He wore only a large sweatshirt. He stood at his stove while I sat hunched in a chair at his kitchen table, my chin on my knees, my fingers interlaced with my toes. He sang something he said was a ditty from long ago.  When he turned to ask me how I liked my bacon, he made some horrid pun on my answer of 'extra crispy' but then finished by telling me I took his breath away sitting over there in his sweater that was so big it fell off one of my shoulders.

I had the most amazing realization.

This was the real Jack. This was what he'd been like, back before a tragedy so immense happened to him that he simply ceased to be himself for a while.

There was an energy about him now that had been slowly coming back only it took this one morning to make me see what had been happening for him. He was unashamed to show me this part of him after the intimacies we'd shared. This was much more than post-coital exuberance, though I believed firmly that the part of himself he showed me while making love with me meant that his physical expressions of affection and attachments were an important way you learned how he felt about you. Hadn't he always showed me the importance of our friendship in the things he did more than in the words he expressed?

He fixed us flapjacks for breakfast even though he moaned that he'd had to use powdered eggs even for such an important occasion as Christmas morning's meal. He told me about his favorite childhood memories of this holiday: of the Yule log being set to blaze on Christmas Eve and of the hearty breakfast on Christmas morning in which the entire household would feast on cold meat and ale.

"I've never heard of such a Christmas menu... ale for breakfast... and for the children, too? Jack, you're not teasing me, are you?" I asked him, a smile on my face at the soft reflection in his eyes.

"This was the custom in the world of my youth, Katie. And Christmas, I am given to understanding, is celebrated wholly different in this time... and here in your land." He blushed slightly as he said, "I am trying to adapt. I had understood that over here, your breakfasts are in this manner... have I blundered?"

"No, Jack. I much prefer flapjacks to ale. You're doing this just for me then? You are a truly incredible and generous man... someone did something right in raising you."

"Ah. I told you once how effective flattery was on me, my dear. Shall I give you another demonstration of just how generous a man I am?"

He caught me before I had much more time than to scamper into his living room. I shrieked in mock protest but soon enough it was me who was the aggressor. I dragged him down before the fireplace, whispering to him of how very decadent it seemed to me to make love there on the rough floor on this day of kings.

Up until then, I had not felt the desire to direct how we'd make love. But my ability to be bold seemed to be returning. And he did not put up a fight at all. He laid resplendent before the embers, a man sated enough to allow me the leisure to stroke, caress, kiss, taste... to whisper to me of what felt good to him... to groan at what simply made him want to indulge himself... to cry out when he came, his fingers in my hair, rubbing my scalp until he tensed and jarred against the back of my throat.

To cry silent tears that leaked from beneath his closed eyelids while I kissed them away and soothed him.

Do you remember what it's like the first time you make love with a man who knows how to make you come? How it seems to you that the world is a different place now that you know about this... about making love, about fucking, about men. How you'd make love in one unending session if you could. How all it takes is one look at him or from him and you simply turn to liquid. How even in the midst of doing the most mundane things, all you can focus on is doing it again because you want to feel him between your legs and you simply ache for it.

I hadn't ever expected to feel that way again. The part of me that had been expressed through a healthy libido never seemed to come back, even after I felt I'd done a really good job of putting myself back together after Ben died. I hadn't thought I'd missed it.

Jack's gentle, all-encompassing way of making love to me that first time had taken me by surprise. I had done it to be nice to him; he did it because he longed for me. He whispered that to me, just before he entered me. His fingers were wet pressure on my hip as he got into position. I shook in his arms at what we were about to do; he felt that. His mouth was near my ear. He told me he had believed that in me, he had discovered a reason to look forward instead of ever behind him. He said he had wanted me for so long that he could now scarce believe it was happening. He asked me to hold him ever so tight.

We would have never gotten dressed on Christmas except I wanted to go home to get his present. Jack decided he would bring his gift for me along and we'd exchange our presents at my place. He carried it in a large sack; I was curious to know whatever he could have for me. I wondered if he'd just grabbed some knickknack from a shelf in the house that morning, perhaps not having intended to give me anything but upon hearing I had something for him, felt the need to have something for me in return. Not that it mattered.

We held hands and said the goofiest things to each other on the walk to my place. All around us, the frozen snow's crusty surface glistened. Off to the sea, clouds gathered and Jack said this would be a bad one. We must choose a house to ride it out in, he said. It could be days. We grinned at each other.

Before we went inside, Jack helped me check the generator to be sure it was ready to kick in if we lost power. We almost always lost power in the bad storms until the Wilson twins would reset switches and gauges at the main juncture.

I had planned to mull wine and make us a light, early dinner to serve in the dining room after we had our gift exchange. But he had other ideas. As I stood at the stove, he was behind me, holding me, swaying us both to a melody he hummed in my ear. When he had me compliant and at his mercy, he said he'd like it if we'd have dinner in bed and open our gifts there.

It was decadent. Imagine such a Christmas? To be exploring each other's body and desires, all alone together out there on that island. To have this luxury. To take this time. To care for each other.

To make love with a man who could whisper tender, heartfelt words one moment and then aggressively possess you in the next. To have his hoarse voice in the height of his ecstasy utter profane promises of what he was going to do to you. To beg him to do it. To have him come with the knowledge you would desire that with him. To see a purely masculine gleam in his eyes after, when he took your face in one hand to pull you into a rough kiss. And to know, in a way that made your heart thud in your chest, that he was a lover of abandon, strength and skill... and you had just given him permission to let his imagination run wild.

His eyes misted over when he opened the box and withdrew the ship's bell. He professed it the finest gift in the world. He made me promise to come with him and help him choose the perfect place to affix it in his sailboat's cabin.

