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I think about the fall from the window. My body going light, and the horrible, all-encompassing pain as I hit the sidewalk. I must have been jerked back to my own time, rather than Henri’s.

“I don’t understand how I survived,” I whisper.

“Nor I,” she says. “You’ll decide later on that you must have begun to time travel before your body fully took the impact of the fall, and that you had some extra energy to help you heal.” My aunt’s spark is what she’s referring to. I wonder if I ever shared with her how I acquired it. “As it was, though, you were found in very bad shape. You broke more bones than you didn’t break, including your skull.”

“Marie,” I whisper. “Did she get home?”

Cecelia nods, with a small smile. “Thanks to you, yes. Katrin did as well.”

“How do you—” I begin to ask, and then I realize she knows about Katrin because, as always, at some point in her past I told her about it.

And in the past, Henri waits. I’ve got to get home to him.

I start trying to sit up and she presses her hand to my shoulder. “Not yet,” she says. “You’ve been in a medically induced coma for quite a while now. Let the doctors assess you before you try to move. Please.”

“A coma? How long have I been out?”

She hesitates. “You were found on March first,” she says gently. “Today is September fifth.”

September.

I’ve been gone, then, for ten months. Poor Henri must be worried sick. So worried I can hardly stand to imagine it. I don’t have to return to September of 1939, I think, my heart beating harder. I could go to March instead. The babies would be safe, and I could spare him some of the pain.

Except it goes against everything I believe in. No matter how bad those months were for him, they’re his, not mine, and they’re behind us now. But I’ve got to get to him as soon as I can. I sit up, ignoring her hand, ignoring the way my body protests the movement. “I’ve got to get back to Henri.”

“Stop,” she commands. “Please…stop. Just listen to me.”

I stare at her, and my eyes well with frustrated tears. I want Henri. I crave him. “I miss him so much I feel physically ill from it,” I whisper. “So, say what you need to say and let me go.”

“He’s not there,” she blurts out.

I suck in a breath. In all these months I spent trying to live, trying to get back home to him, it never occurred to me that it was his survival I might need to worry about. “What do you mean, he’s not there? Is Henri… Did something happen to him while I was gone?”

She shakes her head. “He will be whole and healthy when you return. He’s fighting right now. The Saar Offensive, a brief battle that will end badly for the French.”

I press my hands to my face. “He’s fighting? They were supposed to go to the United States. I made Marie promise. I—” I can’t believe how wrong it’s all gone.

“Life got in the way,” she says softly, her face sad for a moment before she blinks it away. “He’ll be home soon, but you’re in no shape to go anywhere at the moment, and besides that…I’ve intervened again,” she says. “You really shouldn’t go back until October twelfth, which is when you originally went.”

My eyes well once more. I can’t believe I’m finally capable of returning to him and she expects me to wait. “How could it matter?” I ask, wrenching the IV from my arm. “I can’t just sit here for five weeks. Surely you understand that.”

There’s worry in her face, and her mouth opens to argue, then closes. “He won’t return from the front until September twenty-fifth. Stay here that long at least. You need physical therapy anyway. In your current condition, anything could happen when you jump.”

I can’t argue with her logic, and perhaps I should be grateful for what she’s done, or for the mere fact that I survived when so many did not. But right now, I need to see Henri.

For so many reasons, but this one most of all: it feels like there’s something she’s not telling me.

* * *

The doctor pronounces my recovery a miracle. “You’re very lucky to be alive,” he says. Cecelia sits on the other side of me, holding my hand. “You healed beyond anything I imagined possible, given the extent of your injuries,” he adds, yet I hear a but coming. A warning of some kind.

“Yes,” I say, sick with worry as I wait.

“I regret to say that we couldn’t fix everything,” he says. “You suffered a great deal of internal damage. The scar tissue…makes it unlikely that you will ever have children.”

It’s not what I thought he was going to say and I wish, somehow, I’d been prepared for it. I fall back against the pillows. I think of last fall, when Henri and I watched Charlotte and Lucien…how I’d been able to see us as parents. How badly I hungered for it, out of nowhere.

I want Henri to be a father. And it’s something he wants for himself. Now I’m going to return after nearly a year’s disappearance, gaunt, not entirely myself, and tell him I can never give that to him.