He couldn’t help recalling Edith Keeler’s words to him tonight: Perhaps your friends aren’t coming. To this point, although he had thought about it, he had been unable to truly countenance such a prospect. Now, he had no choice but to take into account that he had been trapped in the past for a whole year.
A year in my life, he thought, but not necessarily a year in Jim’s and Spock’s lives. Though it bedeviled him to contemplate the realities and possibilities of time travel, it seemed plausible that he could have one day journeyed from 2267 to 1930, and then one week later in 2267, Jim and Spock could arrive in 1931 to bring him back home. Yet, it also felt unlikely, more like rationalization than reasoning, like a lie he told himself to keep from going mad. For even as he waited to return home, even as he peppered newspapers around the globe with signposts pointing to his location in time and space, even as he held on tightly to his certainty of his eventual rescue, the notion of being trapped here for the rest of his days haunted him.
It took more than an hour for McCoy to fall asleep. When at last he did, he slept fitfully, beset by the same foggy, partially glimpsed images that so often had invaded his slumber ever since his arrival here. Tonight, other faces joined his nightmares, faces he had no trouble distinguishing. All of them belonged to his daughter: as a baby, as a girl, as a young woman.
In the morning, exhausted and on edge, McCoy began his second year living in Earth’s past.