A week after we learned that Downton Abbeyactor Dan Stevens may not return for the series’ fourth season, the period drama’s creator, Julian Fellowes, has spoken out about the potential casting shake-up and the idea of scripting a post-Stevens era.

“Sometimes actors feel they want to move on,” Fellowes recently told Entertainment Weekly. “If they don’t want to come back, there’s nothing we can do.” It has been reported that Stevens, who plays Lady Mary’s handsome fiancé, Matthew Crawley, will appear only in the first episode of the fourth season before departing Downton to pursue other endeavors. The development is especially troubling considering that in the upcoming third-season premiere, which has already been broadcast in the U.K.—vague spoiler alert!—Lady Mary weds Matthew. During Fellowes’s conversation with E.W., he reveals that he “can’t see” himself recasting the character and has already figured out how to gloss over Matthew’s potential departure.

“I think [the Crawleys will] go on jogging quite happily through the 20s,” explained Fellowes. “You know there’s always a little time jump [between seasons]. We did two years between [seasons] 1 and 2 because we only wanted to spend two years in the war so we had to start halfway through the war. Now we don’t have those imperatives. Sometimes you just have a few months so that there can be a few things that have happened in between that you can refer to, and have a slightly back-story for one or another character, but we don’t have the same imperative to leap forward.”

Whether or not Matthew’s departure takes place on-camera, it seems as though there are only a few possible explanations for his exit from Downton: To wit: 1) Matthew dies a sudden, dramatic death (and Lady Mary mourns him in the most stylish dark-colored 20s fashions). 2) Matthew goes to war or pursues a mysterious “business endeavor” overseas. 3) Matthew and Lady Mary break up again (yawn). 4) Matthew is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, Bates-style. 5) Mary wakes up in bed with a very alive Kemal Pamuk and realizes that her engagement and marriage to Matthew has all been an extraordinarily well-fleshed-out dream.

If Dan Stevens does leave, how would you like to see the series write off his character?