, or cold that seeps into your bones, or blisters from unfamiliar work. Dreams don’t have texture. This does.”
Dawson wanted to argue. Wanted to cling to the possibility that there was still some rational explanation, some way back to a world that made sense.
But Kate was right, and he knew it. The evidence was overwhelming—not just the absence of technology, but the presence of something else entirely.
A way of living that could not be faked, could not be manufactured, could not be anything other than what it was.
Real. Inescapably, impossibly real.
“The Cailleach,” he said slowly. “She said something to me. On the beach, before the lightning struck.”
“What did she say?” Kate asked.
“The heart that’s done everything must learn to wish again. To find joy and love.” He shook his head. “I have no idea what that means.”
Kate was quiet for a moment, her expression thoughtful.
Then she said, “The Cailleach always speaks what we need to hear, even if we don’t understand it at first. For me, it was something about finding home in an unexpected place.
I thought she meant Scotland.” She glanced at Connor, and something soft passed between them. “Turned out she meant him.”
“You fell in love with him? Here?”
“Eventually. It wasn’t easy.” Her smile carried the weight of hard-won wisdom. “Nothing about this is easy. But it can be good if you let it.”
Dawson absorbed this, his mind churning through implications he could barely process. The idea of building a life here, of accepting this impossible situation and making something of it—it felt as foreign as everything else.
He was a man who conquered challenges, who bent the world to his will through sheer force of determination. He did not adapt. Nor did he settle. He achieved.
But what was there to achieve here? No companies to build, no mountains to climb, no oceans to cross. Just survival. Just... living.
“What about going back?” he asked, his voice careful. “Is there any way—”
“Maybe.” Kate’s tone matched his caution.
“The door between times isn’t permanent.
It opens and closes according to rules we haven’t figured out.
There might be another storm, another moment when you could step through and return to your own time.
” She paused. “Or there might not be. The Cailleach doesn’t make promises. ”
“So I might be stuck here forever.”
“You might.” Her gaze was steady, unflinching. “Or you might find a way home. Or you might—like me, like Maddie—discover that this is home. That everything you were running from in your old life was just preparation for something better.”
“I wasn’t running from anything.”
The words came out defensively, automatically. But even as he said them, he heard the echo of Catherine’s accusation. You’re not looking for a partner. You’re looking for someone to witness your life.
Kate’s smile suggested she saw right through him. “We all were, in our own way. That’s why the Cailleach chose us.”
Before Dawson could respond, Elspeth spoke from her position near the window. “You should rest. Your body is still recovering, and there will be time enough for questions tomorrow.”
Her voice was perhaps sharper than necessary, and Dawson wondered what he had done to earn that edge.
But when his eyes found hers, something passed between them that he could not name.
Recognition, perhaps. Or a warning. The sense that they had each glimpsed something in the other that they were not ready to acknowledge.
“Thank you,” he said quietly. “For pulling me out of the sea. For—” He gestured vaguely at the solar, at Connor and Kate, at the entire impossible situation. “For all of this.”
“I did what anyone would have done.”
“That’s not true, and we both know it.” His voice held no accusation, only a simple statement of fact. “You could have left me on the beach. Could have let the cold take me. But you didn’t.”
Elspeth simply nodded once.
“The grief you mentioned. The loss.” His voice was rough. “Does it ever stop hurting?”
The question hung in the air, more intimate than anything he had a right to ask. He watched her shoulders tense, watched the slight hesitation before she responded.
“No,” she said quietly. “But you learn to carry it differently. Like a scar instead of an open wound.”
The door closed behind him, and the three of us stood in silence for a moment. The fire crackled, sending shadows dancing across the worn stone walls.
“You’re taking this rather well,” Kate said finally, turning to face me. “Most people would have questions. Or accusations. Or possibly run screaming for the village priest.”
I moved to the chair Dawson had vacated, suddenly tired in a way that had nothing to do with the lateness of the hour. “I’ve suspected for some time. Since your first winter here, Kate.”
Connor’s brows rose. “Ye never said anything.”
“What was there to say?” I settled into the seat, feeling the warmth it still held from Dawson’s body.
“I heard the two of you talking once, in the corridor outside yer chamber. You were describing something called a—” I searched my memory for the strange word.
“A microwave? And how much you missed it. Connor laughed and said he would have thought you’d miss flying. ”
Kate exchanged a glance with Connor, something rueful passing between them. “We thought we were being careful.”
“You were. But I was...” I hesitated, then admitted the truth. “I was avoiding sleep that night. Walking the corridors. I heard more than I should have.”
“Why didn’t you confront us?” My brother asked.
I considered the question carefully before answering.
“Because it didn’t matter. Whatever strangeness surrounded Kate—and now Maddie—you accepted them both, as does the clan.
