The thought of tomorrow jolted her out of her exhausted torpor with a zap of adrenaline. Tomorrow, it would start.
They’d talked, after the kids had gone to bed. She and Joe, with Gail listening in the corner, the whites of her eyes showing now and then, but saying not a word.
“It has to be Scotland,” she’d explained. “It’s December; ships can’t sail until the springtime. If we crossed in North Carolina, we couldn’t travel from the colonies before April and wouldn’t get to Scotland before the summer. And putting aside the fact that I know what ocean travel in the eighteenth century is like and I wouldn’t do that with children unless the alternative was being shot . . . I can’t wait that long.”
She’d taken a gulp of wine and swallowed, but the knot in her throat didn’t go down, any more than it had with the last half-dozen swallows. Anything could happen to him in six months. Anything. “I—have to find him.”
The Abernathys glanced at each other, and Gail’s hand touched Joe gently on the knee.
“Of course you do,” she said. “You sure about Scotland, though? What about the people that tried to take Jem from you? Won’t they be waiting, if you go back?”
Bree laughed—shakily, but a laugh.
“Another reason to go right away,” she said. “In the eighteenth century, I can stop looking over my shoulder.”
“You haven’t seen anybody—” Joe started, frowning, but she shook her head.
“Not in California. And not here. But I keep watching.” She’d taken a few other precautions, too, things she’d recalled from her father’s brief—and discreet—memoir of his World War II experiences, but no need to go into those.
“And you have some idea how to keep the kids safe in Scotland?” Gail was perched uneasily on the edge of her seat, as though wanting to spring up and go check on the kids. Brianna knew the feeling.
She sighed and wiped a straggle of hair out of her eye.
“There are two people—well, three—there that I think I can trust.”
“You think,” Joe echoed, sounding skeptical.
“The only people I know I can trust are right here,” she said simply, and lifted her wineglass to them. Joe looked away and cleared his throat. Then he glanced at Gail, who nodded at him.
“We’ll go with you,” he said firmly, turning back to Bree. “Gail can mind the kids, and I can make sure nobody bothers you ’til you’re set to go.”
She bit her lip to quell the rising tears.
“No,” she said, then cleared her own throat hard, to kill the quaver in her voice—caused as much by the vision of the two Drs. Abernathy strolling the streets of Inverness as by gratitude. It wasn’t that there were no black people in the Highlands of Scotland, but they were sufficiently infrequent as to cause notice.
“No,” she repeated, and took a deep breath. “We’ll go to Edinburgh to start; I can get the things we need there, without attracting attention. We won’t go up to the Highlands until everything is ready—and I’ll only get in touch with my friends there at the last minute. There won’t be time for anyone else to realize we’re there, before we—before we go . . . through.”
That one word, “through,” hit her like a blow in the chest, freighted as it was with memory of the howling void that lay between now and then. Between herself and the kids—and Roger.
The Abernathys hadn’t given up easily—or altogether; she was sure there would be another attempt at breakfast—but she had faith in her own stubbornness and, pleading exhaustion, had escaped from their kind worries in order to be alone with her own.
She was exhausted. But the bed she’d share with Mandy didn’t draw her. She needed just to be alone for a bit, to decompress before sleep would come. She could hear going-to-bed noises on the floor below; taking off her shoes, she padded silently down to the first floor, where a light had been left on in the kitchen and another at the end of the hallway by the den, where Jem had been put to bed on the big couch.
She turned to go and check on him, but her attention was diverted by a familiar metallic chunk! The kitchen had a pocket door, slid half across. She stepped up to it and glanced through the opening, to discover Jem standing on a chair next to the counter, reaching to pull a Pop-Tart out of the toaster.
He looked up, wide-eyed at the sound of her step, held the hot pastry for a second too long, and dropped it as it burned his fingers.
“Ifrinn!”
“Don’t say that,” she told him, coming to retrieve the fallen tart. “We’re about to go where people would understand it. Here—do you want some milk with that?”
He hesitated for an instant, surprised, then hopped down like a towhee, both feet together, and landed with a light thud on the tiled floor. “I’ll get it. You want some, too?” Suddenly, nothing on earth sounded better than a hot blueberry Pop-Tart with melting white icing and a glass of cold milk. She nodded and broke the hot tart in two, putting each half on a paper towel.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she finally said, after they’d eaten their snack in companionable silence. He shook his head, red hair ruffled up in porcupine spikes.
“Want me to read you a story?” She didn’t know what made her say that; he was much too old to be read to, though he was always somewhere nearby when she read to Mandy. He gave her a jaundiced look, but then, surprisingly, nodded and scampered up to the third floor, coming back with the new copy of Animal Nursery Tales in hand.