To say his gift to me made me cry would be to say far too little.

He had composed a cantata for me.

This was how I found out he played the violin. He pulled his case from the bag he'd carried over from his place. As he tuned the strings, he cleared his throat and made this little speech to say that he was just the least bit rusty as he had not taken the instrument up in many months until he decided that he wished to write something for me. I recognized it as the melody he'd been playing when I'd stood outside his door the day before.

Unsaid was what I suspected... that he'd not played in the wake of his family's deaths. That he'd felt it inappropriate to do so or that playing brought back memories he was unwilling to face.

That he would then play for me? How it touched me. That he had written something for me, as my gift, touched me even further.

He paced in my room and played his music from the heart. I sat amidst the disrupted bed linens and pillows... and watched with my heart breaking. It sounded wholly different on this day than it had the day before. Then, it had simply been haunting music. Now, it spoke a longing for me that I had never realized but which made me feel all the more bittersweet to have come to him the night before in the hopes I'd comfort him... and to know already that it had become more than that between us by the morning after. In his music, I heard his journey from where he'd been to where he hoped he was.

I had been so blind to what had been between us. For me, it was a platonic friendship. He knew that. He loved me anyway, even knowing I might never see in him the lover he wished to be with me.

When the last strains of the music drifted away into silence, he turned to find me crying. I held my arms out to him; we held each other close

He left my arms only to retrieve a box from the bag that had held his violin case. It was wrapped in green ribbons. Inside was a carved violin and bow, made from some almost cherry-colored piece of driftwood.

"It's so beautiful, Jack. You made this?"

"With love and my deepest admiration, Katie."

"I will always give it a place of high honor, wherever I may be living. I shall keep it near so that I can keep you near, Jack."

The storm that began the next day shook the house in the force of the winds. After we lost power, Jack had to struggle mightily to get into the little shed that held the generator. Without that wonderful contraption, the deadly cold might have burst pipes no matter that we took the precaution of opening the taps to let water keep flowing so it didn't freeze up within the pipes.

Jack had a wild dream that night in which he was caught in an icy patch of ocean as a ship beneath him broke apart from the ice floes. I listened to his sweat-soaked voice tell me of having to abandon ship, to get his men off into lifeboats, to know true desperation... to be that responsible and unable to ever show fear because what his men needed was a leader not a coward. I held his face in my hands and reminded him that it was only a nightmare.

As we huddled together and listened to the wind rage outside, he asked me if I only believed in things I could prove.

"I wonder, my dear, are you a woman of science or a woman who believes that some myths may never be explained but it does not make sense to tempt fate by not believing them?"

I snuggled in against him, saying, "Well, I'm not a woman of science. And I write fiction, so I'd say I'm more likely to see that there is a place for mysteries and magic in our lives. Is that what you mean?"

"Not precisely. But it is close enough." He cleared his throat; I realized he was about to tell me something of real importance.

But just then, we heard something hit the house and our attention was diverted. A moment later, the unmistakable sound of breaking glass. Inside a room down the hall from where we were, a tree limb had crashed through the window. The sound of the storm was a deep howl through the gaping hole. I showed Jack where I'd stored lumber up in the attic and he pulled down a piece of plywood while I fetched a hammer and nails.

It took all his strength to hold that plywood against the force of the wind trying to invade the house. I hammered away on the 2x4's he showed me to use as bracing to hold the plywood in place.

We stayed up all night, listening to the intensity of the storm, waiting to jump into action should it be needed. By morning, we fell asleep on the couch... Jack's head lolling over the back of it as he snored and my head lying on his lap.

Once we were both conscious again, Jack insisted we go check the damage. It wasn't horrible, but some shingles were taken off and another large tree limb had knocked the railing along the back deck loose. Other than that, there was another tree down but it was far enough from the house that I didn't worry about it just then.

At the house he was renting, we found that the wind had done very little real damage. One big tree leaned precariously; Jack observed it very seriously before professing that he would try to shore the tree up and save it.

The next week or so, we worked on fixing the damage at my place. We replaced the window with a snug-fitting piece of plywood. I asked Jack where he'd learned to do such emergency repairs that would withstand the force of nature. He shook his head at me and told me that was a tale for another time.

The Wilson's twins were right about February. It is the bitterest of months. On the island, that month clamped in over us with a smothering blanket of weather that made venturing outdoors a true ordeal. The fact that we weren't all stone cold crazy from cabin fever is a testimony to our ability to persevere.

But as Bill pointed out to me one day in January, at least February is the shortest month.

By March, I believed that if I never saw that insufferable Jack Aubrey again, my life would be just fine and dandy. In fact, I'd told him not two weeks before that very thing. And I'd meant it, by God.

Just as he'd meant it when he'd yelled at me with a thunderous voice that he would be off this island and out of my life the instant he could chop a route for his sailboat out of the harbor and through the floes to the mainland.

"Get the hell away from me!" I'd screamed.

"With pleasure, madam," he'd yelled back just before slamming the door behind him.

The only thing I was ever smart about in those two weeks was that some semblance of maturity and remembrance of better times stayed my hand when I nearly tossed every wooden object he'd carved for me into the raging fireplace. I'd been about to... and then I had simply been unable to move.

I thought about the months in the late fall and early winter we'd spent existing in companionable friendship and then the two months we'd been together in intimate harmony. I thought about the fact that we'd made the decision together to continue our affair even though we should have figured out a way to take precautions. We did try. Let me be the first to be sure and say that trying to figure out when you're ovulating is not an exact science. Well, we had to try because we were stuck out there with no supplies for preventing pregnancy. No rubbers, no pills, no patches, no shots, no diaphragms. We were not prepared for sex but that's what we were having.

