Out of perpetual nothingness came the gentle sighs of a whispering sea.

Lowe's fingers twitched.

The tingling numbness in his hands melting away with a steady rush of life. Faintly aware of a soft sunny warmth washing over his face, and the splendid coziness of something woolish underneath him.

His haven of unconsciousness chased away by the playful lullaby of the low morning tide, distinctly less carnal than a midnight surge.

And judging by the tender caressing passes of the ocean waves, he guessed it to be about the 7th hour of the morning, little more or less.

Lowe slowly came to, awakened at last from a sleep that felt too much like death.

Breathing in the rich meadowy scent of laurel-grown hills, wood sage, and bramble leaf kissed by misty sea-air.

When had he forgotten how much he loved the world smelling so green?

Lowe's eyes sleepily batted open, warmed to a fiery chocolate shade in the dawning morning sunlight.

The window open and undressed to allow as much of the sea-air in as possible.

Carrying the scent of dried lavender and bergamot from his wardrobe closets and chest of drawers.

The sheer lace curtains and indigo drapery tied back in the same fashion the housekeeper, Mrs. Potts, had always knotted it for him as a boy, allowing him to meditate on the sea rather than his studies.

And watching the shadow and light play through the leaves of the Irish Oaks at his window, Lowe knew no trouble in the world.

Taken by a peace he hadn't felt since the first day he'd caught an ocean wave between his toes.

And everything felt as it should be.

Just as he'd always remembered his childhood home in Wales.

Was this heaven...or the other side of hell?

Being dragged under the Atlantic by the Titanic...Throwing himself off a cliff to save a young miss in a parallel universe...That barmy clock woman from that daffy crack shop who wouldn't stop wishing him a good day...was it all just a bygone nightmare now?

Had he really done it?

Had he managed to fix time by coming out right on his own side again?

For Pete's sake, why did it even matter how he'd done it, as long as he'd done it?

It was all just detail anyway.

He was home now.

And however it was that he found himself at home again, there'd be no bewailing out of him. Because it was loads better than dying, and that was that.

I'll sort it out when I'm up, he dismissed the world lazily.

Closing his eyes ever so contently.

"Good day, madam. Please forgive me for showing up unannounced. I regret that I have no calling card for my visit, but the matter was urgent, I'm afraid."

Lowe's eyes blinked open again, his reprieve interrupted by the murmurs of a gentleman somewhere off.

And then it dawned on him that the voices outside his door were not the sounds of a world behaving like it should when he wished to dismiss it.

He wasn't alone in this house.

"Please allow me to introduce myself. I am Hudson Evans, Marine Superintendent at White Star Line. Does this residence belong to Mr. Harold Lowe?"

"Aye, yes, it is," a woman's voice answered him, alot like the Lowes's caretaker, Mrs. Potts. "White Star, you say? Is something the matter, sir?"

"Well, I don't mean to alarm you, madame," Evans told her regretfully, sliding a telegram from his coat pocket. "I have here an officer's assignment from White Star to deliver to Mr. Lowe. However, there's been a disturbing development lately. No one seems to know where he is. He was due to sign off from his last voyage a week ago, but when the ship docked in Liverpool, he was nowhere to be found. He's missing...as if he's disappeared completely into thin air."

Mr. Evans?

Lowe's brow furrowed questionably.

As in the Mr. Evans he knew?

Shouldn't he be at his office in Liverpool, as the shipping season was booming this time of year?

What was this "disturbing development" that would send the marine superintendent to Barmouth ringing Lowe's door?

"I'm sorry I do not follow you," Mrs. Potts informed her unexpected guest. "Plain and simple talk is how we like it best here. If it's my Mr. Lowe you've come here to look for, I'm sorry to tell you that he isn't in. He's been out to sea for some years now. He rarely drops in."

"That is precisely what I was afraid you'd say," Mr. Evans replied gravely. "Then there hasn't been any sign of him...Oh dear...I'm afraid that...well, it appears that Mr. Lowe has...I cannot bear to inform you how much it grieves me to say that our Mr. Lowe...may be lost at sea."

"What?" Lowe whispered incredulously.

But Mrs. Potts beat him to it.

"I beg your pardon, sir? Missing?...What proof do you have of that, I'd like to know?" she demanded breathlessly. "It can't be, I tell you. My Mr. Lowe? There must be a misunderstanding. I'm telling you, it just doesn't feel right in my heart. I'd know something was wrong, if he was in trouble."

