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deaths made her feel fifty. Six years ago, she believed she’d been sent back to the twenty-first century for a reason. At least that was the pep talk she gave herself late at night when her longing for the man she’d left in the third century made it impossible to breathe. But now she was painfully aware that if she had stayed in Carthage and seen this virus put to bed, that mother on the morgue slab would be home hugging her baby tonight.
    In the tomblike darkness, fingers of cold snaked through the vehicle’s broken window seals. A guilty shudder ripped through Lisbeth’s exhausted body. Despite her best efforts, the past had caught up with the future.
    Lisbeth grabbed the sanitizer out of the console and scrubbed her hands. Even though she’d showered and disposed of her scrubs before she left the hospital, she reeked of failure.
    Determined not to be undone by the pain, she squirted an extra glob of sanitizer into her hand and glanced at her cell phone: 3:00 a.m. If she was lucky, she’d have time to see Maggie before the CDC’s chartered jet arrived. Prompt action by public health officials was essential in addressing emerging outbreaks. The governmental investigators would expect every local infectious disease specialist to be front and center until they’d contained the danger.
    Lisbeth yanked the phone from the charger and dragged herself from the car.
    The elevator dinged. She trudged the dingy apartment corridor. A glass of milk and a plate of homemade cookies waited on the welcome mat. She bent to read a note written in red crayon.
Dear Santa,
I want my daddy.
Maggie
    Beneath her five-year-old daughter’s signature were three red stick figures. A mom. A dad. And, in between them, a child with outstretched arms.
    Yearning clenched Lisbeth’s empty belly. She and Papa had done their best to piece together a family for Maggie. Grateful as she was for Papa’s help, returning to this century meant Maggie would never know her own incredible father. Santa could more easily give her daughter the moon.
    Lisbeth folded the paper and stuffed it, along with her regret, into her pocket. She scooped up the cookies, drank the milk, then slid the key into the front door lock.
    Inside the quiet apartment, oatmeal and cinnamon lingered in the air. Lisbeth inhaled deeply, letting the sweet scent carry her back to the makeshift ICU she’d thrown together in Cyprian’s third-century villa and what it’d been like awakening to Cyprian standing over her, a steaming mug of warm wine laced with spices in his outstretched hand. She’d begun falling in love that morning, and nothing had been the same since.
    Lisbeth quietly dropped her keys on the kitchen table and draped her white coat over a chair.
    Papa snored on the couch, an afghan snugged tightly beneath his chin. White lights twinkled on the spindly spruce leaning against the TV. Under the tree was Maggie’s new Little Mermaid doll. Lisbeth was relieved her father had remembered her instructions to get the red-headed mermaid out of the closet.
    “Papa?” She pressed two fingers into his sinewy shoulders.
    He roused with a start and opened one eye. “Home already?”
    Life with her father had been like growing up with Indiana Jones. She was only five years old when Mama fell through the time portal at the Cave of the Swimmers and disappeared from their lives. For the next thirteen years, she and Papa traveled the world, leapfrogging from one archaeological dig to another. Roman baths in England. A long-buried, first-century villa in Artena. A crumbling, midempire amphitheater in northern Libya. They’d probably still be digging together if Papa hadn’t insisted she go to school in the States and become a doctor . . . to be more like Mama. The four years she spent in college had been her first experience of staying in one place longer than a digging season. That’s when she realized that while Papa loved every moment of their vagabond travels, she longed for a