We stopped for a little while right after we'd begun. I'd realized I was playing with fire. I didn't want to be cavalier about it. I felt very strong affection for Jack.

Jesus.

This is what he hated.

That I was in love with him and trying to pretend it wasn't as immense as it was.

As it had been.

We weren't in love anymore.

That's for damned sure.

I knew I was pregnant right about mid February. It was bound to happen. Jack's impossible to resist. He is an exquisite lover. He has this way of loving you that makes you feel you are unlike any woman he's ever met. He enjoys women. He can touch you as if you are the most precious, delicate treasure... but he can also grab hold and challenge you to endure an encounter that is as purely and intensely physical as emotional.

So, as I have said, he is irresistible. 

Dammit.

I had to stop this. I could resist knowing he was only two houses down. That all I had to do was say one word and mean it... and he'd have invited me to his bed again. That there was a part of me that was revolted I could even think about being with him again. That there was a part of me that died every single time I held the violin he carved for me.

Why had it turned out to be that he could both be this man I had grown to love with an intensity and completeness that consumed me... and yet also be a man suffering from a frightful delusion that must have been caused in a disassociation with reality in the wake of his family's deaths?

If he would have just agreed to get professional help once the weather cleared enough for the first trip to the mainland. I would have seen him through it... but I'm not going to become part of his delusion.

He thought he was a man from another time. That he had a family... but that it was back in the early 1800s, not in current time. That one day, he just woke up to find himself in modern times. That ever since then, some unknown group has helped him exist but that he fell into a deep depression when the reality of being in another time and cut off from everyone he loved began to weigh on him with the finality of it. That only since he met me has he felt his life regain any sense of joy. That he loves me and wants to get married and raise our children together.

How it broke my heart when he told me this. He believed it so deeply; nothing I said, no amount of sense I made... none of it could sway him to see reality. I told him that I had read of such things, of people being so broken by their grief that they suffer the most realistic delusions.

It infuriated him that I would not believe him. Worse, it hurt him deeply.

But what could I do?

I refused to marry him and have this child with him. Not if he wouldn't get help. I only knew that my first priority was to look out for my baby.

He didn't tell me his fictional tale of his background right away. The first time he ventured an effort to tell me had been early on, when he'd asked if I only believed in things I could prove. But he didn't pursue it then; I don't suppose he was ready to share it with me yet.

The second time he broached the subject, he was again testing the waters to see how I'd respond. I think it was early January... he said something about how his moment of realization came while he carved that seagull for me. He suddenly saw it so clearly.

"What's that, Jack?" I said, looking up at him as I folded towels fresh from a warm dryer.

"My wife and children died while I was at sea, on a sailing mission," he said.

I gazed into his steady eyes. There was a flush to his face. "That must have been so hard. To come home after... I feel so badly for how it must have hurt for you."

"When I realized my wife and children had died without me, I felt guilty that I was alive. I felt I owed it to them to never let any moment pass in which the gravity of their loss was not the most important thing to me. I couldn't laugh or feel good because it insulted them, as if they were not important to me anymore if I could move beyond their loss."

"Oh, my dear sweet Jack. I understand what you mean... I felt that way, too, for a long time after Ben and Cody died. How it seemed an insult to them to ever be happy again." I went to where he sat and cuddled with him. After a while, I whispered, "But what does that have to do with my seagull? You said you had a moment of realization?"

As he carved the seagull, he thought about the fact that what he was essentially saying was that the dead people he knew and loved now owned his life. That he had given his future to people who no longer existed.

And he realized this for the futility it was.

"The dead do not own our lives," he told me solemnly. "We own our lives, Katie. And we must make of them the best lives we ever can."

"Cody would have been nine in the spring," I told him. "Sometimes when I wake up, I still get the urge to go check on him and make sure he made it through the night okay."

"Sometimes when I first wake and realize I am not at sea, I listen for my daughters' voices. Lord, but their voices could carry a far distance. They were not always the genteel ladies that Sophie wished for them to be."

"Were you a good father?"

"I was the best I knew how to be. But I was not with them enough to truly believe I knew them as their mother did. Of course, a father cannot. And they would change so much between my visits. They loved me dearly, Katie. As I loved them. But we did not always exist so happily together. Their noise could prate on a man seeking peace in his home."

Gosh, how he could make me laugh. The way he shook his head so solemnly even while a mischievous smile lit up his eyes. I pictured Jack with his children; I pictured him under the mistaken impression that children would react as small adults, which is what I rather assumed Jack had thought of them as.

That was as close as he came to broaching the subject he'd been meaning to talk about with me. But then I veered the subject to something that I had wished to really discuss with him for a few days.

It was this issue of the chance I'd get pregnant if we didn't take some precautions, maybe abstain. His response shocked me. It also pleased a very instinctive part of me. He wanted it. He told me that the idea of making a child with me was a very pleasant dream for him.

Truth be told, I was ambivalent. Under ordinary circumstances, I would never have taken a risk of becoming pregnant unless I knew I wanted it. Like I had with Ben.

But I was already in love with Jack and growing more so each day. I loved him so much it hurt sometimes. I could see him across the living room from me and actually ache at the reality that he existed and was there in my life.

He was incredibly passionate and obscenely loving. Nothing was off limits between us in that way; everything was willingly given to each other.