"I've searched everywhere for him, from Liverpool to Southhampton and now Barmouth," Mr. Evans continued worriedly. "I fear the worst may have happened on his last crossing. An accident of some kind at sea. It's not unheard of for crew to go overboard with no one noticing...Perhaps, he is..."

"No, don't bother yourself saying it, because I won't believe it," she shot back stubbornly to the gentleman, who remained remorseful and grave, wishing he could say otherwise. "It's a mistake, it is! Not Harold, that dear boy!"

What's this all about? Lowe wondered. Do they as well believe I died on Titanic?

Mr. Evans frowned, his eyes brimming with condolences for the elderly housekeeper.

"Forgive me, madame, I am upsetting you," he apologized softly. "He spoke so highly of you, Mr. Lowe did. I cannot imagine the burden I've put on you with this unhappy news. I shouldn't have come here like this."

Mrs. Potts dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, wailing ruefully, "Are you absolutely certain it's my Mr. Lowe who's missing? Do check again, sir, I beg you! There must be some mistake! My heart can't bear it! I may not be his mum, but it don't matter, because he was just the same a child of mine."

"I hoped to come to you first, before I informed his father," Mr. Evans told her. "Hoped against hope that you'd heard news of him, or at least received a letter from him about changing ships at the last moment."

And though it wasn't socially proper for a housekeeper to behave in such a way, Mrs. Potts fell back onto the sittee in the reception corridor, unable to stand for the thought of Harold gone mysteriously missing at sea.

"Forgive me," she whispered, fanning her round rosy cheeks. "I'm suddenly so dizzy."

"No, please do sit, madame. There's no need to make an apology," Evans told her. "We're all troubled for Mr. Lowe's sake. He was a good chap, and it's never easy when the young die young. We regret the loss of such a promising shipman."

"I beg you, sir, please do not say 'was', like you've given up all hope for him. Pray, don't ever speak about him like that, unless you can tell me you're absolutely sure that lost at sea my Mr. Lowe is."

"With all my heart, I want to believe I've made a mistake," Evans tried to give her hope. "Perhaps, he did change ships, and he never had a chance to inform us. You know how busy Mr. Lowe is at sea, now that he's been promoted to officer. And well deserved, it was."

Mrs. Potts buried her face in her handkerchief again. Her shoulders shaking with each hard hiccup of utter devastation.

"Oh, how I wish it wasn't true, that it was Harold only playing another game of his now," she wailed. "I wouldn't even be cross with him. Not in the least. So long as he came home alright in the end."

'Ah, the poor old girl...Somebody ought to tell her I'm not really dead', a smug-looking Lowe thought.

And what better messenger for the telling than he?

As might be expected, she'd beat him back to yesteryear for pulling one over her like this, but he rather missed dodging her bludgeonings anyway, if truth be told.

So how could he resist sauntering right down there after all these years-cool as chilled custard-and ask the old girl what she reckoned they'd have for breakfast, now that he was back home?

Slowly sitting up, Lowe worked the crook of his elbow out from under his pillow and freed himself from his bundled bedcovers.

Never remembering the quilts on his old bed to be so...weighty?

Because in all his 15 years of being at sea, sleeping on just about any plank or a hammock aboard pretty well every ship afloat – the different classes of ships– from the schooner to the square-rigged sailing vessel, and from that to steamships, and of all sizes-he never remembered waking up beaten so black-and-blue.

As if he'd been tangling in bed with a sack of potatoes all night, and the sack had won.

Blimey.

Had a pillow alone done that to his aching back?

He knew he slept like the dead in any which-way, thanks to being crammed into tiny sleeping spaces inside every-which ship, but nothing a few cracks here and there of his neck couldn't fix.

But this was supremely heinous.

What the blazes had he been up to all night?

"Ah, bloody and bugger," he moaned in a whisper, as he worked the tension this way and that out of his shoulders.

An anvil of a headache crushing down on him like a hangover.

And deciding that he must rise and sort this whole thing out, Lowe worked at the tangle of sheets and covers wrapped around his thigh.

"Not to worry, madame, I won't give up until I've found out exactly what's happened to him," Evans went on assuring the housekeeper. "If there is any information you can give me from Mr. Lowe's last letter, it would be most helpful."

"The last I heard from Mr. Lowe, he was aboard the...Oh, dear...He's been aboard a great many ships..." She tried her best to recall the name. "Which one was it that he told me last?"

"Yes?" Mr. Evans waited eagerly.

"I do believe it started with a T, if my memory serves me well."

