Chapter 25 #2
“How far into the future? Where?”
Tears rolled down her cheeks.
“A place called California. It’s west, all the way across the country from Philadelphia and Boston which you’ve seen.” She took a breath. “I’m from the year 2026.”
He turned abruptly toward the sea then, one hand braced hard against the stone wall beside them as though the world itself had shifted beneath his feet. For the first time since Abigail had known him, Rory Sinclair looked briefly unmoored.
“By the saints,” he said softly, crossing himself.
“Yeah. That was more or less my reaction too.”
Something very near a smile touched his mouth for the briefest instant before fading again.
“And Sam?”
The question hollowed her out.
“He’s there.” Her voice broke completely now. “He’s still there, in the world I came from. Sick, and stubborn, and probably eating something terrible out of a paper wrapper while pretending everything is fine.”
Understanding moved slowly across Rory’s face, probably not belief, but understanding the loss of her brother.
Abigail wiped angrily at the tears freezing against her cheeks.
“I never meant for this to happen.”
“What?”
She looked at him helplessly.
“You.”
The word broke softly between them. For a long moment neither of them spoke, then Rory stepped closer, brushing tears gently from beneath her eye with his thumb.
“I kent there was something beyond ordinary about ye,” he said softly.
His mouth twitched faintly, though the humor soon faded.
“And the storm brought ye here?”
“I think so.” She looked toward the Wine Tower, dark against the snow and sea. “The Cailleach appeared to me on Halloween, I mean Samhain, she told me the storm was the door.”
Rory’s hand stilled against her cheek.
“She came to ye?”
Abigail swallowed. “She knew things. She said I’d written to you before I ever had.”
Rory’s brow furrowed.
“I found your letters,” Abigail said quietly. “In the archive of the lighthouse museum.”
The wind seemed to draw back from them for one strange breath.
“My letters?”
“To Thomas Smith. To the Commissioners.” She looked up at him, feeling suddenly as exposed as if she had opened a locked drawer in his soul and found her own name written inside.
“You wrote about the light, the bearings, and the construction problems, but then you started writing about the woman who came from the storm.”
Rory’s face changed.
“Abigail—”
“You didn’t name me,” she said, softer now. “Not in the letters I found. But somehow I knew it was me.”
Snow moved quietly around them.
“You wrote that I came from the storm, that you couldn’t explain why I felt familiar.”
Her throat tightened, and the words came slower now, pulled from the deepest part of her. “You wrote that I had the finest mind and the kindest heart you’d met in any century.”
Rory went utterly still.
Abigail gave a small, broken laugh. “Do you know how horrifying it is to read love letters about yourself in a museum archive where anybody can read them?” She shook her head. “Well, they will be able to read them when they go on display.”
The words caught him somewhere between grief and astonishment, and for one heartbeat, a breath of laughter escaped him before his face folded inward with something much deeper.
“I wrote that?”
“Yes.”
His gaze searched hers.
“There was a note,” Abigail said. “Not yours. Mine. My handwriting, on old paper. A drawing of the bearing solution. Sam’s name at the bottom.”
The lighthouse beam swept over them again, turning the snow around them briefly to silver.
“That was why I knew that somehow I’d been here,” she whispered. “Before I understood what was happening. Some part of me had already reached this place, and some part of you had already answered.”
Rory closed his eyes briefly, as though the world had become a mechanism with too many pieces moving at once.
When he opened them again, his voice was rough.
“I have spent years building something against darkness. Stone by stone. Gear by gear. I thought if I made the light strong enough, loss would pass me by.”
The sea struck the rocks below with a hollow boom. Rory brushed his thumb once more beneath her eye.
“If ye truly came from the future, then ye have a life there. Yer brother, yer calling as a scholar.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“Aye,” he said softly. “I ken.”
“No, you don’t.” The words came out sharper than she meant them to, but Rory didn’t flinch.
“If I stay, I abandon him. If I go back, I leave you, and I don’t even know if going back is possible. If it were, wouldn’t I have gone back by now?”
The last of her defenses left her in a whoosh of breath.
“I love him,” she whispered. “Sam. He’s all I had left of my family.”
She met his gaze as the words fell out before she could stop them.
“I love you. I think I fell in love with you when I read your letters.”
Rory went utterly still, and the snow seemed to hush around them while the sea below drew farther away for one suspended breath.