As I came to spend such time with him, snug inside the beach house while winter clamped down outside, I saw Jack in many moods. He could be solemn and inward focused. But most often, he was engaged and engaging. We discussed politics... only to learn his British sensibilities were at wide disparity to my northeastern brand of Democratic ideals. We talked religion and found surprising similarities in our beliefs even if our approach at having reached those beliefs were dissimilar. We discussed current events; Jack probed my memories of the whys and wherefores to the point where it was like trying to explain the concept of heaven and hell to a child.

Jack was solicitous and caring. Not that he didn't relax pretty quickly into the routine of him not quite minding it when I took over more and more of the housework. Ah, but that's the bloom of infatuation, I think, for many women... that way you have of almost creating a nest as if to prove to the man he can have a nice place to roost.

But he could argue with me when we disagreed as if he thought all discussion ended when he said it did. And then five minutes later, we were both contrite and begging the other's forgiveness for being stubborn and out of sorts.

But the came THE fight.

He had been over the moon when I'd realized the horrible morning sickness that lasted all day long meant only one thing. Actually, I'd been pretty much in shock at first; his enthusiasm made me nervous.

He assumed we were getting married.

I said I didn't want him to feel any obligation.

He said it wasn't an obligation; it was love. And furthermore, he told me, it was as if all of this had been the reason for him to be there... so that he could find the one person who made him happy to be alive in this day and age.

This was when he sat me down and told me this fantastical story of his. The one that was really just the delusion of a man whose mind had found a crutch to help him cope with tragedy.

"I would like to tell you a tale. It is a true one, you may take my word as a gentleman as oath upon it. Though it may appear otherwise, I beg you to not judge it a bit of fantastical amusements I have dreamed up."

He rose from the warmth of the bed and paced in the cold of the bedroom. He asked me to listen only, to withhold judgement until the end, to not interrupt with questions.

His tale was the wildest ravings of a mad man. I was horrified to learn I'd given myself to such a lunatic.

One moment, he said, he was aboard his ship and playing a duet with a friend in his great cabin. It was the year 1805 and he was in the height of his success as a Captain of a Royal Navy ship named the Surprise. Almost 200 men were entrusted to his care; he'd had a long and colorful career. Back in Portsmouth, England, his wife and three children awaited his return.

The next moment, he was walking up a quay in Portsmouth only he did not know how he got there, had indeed not recognized where he was at all. He had been off the coast of Chile so how had he instantly found himself back in England? Not only that... in fact, the most astounding thing of all... was that he learned he wasn't even in the year 1805 any longer but that he was suddenly in the year 2003; the month was November.

A woman was waiting for him upon the pier. If not for her, he said, he would never have survived. As he contemplated this new reality, he became confused, irritated, angry... scared beyond all reason that he had lost his mind.

I kept waiting for the punch line. I smiled at him, knowing this was some elaborate joke... only, I really did know he believed what he was saying. A huge void seemed to be forming inside me. How could he be weaving such a fantasy and not see it for what it was?

He said the woman proved to him that he was indeed in the year 2003. She did not really say how it came to be that he'd been brought out of time; he had never point blank asked her. He just accepted that as it had happened, it was what was and that was all. But she anticipated his reactions; she had greeted other men who arrived as he had, from out of time or out of place. She began to win his trust; she began then to teach him about the age in which he now was.

Before long, he wanted only one thing: to go home to his family and friends. He escaped from the hotel in which they were staying. He used his old memories of the way home to find his way through a countryside and town that had changed drastically.

When he told me of searching for his home, of having to admit it no longer belonged to him... another family lived there, not his... I was by then totally rapt in the tale even if I did not believe him. The thing that held me fascinated was the degree of detail, the depth of emotion, the specificity of memories that he had woven into this delusion. If for one shining moment, I could have ignored the laws of reality, I would have believed him if for no other reason than how intensely the next memory he spoke of had affected him.

It was when he told me of finding their graves behind an old church that made me cry. He lowered his head when he heard me sniffling; I went to him and wrapped my arms around him as he breathed heavily and tried not to cry himself. I led him back to bed; his skin was cold and I wanted to hold him. I wanted to tell him it was okay for him to stop living in that fantasy. That I would take care of him until he could get therapy and begin to see that he had something worth living for in the real world. But all I could do just then was hold him while he felt his grief over visiting their graves.

"Her name was listed above mine. She died not 16 years after the last date I know I was in my own time. Whoever is in that grave with her may have my name but it is not me, Katie. Whoever he was, he died 22 years after she did. My children... their mates, children... they were buried near us... near them."

"But, Jack! Surely this can't be true."

"And my friends... everyone I'd ever known... all gone."

We sat in silence for a few minutes, until his voice was even again. He continued his tale by saying that the woman who greeted him worked for a law firm in Boston. She had been sent to help him, to teach him, to be his guide in a new place. She had brought him there, to America where his life had begun again with new friends in a new town.  But when the excitement of all the new things began to fade, he was faced with the absoluteness of his losses. He had sought a place where he could be alone to mourn. It was the woman at the law firm who helped him find the island.

"Josiah said he'd sent a cable message to a law firm in Boston. That you'd wanted them to arrange for you to buy the Bennett place," I blurted out, wondering how deftly he'd mixed in details of fantasy and reality. This law firm... surely Jack had to remember that he'd probably gone to them to probate his wife's estate... not to help him adjust in the modern age. Things like that just didn't happen.

"They are the very same as have been assisting me. I have never met my benefactor; I am given that he simply intends that I shall be under his protection until such time as I begin to make my way in this new world."

"Jack... you're seriously asking me to believe that you just woke up one day to find every single person and thing you'd ever known were no longer even in existence? Doesn't that strike you as rather outside the realm of possibility? How could anyone even go on after that?"