"Yes, madame?" Mr. Evans attempted to assist her. "And it would likely end in an ic. All White Star Ships end with an ic."

"That's right," she remembered. "The Tropic, it was!"

"The Tropic?" Lowe and Mr. Evans repeated astonished at the same time.

"Are you sure it wasn't the...Why, I clearly remember assigning him to the Mersey as a training officer," Mr. Evans went on. "I know it for a fact."

"No, sir, it was the Tropic. I am absolutely certain of it."

"Rather peculiar," Mr. Evans thought it over. "When I checked in at the White Star, they too informed me that I was mistaken. They insisted that I'd assigned him to the Haverford as 4th officer. However, when I checked my record of Mr. Lowe signing on for the Mersey, I found it'd gone missing. My secretary had no knowledge of the record, which is absurd, because I am certain I remember every letter of it. So, I went back to White Star and demanded to know which story was truth. But when I finally received word back from the Mersey, the crew claimed they hadn't a Mr. Lowe either. Then I was told that he'd been assigned to the SS Tropic instead, but that was without rhyme or reason. I sounded the alarm at once that he might be lost at sea. No one had any clue where to look for him, and they seemed hardly bothered by it. May God damn them all, I say-Pardon, my language, Mrs. Potts. I'm still rather vexed by all this bureaucratic codswallop."

"But Mr. Lowe has dutifully served the White Star for years. How can they do nothing but shrug his name off so lackadaisy? How should I begin to write to his father? Am I to tell him that his son is missing or that he is dead?"

"There's something dodgy going on here, that's for certain, and I'm meaning to get to the bottom of it," Mr. Evans pondered.

But Lowe already knew that something had gone terribly and disastrously array upon his return to 1912.

It was no wonder they all believed he was missing.

Neither he nor White Star had their facts straight.

Because if this was indeed April of 1912, as he'd left it, then that would mean that White Star was looking for him aboard a ship he'd already retired from in 1911.

And it'd been some months now since he'd completed his service aboard the Mersey.

So, why would the Marine Superintendent go asking for him on past ships he'd already signed off?

It was Titanic he'd gone missing on.

Not the Tropic.

How had she never even been mentioned in the places Mr. Evans had checked for him?

As if Titanic had never before...

...existed?

And if that were truly the case, then which year exactly was it now? 1912 or 1911?

Had he retreated back into time further than he intended...or had he somehow erased Titanic completely?

There was something funny about the whole business.

Something a few sails short of a full mast, that was for sure.

But before Lowe could rise from bed and sort it all out, another ring at the door downstairs stopped him.

"Forgive me," Mrs. Potts excused herself, to which Mr. Evans graciously accepted her departure.

The housekeeper quickly dabbed her eyes and tried to pull herself together so she could keep performing her duties.

Straightening up like a soldier at the door, she pulled it open, and found yet another gentleman unasked for, standing at the threshold.

"Good morrow, madame, pardon my disturbance on your fine morning," he removed his top hat hurriedly for the bare minimal of a proper greeting. "But where the blooming is he?"

"I beg your pardon, sir?" Mrs. Potts shot back, under fire of such a sudden and curt salutation.

"That damned scoundrel Welshman!" the gentleman declared. "Lowe!"

"For God's sake, sir, what is the meaning of this!" Mr. Evans checked him, coming to Mrs. Potts's defense. "Is this any way to come calling at a respectable man's door?"

"Respectable?" the gentleman hissed spitefully. "What rubbish! That Mr. Harold Lowe is the dastardliest of all dastards, and I have come to make him answer for his lies!"

"And who are you to tarnish a good man's reputation?" Mr. Evans demanded.

"I, sir, am Mr. Edgar Cavendish!" the gentleman declared haughtily. "The cousin of Ms. Ivy Cavendish-Aston. And I have of late learned the most contemptible news that has made my poor virtuous cousin a victim of scandal! It has come to my notice that the damnable Mr. Lowe made my cousin a promise of marriage in the earliest years of her coming out. After which he took flight to sea like a knave and I have been hunting him down ever since!"

"What an outrageous accusation!" Mr. Evans objected. "Has your cousin any proof of an understanding between herself and Mr. Lowe?"

"How dare you!" Mr. Cavendish checked him. "Her honest word is proof enough!"

"How dare you come knocking at this door uninvited at a mournful hour like this," Mrs. Potts said. "The arrangement you speak of was called off years ago by Ms. Cavendish-Aston herself. How dare you spread rumors about Mr. Lowe turning his back on a promise he no longer has an obligation to keep."