” I looked at my brother’s wife. “Maddie. She talks like ye do. I heard her say something about a phone, like Dawson asked me, so I knew she was like you. The how of your arrival seemed less important than the fact that ye chose to stay.” I met Connor’s eyes. “That ye make my brother verra happy.”
Kate’s expression softened. “And now? With Dawson?”
“Now I understand more than I did before.” I stared into the fire, watching the flames consume a log with patient, relentless hunger. “He truly has no way home. No family will ever know what became of him.”
“Does that change how you see him?”
The question held more weight than the words suggested.
I thought of the way Dawson had looked at me in the stillroom—like I was something worth seeing.
The way his grief for his mother had been so raw, so unguarded.
The way he had thanked me for saving his life as if it were something remarkable rather than simple human decency.
“It explains some things,” I said carefully. “The strange way he speaks. The gaps in his knowledge. The way he looks at everything as if it’s the first time he’s ever seen anything like it.”
“But does it change anything?” Kate pressed.
I met her eyes, and something passed between us—an understanding that went deeper than words. She had been where Dawson was now. Lost, confused, grieving everything she had left behind. And she had found her way to something new.
“Ask me again in a fortnight,” I said finally. “When I’ve had time to think.”
Connor cleared his throat. “This stays between us. The clan accepts that Kate and Maddie are travelers from distant lands—they don’t need to know just how distant. And Dawson...”
“I’ll keep his secret,” I said. “As I’ve kept yours.”
I rose and moved toward the door, then paused with my hand on the latch. “Connor. The things the Cailleach said to him—about learning to wish again, finding joy and love. What do you think she meant?”
My brother’s expression was unreadable, but Kate’s mouth curved into something that was almost a smile.
“I think,” Kate said quietly, “that the Cailleach never does anything without a reason. And I think you might want to pay attention to what unfolds.”
That night, Dawson lay in his narrow bed and stared at the ceiling.
The keep had quieted around him, the sounds of the day giving way to the deeper silence of a world without electricity, without traffic, without the constant hum of modern life.
He could hear the wind against the shutters.
The distant bark of a dog. His own heartbeat, steady and strange in the darkness.
He thought about his mother.
She would be decorating for Christmas right now, in the brownstone she had lived in for thirty years.
The same ornaments she had used since he was a child—the hand-painted snowflakes, the crystal icicles, the star that had topped the tree since before he was born.
She would be making her famous wassail, and complaining about his father’s seventy-fifth birthday party, and wondering when her son was going to settle down and give her grandchildren.
She would never know what happened to him.
The realization hit him fresh, as if he had not already processed it a dozen times today. He would never see her again. Never hear her voice, never endure her well-meaning criticisms, never tell her that he loved her even when he failed to show it.
His throat tightened. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, refusing to let the tears fall.
This is real, he told himself. Accept it. Deal with it. Survive.
But acceptance felt like betrayal. Like giving up on everyone and everything he had left behind.
The heart that’s done everything must learn to wish again.
The Cailleach’s words echoed in his memory. What did that even mean? He had spent his life achieving, conquering, building. He had never needed to wish for anything—he had simply made things happen through sheer force of will.
But will alone could not get him home. Will couldn’t bridge over three centuries. And sheer will certainly couldn’t bring back everything he had lost.
Maybe that was the point.
Maybe the Cailleach had chosen him precisely because he’d never learned to want something he could not simply take. Never learned to hope for something outside his control. Never learned to trust that the universe might give him something he had not earned.
The thought was deeply uncomfortable. Dawson didn’t believe in handouts or fairy tales. He believed in hard work, strategic thinking, and the application of resources to problems.
None of which would help him here.
He rolled onto his side, staring at the dim glow of dying embers in the hearth.
Tomorrow he would have to figure out how to survive in this world.
He would have to learn skills he had never needed, navigate social structures he barely understood, and build relationships with people who had a different worldview.
But tonight, in the darkness, he let himself grieve.
For his mother, who would spend the rest of her life wondering what happened to him.
For Margaret, whose loyalty deserved better than his unexplained disappearance.
For the life he had built—imperfect, hollow, but his—now forever out of reach. But strangely enough, not for all his money. Two billion and change, and none of it could help him here.
And somewhere beneath the grief, beneath the fear and the confusion and the overwhelming strangeness of it all, something else stirred.
Something that felt almost like hope.
Because despite everything, he was still alive. Still breathing. Still capable of facing whatever came next.
And somewhere in this ancient keep was a woman with storm-gray eyes who looked at him like he was either a puzzle to solve or a threat to neutralize.
He was not sure yet which he preferred.
The fire finally died, plunging the room into darkness, and Dawson—who had conquered mountains and oceans and markets, who had never failed to achieve anything he set his mind to—closed his eyes and surrendered to the unknown.
Whatever came next, he would face it.
He had no other choice.