He hugged me in tightly. "There were days when I wished I was able to wake and find myself inside an asylum for lunatics. That would have been some comfort... that this was all inside my mind. But it was not, my dear. Imagine what it was like... to mourn my family and friends, to not know anyone, to have nothing of my old life... to have no future but be forced to live as if life would simply go on and me go on along with it? I have been brought low before, Katie, but I have always had a resilient nature. This time, my ability to find anything good in what had happened was absent. Until I came here... no, that is not exactly it. Until I met you, sweetheart."

"That might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me," I whispered to him. But even as I held him close, I cried silent tears for him. His mind... it needed to be fixed.

"Now that you know of my hidden past, are you willing to consider me as your suitor?"

I sat up from him. When I looked down, I smoothed hair from his face so I could kiss his forehead. My lips lingered there as I found it simply impossible to know what to say. Did I just tell him he was mad? Did I pretend I believed him? Did I tell him he scared the bejeesus out of me? Did I risk plunging him deeper into his fantasy no matter which way I turned?

Just then, I kept silent. But I lay awake all night as he held me and slept on, oblivious to the fact that if we had been on the mainland, I would have been checking him into a psych ward.

But the next morning, I told him the truth. That while I knew he believed in his delusion, that's all it was. And that he needed help. That I'd get it for him. That all he had to do was hold on and let me hold him. And then we'd see what the future held for us.

At first, he tried to cajole me to saying I would let him prove he was telling me the truth. He said he'd contact the law firm and have someone come see us... someone from this time who'd confirm his tale. Then I'd see, he said.

"Surely you can trust in me until that point? Trust in the man you've come to know, my dear. I am not lying to you and I am not insane."

"I know you believe it, Jack. But it's not real."

"Do not be so stubborn, Katherine," he snapped at me, his voice rising to a near shout. "You cannot be in the least seriously thinking I am delusional."

It got worse from there. It got to me throwing him out. To him leaving angry.

To us not seeing each other for weeks.

Except I saw him.

I saw him almost every day at some point. He would sneak up to the property line, sometimes even venturing so close to the house that I was sure he was going to come inside and confront me.

But after about a week, I realized what he was doing. He was watching over me. Even in the bitterness of that awful February weather, he resolutely forced his way over to where I was living just to make sure I was okay.

It touched me so deeply.

I felt myself going slowly downhill... I knew it was bad when I began to examine his story for holes and could only find details that shored it up. "You cannot seriously be telling me you want to believe him, can you?" I said into the mirror one morning.

How can you love someone so much that you love him even if a part of him is mad?

The Coast Guard cutter made it to the harbor in early March. I had not known they did things like that. Josiah told me about it when he dropped by about a week earlier to tell me that if I had mail for my publisher or family, I should get it ready with proper postage because the crew on the ship would drop it at the post office on the mainland when they finished their round of islands in this quadrant.

They came through as soon as the weather cooperated. Their visit was part checking on us and part preparing themselves for when people would begin venturing out on their boats again in bigger numbers.

I stood in Josiah's office and watched them near the pier. Jack and the other men were pacing out there upon the cement quay wall. He looked good. I missed him.

"So something happened between the two of ya, eh?" Mary asked me in that bray of a voice of hers.

"Who? Me and Josiah? He's an old fart."

"You and the Brit."

"Me and Jack? We're friends, yeah. Just like me and Bill are, too."

"Oh sure. Sell it to the tourists 'cuz I ain't hauling that load of crap."

"Mary, what'd you ever do without me to gossip about in the winters?"

"Used to gossip 'bout your mom for a while there."

"Go to hell."

There actually wasn't anything I wanted so much as to climb aboard the cutter and leave that island with the Coast Guard. I was actually waiting for my chance to ask whoever came off the boat to take me back with them. I had a bag packed at home and it wouldn't take me long to get it if they said yes.

Yes.

That's all I had to say to Jack and maybe we'd be okay again.

But he just refused to see that he needed professional help. And I was bringing a baby into this world and I had to look out for my baby's welfare before my own. Jack thought I should just believe his delusion and marry him. I missed him so much it was a physical ache. I couldn't do this.

I lost my train of thought when I stomped out of Josiah's office and noticed Jack was walking my way. He must have seen me at the same time. We just kind of both froze in our tracks except I was determined not to let Mary see me react to him so I forced myself to move again.

What was it I didn't want again? Why wouldn't I marry him?

Oh.

Right.

I don't want to lose him. God. I love him. I am carrying his child. Everything in my body has changed. Everything in my heart has, too. I am so tired. I don't think I can do this anymore.

"Jack."

"Katie."

"I was looking for Josiah. I have mail I'd like to give to ..."

"Allow me. I shall put it with mine and you may be assured I will place it firmly within the hand of the ship's commanding officer."

Our gloved hands touched. His eyes searched mine.

"Was there anything else I could do for you, Katie? I am at your service."

"No, no. That was all. Just the mail."

So I didn't leave with the Coast Guard. I figured there'd be another boat coming back before too long. The ferry service wouldn't begin until the end of April but that's only because there wouldn't be enough visitors and tourists coming out here until then.

I saw Jack out on the beach every so often after that. I'd gotten back into my beach walks by the middle of March. I could have gone sooner; I suppose I just forgot about them.

But then it dawned on me that I needed to take good care of my body since I now had a passenger depending on me. I was prone to sudden bouts of overwhelming fatigue as my body continued adjusting; I was also pretty emotional, given to crying jags that would send me crawling to bed with violent headaches. I kept thinking that I'd soon have no choice but to insist on getting on the next big boat that beat its way over the tempestuous seas between us and the mainland. I really needed to get in to an obstetrician and get an exam so I could get started on all the prenatal regimens.