"A mere maidservant dare speak to a gentleman this way?" Mr. Cavendish objected.

"You're lucky that's all you got from her, and haven't gotten anything worse from me," Mr. Evans warned him.

"Are you threatening me, sir?"

"Suppose I am? Mr. Harold Lowe is a dear friend of mine, and I won't allow you to soil his name as a White Star officer, when his unhappy fate has not yet been determined!"

"He's soiled it properly as it is!" Cavendish swore. "And I haven't the slightest doubt that he has led my cousin along while keeping a harem in his own house! As it so happens, I have noted on good authority that Mr. Lowe was seen only last night stowing away an umarried woman in his arms through the servant's door of this very house, in the wee hours of the morning! Is that the behavior of a so-called respectable officer?"

"You're mistaken, sir," Mrs. Potts answered firmly. "It is only me who looks after this house."

"That is stuff of nonsense!"

"You'd do well to cool your tone, sir," Mr. Evans warned him. "This is most ungentlemanly!"

"Then I gentlemanly request that you kindly inform Mr. Lowe that should he fail to marry my cousin as he promised before summer, he will rue the day I came to this door. My cousin has believed until now that she will marry him, and faithfully kept herself from other suitors. And she is all but past the ripe age for marrying now, no thanks to that rascal Mr. Lowe!"

"I assure you, sir, that is not the only reason why she has not been easily married off," Mrs. Potts muttered.

"Why, I'll set you back in your place yet," Cavendish threatened her, tightening his grip on his walking stick.

"Sir, I must ask you to leave at once, or I will be forced to escort you away," Evans warned him. "Mr. Lowe has gone missing at sea, presumed dead as we speak. And yet here you are harassing his housekeeper with odious heresay! It's most unseemly!"

"Missing at sea? Now that's a good one. I wouldn't count that scally dead until I've nailed him into a box myself!" Mr. Cavendish declared. "Might I suggest an alternative truth? Perhaps he isn't dead or lost at all. Perhaps that is the very crux of his ruse!"

"I beg your pardon!" Mrs. Potts couldn't help but oppose. "Do you mean to suggest that Mr. Lowe is only playing dead?"

"Can you imagine the scandal if Mr. Lowe really were so cowardly?" Mr. Cavendish declared. "And when you think you fully know a man! Perhaps he could think of no better way to abandon his promise of marriage."

And Mrs. Potts's face boiled like a lobster in silent fury.

"Like I said before," Mr. Evans spoke first, saving Mrs. Potts the temptation of making Mr. Cavendish regret the steaming teapot close at hand. "It is bad form to soil a good man's reputation by rumors alone, without a proper why and wherefore."

"There's no rumor about it," Mr. Cavendish persisted. "Mr. Lowe has made no secret that he wishes to avoid being wed. Why else would a man of 29 choose to stay at sea perpetually? I find it rather hard to believe that he wouldn't try to stage his own death, at least once."

"I must say, I can't blame him for it either," Mrs. Potts mumbled under her breath.

"My, what a bargain it must have been to take you on?" Mr. Cavendish remarked to her. "When my dear cousin is lady of this house, you will be the first thing to go!"

"Though not a moment sooner than you, sir!" Mr. Evans turned him around and hastily walked him away from the house. "I can speak fully for Mr. Lowe. He is a forever-gentleman and an exceptionally honorable man. Truly, a ship officer's reputation is worth as much as his service. If he has agreed to marriage, he will honor his pledge. A man like Mr. Lowe would surely never risk his career at sea by performing such a gambit. He's an honest man, even when he's honestly dead."

"Unhand me at once, sir! I will decide for myself if he's dead or not!" Mr. Cavendish ripped his shoulder away from Mr. Evans and marched back toward the house, calling out, "Lowe! Lowe, you swindler, come out and face me at once!"

And by that time, Lowe was simmering to get down to the sitting room and take him up on the dare of dropping him all the way back to the states where he belonged.

"Cavendish," he muttered under his breath. "That farthing-faced chit."

But just as he tugged at the entangled quilt wrapped around his ankles, he felt the quilt stubbornly tug itself back.

Lowe froze.

Chilled to the bone.

His eyes wide.

Recognizing the drowsy sigh of an unsolicited bedfellow yawning and stirring awake behind him.

Afraid to do it, but knowing no alternative, he slowly turned his head around.

Coming nose-to-nose with his tug-o-war opponent.

As nothing said Mondays like waking up to a woman he never remembered taking to bed with him.

"Ms. Amberflaw?"