Abigail stared at him, horrified by herself and relieved all at once, because there it was. The truth. Not tidy, not sensible, not remotely convenient, but true.
“I love you,” she said again, quieter this time. “And I didn’t mean to. I tried not to. Believe me, I tried very hard, which apparently was about as effective as Duncan trimming a tree.”
A broken sound escaped Rory, then he cupped her face in both hands.
“Abigail Winston,” he said, and her name in his voice nearly finished what the tears had started.
“I’ve loved ye since I found ye on the rocks.”
Her breath caught.
“I dinna know what ye were,” he said. “Where ye came from. Why the sea gave ye to me. I only knew that once ye were here, everything changed.”
She closed her eyes.
His forehead touched hers, cold from the wind.
“I love ye,” he said softly. “And I’ll no ask ye for what ye canna give.”
That was the thing that broke her.
Abigail let out a small sound and folded against him. Rory’s arms closed around her at once, strong, holding her close. For a while she simply stood there with her face against his coat, breathing wool, salt, cold air, and him.
Then, beneath everything else, the real fear surfaced in his voice.
“Are ye leaving?” he asked quietly.
Abigail lifted her head.
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
His eyes closed briefly.
“I don’t think it’s my choice,” she said as a cough escaped.
“I don’t know if the door opens both ways,” Abigail said. “I don’t know if it opens at all unless the Cailleach wants it to. I don’t know if Sam is still alive right now, or if time is moving differently, or if… he’s already gone.”
The last words came out thin and terrible.
Rory pulled her close again.
“Then we face what comes when it comes, ye’re no alone in it now.”
Abigail closed her eyes against his chest.
The lighthouse turned above them, steady and patient, throwing its beam across water that had taken so much and still somehow carried men home.
After a while Rory drew back enough to look at her. “There is one thing I must ask.”
Her stomach twisted. “What?”
“This future of yours.” His expression was grave. “Will ye tell me about it?” He made a face. “What is a van? And surfing?”
She laughed. “I’ll explain everything.”
Rory held her as if laughter and grief were not opposites at all, but two candles burning in the same dark room.
On the walk back, she explained surfing and how Sam’s van was actually a home on wheels. There was so much to tell him, and she couldn’t believe he actually believed her, or was at least trying to accept that she was from the future.
Mrs. Gable’s voice carried across the snowy courtyard. “If the pair of ye are finished freezing solid, supper’s near ready, and Duncan’s attempting to carve something. I’ll no say what, as I’m no certain the bird would recognize itself.”
The kitchen swallowed them in warmth the moment Rory opened the door.
Heat rolled outward from the hearth carrying the smell of roasting meat, cloves, fresh bread, pine greenery, and enough whisky to convince Abigail that Scotland approached winter with either admirable determination or profound distrust of sobriety.
Conversation filled the room in overlapping layers.
Tavish was arguing with Duncan about whether a goose ought to resemble itself after carving.
Mrs. Gable was threatening both of them with her wooden spoon while Ewan laughed openly into his cup.
Someone near the hearth had started singing half a verse of a carol before forgetting the words entirely.
And somehow, impossibly, life continued.
Abigail stood just inside the doorway with snow melting slowly in her hair and Rory’s warmth still lingering against her skin while the joy of Christmas Eve pressed suddenly against every raw place inside her chest.
For one terrible aching moment she wanted this. Permanently. The wanting of it frightened her more than the storm ever had.
Mrs. Gable glanced once toward Abigail’s face, then immediately thrust a steaming mug into her hands.
“Drink that before ye freeze solid.”
Abigail looked down. “What is it?”
“Whisky.”
Across the room Rory removed his coat while Duncan continued defending whatever crimes he’d committed against the goose.
Later, after supper dissolved into stories, music, and enough whisky to make future physicians deeply uneasy, Abigail slipped quietly from the crowded kitchen and climbed the narrow spiral stairs toward the lantern room.
She told herself she wanted air. The lantern room glowed warm, the lens turning in its steady endless rhythm, brass and crystal catching golden light while the beam swept slowly across the water.
Abigail crossed toward the windows and rested one hand lightly against the cold glass.
“I thought ye might be here.”
Warm gold light moved across Rory’s face as he crossed to her, and Abigail’s pulse immediately sped up.
“I think,” Rory said carefully, “that if I wait much longer to do this, I’ll regret it the rest of my life.”