Still... I seemed stuck for a little while and if so, then a routine seemed a good answer. I put walking as my highest priority, just to get me out and about. I also decided to get back to a few of the projects I'd wanted to do around the house.

The first time I saw Jack on the beach, I acted like we were back to being neighbors, as if nothing else had happened between us over the winter.

The second time I saw him, I started crying the moment after we passed each other and blamed it on my hormones. I just turned and walked straight away from the ocean until I was over the crest of the dune and knew I was out of his sight if he should chance to turn around to glance my way. I sat right down on the sand on the other side and blubbered that I wasn't going to make it without him and that I was so sad I didn't think it was good for the baby.

When the crying jag was over, I huddled in my coat as I rested against the dune's side and before another moment passed, I was asleep. When I woke, I was chilled so deeply that my teeth chattered until I got home and sat before the fireplace.

The next day, I resolved to not let any silly emotional breakdowns keep me from my new routine. I was still writing my requisite hours a day. I'd started a new novel and a short story. They served useful purposes in helping me write out the emotional turmoil I was feeling.

After I got in from my morning walk, I sat at the laptop and wrote for two hours. After lunch, I stood in the middle of the room where my parents had always slept when we'd been here in the summers. I knew what I wanted to do in that room; I just wondered why it'd taken me all winter to get around to doing it. I rubbed over my little pooch of a tummy and tried to remember the last time I'd seen my mom sleeping in there.

It took me all afternoon to measure the wall upon which I wanted to build shelving. Ben had said he was going to do this project for the last four years we'd been there at the beach house. He just never got around to it. It had been something my mother had wanted... broad planks of shelving she'd seen in some magazine and shown to Ben the summer before she died. The next summer, I'd walked in this room with Cody on my hip to find Ben measuring and drawing up his plans for the shelves. He never got further than that in that summer. The next year, we'd brought the supplies, but... I don't know why Ben was like that, but he was. He'd get started on something but never see it through. It used to drive me crazy.

Movement outside the window caught my eye.

Jack.

This time, he was doing more than hovering on the edges of my property. This time, he was out there, examining the tree that had fallen in the really bad storm that winter. I'd never done anything with it. As I watched, leaning a hip against the windowsill, he went into the tool shed and emerged with the axe. I stood there watching him resolutely chopping that tree into chunks. He carefully stacked them near the aged wood. And then he picked up his coat and walked off.

I stared at him until I could no longer see his blond hair blowing in the breeze.

The next day, I set up the sawhorses and power saw on the back porch. From the storage room off the kitchen, I pulled each of the pine slabs that Ben had gotten... one by one, as I needed them, I brought them outside where I'd carefully measure them and then stand there slicing through them like butter with the saw.

My father and brothers used to do this in the summers when I was a kid. While I was happy to spend every waking moment playing on the beach or at Beth's house or over at the docks, they liked having projects. My father only came to the beach house in August. Honestly, that month he spent more time with us kids than the rest of the year combined. When I was in my early teens, I used to love to watch them working on the wood. They built shelving for the storage area, repaired shutters, built bookcases for the boys' rooms... they also built the decking, front and back. Each year, they added things... like railings they spent hours carving. It was fun for them. I loved the smell of newly-cut lumber.

Maybe that's why I started smiling again. Because I was sawing into lumber and smelling that distinctive aroma.

I don't know why Ben never got projects done. Maybe he just wasn't made that way or maybe it was because his father never cut lumber with him.

Jack had told me once about this conservatory he designed and had built for his home in Portsmouth. He said he had ground the lens for his telescope himself and it gave him the finest, sharpest view of the harbor during the day and of the skies at night.

He had listened to my list of projects that I wanted to do around this place... and he had started making them happen. We had already built storage bins for the attic. And we'd replaced the countertop in the kitchen that one of my brothers had burned with a hot pot maybe five years ago. We had replaced some rotting wood in the front porch and repaired one of the banisters on the stairs.

I traced all these little things about Jack that I felt I knew so well. He was the kind of man who finished projects and dreamed of other ways to improve things for me around the beach house. When he drew plans for a greenhouse and a walkway from the front door to the generator shed and an extension of the back deck... I simply knew he'd get it done just as soon as he had the material. If he said he'd do it, he did it.

Jack was the kind of man who gave his word and meant it. He might have told rambling, awful jokes... but even when he teased me by telling me some fanciful tale, I could have sworn anything that he never once tried to hide behind a lie, that he was even capable of blatantly and purposefully trying to lie to me. He was also never mean or malicious. Up until his big whopper of a delusion, I would have said Jack Aubrey could never have fooled me with a lie and that he was the one man I knew who saw the world clearly, even through bruised eyes.

It seemed impossible for me to reconcile this delusional man with the Jack I knew... maybe, then, the truth was not so absolute? I remembered in a flash him asking me that one time if I only believed things I could prove.

If he said it was so, it always had been.

So what if this had been true? Say his delusion was the truth, I thought... how could he have told someone in this age that he was from an earlier time and been believed? How could he have proved it?

After I'd finished cutting the wood, I rubbed tung oil in the planks. As I finished with each one, I hauled it off the sawhorses and leaned it against the railing to finish drying

Up in my parent's old room the next afternoon, I used a battery driven screwdriver to hang the support brackets. I was planning to use the power nail gun to secure the planks but after the first few went in, it gave out and I realized I'd not properly recharged it. But I figured I'd prefer wielding the old hammer to waiting an entire day for the battery to be recharged.

I'd been at it maybe an hour. Long enough to be breaking a sweat at the mild exertion from hammering.  I tossed open the window, leaned my head out over the second floor overhang and breathed deeply of crisp, salty air as icicles dripped melt water from the eaves and glistened in the sun. And then I got back to work.

I heard him only when he stomped in the room. My mind had been far away, worrying over stuff and junk. And thinking about him and how impossible his tale was but how convincingly he told it.

For a moment when I heard his footsteps trod into the room, I forgot he wasn't supposed to be there. I turned to ask him something, as if nothing bad had happened between us... he stood there with his hands on his hips and this narrow-eyed, tight-lipped expression on his face. But even though he let a second or two pass before he said anything, I still jumped in surprise at the roar that came out of him.

"What in damnation do you think you are up to? Hand me that tool this instant and climb down off that ladder," he boomed out.

I teetered on the upper rung where just a second before I had felt infinitely secure. The wood plank I was hammering was not yet attached with anything but one nail but I grabbed for it to keep my balance... only it came loose and I teetered even more until the wood began to fall and I had the instinct to try to catch it... and then I was done for... and I felt myself falling as the ladder began to slip from beneath me...

His strong arms caught me not even a second later. I clutched in around his neck... my heart was beating wildly. Wood and ladder and hammer and nails clattered to the floor in a horrible cacophony.

The following silence in the room was broken only by a few rolling nails and the waves crashing outside and the seagulls calling in the sky.

It had been weeks.

Our lips were inches apart.

I saw only fear in his eyes.

"You frightened me," I whispered.

"I would never have forgiven myself if you had been injured... how could you be so foolish as to... You are in a delicate condition and have no business doing something so strenuous and dangerous... You..." But he stopped part way into his harangue and suddenly hugged me in against him so tightly it was hard to breathe. His voice softened to a hush. "Do you not have any concept of how many deaths I would die if something had happened to you? Damn my soul to hell. I have been a scrub to have let the woman having my child go it alone these last few weeks."

Was it weakness in me that being in his arms made me lose my way? Or had I found my way? All I really knew was that I had already been finding reasons to put aside my misgivings and to try to believe him that he was who he said he was if only because I suppose I simply believed in him.

"I need you so badly, Jack. I don't know what to do anymore," I admitted to him. "I still fear it's a delusion you're having... but I want to believe."

He carried me into the bedroom we'd been sharing. He held me in his lap. Just held me. I had the strongest memory of our first time together. Of how he'd been shut down when I first met him. Of how he'd been totally closed off from interaction with other people when I first heard of his existence.

Of how, when I thought about it, he had a charm and sophistication that I'd not run across before. Of how he had a way about him, almost this courtly disposition, that I could now view in another light. Of how he knew so much about that time period. Of how he had sometimes told me dreams and I maybe hadn't realized that rather than dreams, they'd been memories he only felt safe sharing with me by saying they were dreams.

"I need you to take a leap of faith. To believe in me as the man of your heart... as the father of this child," he said. His deep voice was almost a whisper. It sent shivers down me as he spoke the words and gently caressed my tummy over where his seed grew.

"Do you love me, Jack? Or are you just happy to have some woman in love with you who can warm your bed and cook your meals?"

He laid me gently on the bed and leaned in next to me on his elbow. His free hand played with my hair. His eyes were aimed at my chest but he was seeing some internal thoughts. Finally, "I have only loved one other woman in my life. Truly loved, I mean. She remains a part of who I am. But I long ago reconciled where her place in my life was. I am not the sort of man who seeks just any woman to be my partner in life. A man has needs; if that is all he seeks, he would not seek that with a woman such as you, Katie."

"Can you really move beyond Sophie? Have you really reconciled that she's dead and not lost in time? No, don't look hurt... I have a right to ask this, Jack. I can take the leap of faith... I think I already had begun, but I need to look in your eyes and believe you've finished the process of letting her go before I let myself be absorbed into your life."

"When did you know you had moved beyond Ben?" he asked me softly, his face changing to a softer openness.

I blushed and felt a sad grin come on my face. "When I remembered the things about him that used to bug me royally. I guess it was just that he was no longer Saint Ben but became... well, like you said, right? He is a part of who I am but he was no longer an active part of my life."

"Just so. And you see now, do you not? I had to mourn my losses. I am not perfect, Katie. Such losses are sore weights upon my very soul. But I am also a realist and given time, I found a reason to reclaim the man I am."

"Sometimes I wonder what serendipity brought us together, Jack. I only stayed on the island this winter because I had been unable to write in all the time since Ben and Cody were killed. I wanted to write... but it wouldn't come out. Then I had this brilliant idea to come back to the island for the summer and face this place again. As the weeks passed, I realized I was no longer haunted by their ghosts. I wanted to stay here and find out what laid beyond. Just the thought of doing that, staying the winter, it brought the writer in me back to life."

"And I stayed because I thought solitude would allow me to gather the ghosts to me. But they never came... only their memories. I was saying goodbye and needed to do it in that way."

I asked him to tell me something about Sophie that he'd never told me. He told me about when he'd first seen her, how she'd taken his breath away with the delicacy of her beauty and youth... and how he'd wanted nothing so much as he'd wanted her for his wife. He described in affecting detail the dress and bonnet she was wearing. They were both blue, I remember the way he said the word 'blue' and could see in his eyes that he was seeing that color so clearly. It was the kind of minute detail that is an unbidden anchor of an abiding memory.

And then his eyes sharpened and he told me of the first time he'd ever seen me. He described in utter detail the green and rose bikini I'd been wearing, the funky brown and black striped straw hat that had been so at odds with the bikini. He even remembered the rose and black sarong I'd had tied around my waist. And my sunglasses.

"Jack, I sit here and look in your eyes and... I see no madness. I see only you, the man I love and admire. Was I really so wrong? Did I hurt you so badly? I think about all you told me and... I hurt you, didn't I? To trust me with your story and to then have me reject you... Oh, Jack."

"With all my heart and soul... I love you, Katie. I wish to build a life with you. Say you will cling to me now and ever after? I shall be a good husband and father. But even if you say no, I will still find the way to care for you as best I can."

"You still want me that way? A life with me?"

"I wish it above all things."

 We both cried and I tasted salty tears when I kissed him. 

But our kisses turned from somber to passion before long. They were long, slow, deep... they could have taken days. I believe the love we made in that first time was desperate, clingy, urgent. It was more about expunging for each other the weeks of turmoil. The next morning, he woke before me; I woke to find him leaning over me, kissing my tummy and whispering to his child. I asked him what he was saying. He said he'd made a promise to be a fair, devoted father.

The next few days, we spent more time holding on to each other than we did anything else.

And the next time when he asked me to marry him, I said, "Yes" very plainly so he would know in words as well as actions that I had already placed my life in with his.

I placed no conditions on my acceptance. But I did tell him that I was always going to fear the unknown that lay waiting to take him from me. He sensed what I meant; that without understanding how he'd been brought into our time, how could we not fear the process would reverse itself and he'd be taken back to his own time?

I know why this is now... that I feared that he'd just disappear one day and that I'd have to go on alone, not knowing his fate, only knowing that maybe it really was him buried in that grave next to Sophie rather than another him who'd stayed back there in 1805 and lived out the life Jack had been meant to live.

I only figured out gradually why I focused on this issue and honed it until it was a knife sharp enough to make me bleed.

It's because we never found the bodies.

It's because I never got to say goodbye.

It's because there's always been a part of me that wondered what really happened to Ben and Cody. To lose them as I did but only find the remnants of their boat smashed against the headland rocks in the wake of a summer squall that came out of nowhere... to never know if Ben had made a mistake or if he'd been hurt or if he'd been drinking or if they'd been frightened or if Ben's last action had been to try to save Cody. I know it had to have been. I do. I just wanted some kind of proof.

Not having their bodies to bury left me without anything tangible to say, "They're really gone."

And if Jack disappeared tomorrow, I'd be left in the same kind of quandary of never really knowing what happened to him. Never knowing if he was alive or dead. Here or there.

In the end, though, I understand what Jack meant when he said we don't owe our lives to the dead.

The water took all I ever had in life. It still has parts of myself out there. It took me a long time to ever travel upon the water again. I kept waiting for the dead I loved to reach up from their watery grave and take me with them. In the beginning, I had wished I'd been with them so that I could have died with them.

Jack told me he felt the same way about Sophie. That when he had first realized what had happened to him, that he wanted more than anything to have been with her and died with her.

A new letter came about two weeks after I said yes to Jack. It was a letter from that law firm in Boston. He'd written to them seeking answers. He might never have asked if it hadn't been so important to me. It touched me deeply.

We sat for a long time the night Josiah brought it by to Jack's place. The envelope sat on the table, unopened. Jack would touch it every so often. Finally, I put my hand over his.

"Maybe we aren't meant to know. Maybe there are some mysteries in life we're better off not having explained to us," I said to him.

"You have a right to know before you agree to throw your lot in with mine. I do not begrudge you that, Katie my dear. But I have often wondered this... would it change how you felt about me if you learned that I would not live out my natural born life here with you?"

"No. It wouldn't, would it? But it would be so hard to know I was going lose you that soon... I don't know how I'd bear it."

I sat sheltered within Jack's hold as he sailed us for the mainland about a month later. He had insisted I be bundled most securely against the still brisk weather. I adored the way he insisted I was nothing so much as this delicate woman who needed him to see to her every need all the while he grumbled if his dinner was ever late.

We accomplished three important things while on the mainland.

First, we found the justice of the peace. We were married within an hour of docking.

Then, we made it in plenty of time for my check up at the obstetrician's office. When we registered, Jack sniffed back tears to see his name as my next of kin and to see me carefully write my name as Katie Aubrey.

Jack's face when he got to listen to the heartbeat was a thing of pure joy. I have never seen a man as enthralled with a woman's pregnancy as he was.  We left there with armloads of books and reams of prescriptions we had to get filled for prenatal vitamins and other mundane necessities.  Jack started reading the first book even before the doctor came in to tell us the results of the lab work. The baby was healthy; we both took big sighs of relief. Just wait until the next visit, our doctor said. The sonogram, I whispered to Jack. He rubbed his hands together and declared he couldn't wait.

The third important task we accomplished was Jack signing the deed for the Bennett property. It was waiting for us at a local attorney's office. When we got there, the woman who had served as Jack's guide was the one who'd brought the paperwork from Boston and she'd waited around most of the day just to see Jack again. She told us she had wanted to reassure herself that the answers her firm had sent to Jack had not raised more questions.

That night, the three of us had dinner together. When Jack excused himself to go to the restroom, the woman asked me what we would do now.

"We've taken our leap of faith," I told her. "Into every life, there has to be a moment when you don't mind at all facing whatever will be, with no guarantees. That's reality. It's not such a bad thing."

"You understand that we are here if you ever need us?"

"We won't be staying on the island forever. Only the summers."

The next morning, we went by the post office and I mailed the box that held my novel's pages to my editor. We took with us the mail for the rest of our island cohorts. And then we headed back across the sea.

On the way back, Jack let me snuggle in against his back as he sat at the wheel. I laid my head on his shoulder and wrapped my arms around his waist.

"So now we know," he said to me.

You can't say fairer than that, can you?