Chapter 2 #2
For a moment—just a moment—I let myself remember. The flutter of movement in my own belly, four years past. The fierce, terrifying love I’d felt for a child I would never meet. The blood and the cramping and the emptiness that followed, vast as the sea.
My arms tightened around Hamish, and I pressed my lips to the downy crown of his head, breathing in his milky, innocent scent.
“Ye’ve a gift with bairns,” Meghan said softly. “He never settles so fast for anyone but me.”
I handed him back before the ache could swallow me whole. “He knows I mean him no harm. Children sense these things.”
“Aye, they do.” Meghan’s eyes were kind—too kind. She knew my story, everyone did, but she’d never looked at me with anything but gratitude. “Thank ye, mistress. I dinna know what we’d do without ye.”
The words were genuine, uncomplicated by the weight of my past. Here, in this small cottage with a sick baby and a worried mother, I was simply the healer.
It was enough. It had to be enough.
The walk back to the keep was colder, the wind biting through my cloak. I pulled it tighter and bent my head against the gusts, my thoughts drifting despite my best efforts to keep them leashed.
I wondered sometimes what my life might have been if I’d never met Alasdair MacKenzie. If I’d stayed at Bronmuir, married some local man, borne his children. Would I have been happy? Or would I have spent my life wondering what lay beyond the walls of duty and expectation?
Memory took hold as I remembered the girl I’d been before him. Seventeen and reckless, climbing the cliffs because someone said I couldn’t, laughing loud enough to scandalize the elders, believing with all my foolish heart that love was something that happened to people like me.
That girl would have been appalled by what I’d become—so careful, so guarded, and so determined never to want anything I couldn’t have.
But that girl had also been na?ve enough to believe Alasdair’s pretty lies, to follow him to Inverness with nothing but the clothes on her back and the certainty that he would keep his promises.
She’d learned. We both had.
There was no point in such thoughts. I’d made my choice, and I’d paid for it in every way that mattered.
But Gods, I was tired of paying.
Later, when the evening meal was done, and the hall had settled into quieter conversation, I slipped away to the stillroom. The brazier had burned low, but I stoked it back to life and lit the candles, surrounding myself with the scent of beeswax and herbs.
This was my place. My refuge.
I pulled out my journal—a small leather-bound book Connor had given me last Candlemas, likely at Kate’s suggestion—and opened it to a fresh page. I didn’t write often, but tonight the words came with unexpected force.
I am tired of being brave. Tired of pretending the whispers don’t wound me, that the careful distance doesn’t ache.
I watch Connor with Kate, Brodie with Maddie, and I see what I’ll never have—not because I don’t deserve it, though God knows the clan thinks I don’t, but because I’m too afraid to reach for it again.
Alasdair broke something in me. Not my heart—that healed, eventually, in the way bones heal crooked when they’re not set right. But my faith. My ability to believe that someone might stay, might choose me, might love me without shame or secrets or conditions.
I miss who I used to be. The girl who climbed trees and laughed too loud and believed the world was full of possibility. I miss believing that love was real, not just a pretty lie we tell ourselves to make the loneliness bearable.
But sometimes, in the quiet moments between sleeping and waking, I imagine it. A hand reaching for mine in the darkness. A voice that says my name like it matters. Skin against skin, tender instead of taking.
I push the thoughts away as soon as they come. They’re dangerous, these dreams. They make me want things I cannot have.
But Gods help me, I want them anyway.
I closed the journal and tucked it back into its hiding place behind the shelf of dried mint. Then, I doused the candles and left the stillroom, walking back through the darkened corridors to my small chamber in the north tower.
Sleep came fitfully, my dreams full of the wind and waves and the sound of someone calling my name from very far away.
When I woke, the snow had stopped, but the wind still howled around the tower, rattling the shutters. I dressed quickly in the gray light of dawn, layering my warmest stockings beneath my skirts, wrapping myself in my wool cloak.
The keep was quiet, but my thoughts were not. Malcolm MacKenzie was coming. The Candlemas preparations would begin in earnest. And I would have to smile and pretend that none of it touched me while he looked over the lasses, choosing his bride, binding our clans together, healing old wounds.
I needed the sea. Needed the wild, empty stretch of beach where no one watched me with pity or judgment. Where I could breathe without feeling the weight of their expectations pressing against my ribs.
I grabbed my gathering basket from its hook—Moira’s stores were low, and we’d need kelp for the poultices—and slipped out through the kitchen, past the banked fires and sleeping scullery maids.
The keep was quiet in the hours before dawn, the only sounds the crack and settle of cooling stone and the distant barking of the hounds in the kennels.
The eastern gate was guarded by young Callum, who nodded me through without question. Everyone knew I went walking at odd hours. They probably thought I was touched, but at least they’d learned to leave me to it.
The path down to the shore was treacherous with ice, and I picked my way carefully, my breath clouding in the frigid air. The basket bumped against my hip with each step, a reminder of purpose.
Useful. I would be useful and dutiful, and the perfect laird’s sister.
The beach opened before me, gray and wind-scoured, the surf pounding against the rocks with a force that sent spray high into the air.
I breathed in the salt and cold, feeling something in my chest loosen slightly.
Here, with only the sea and the sky and the wheeling gulls for company, I could pretend I was someone else. Someone whole.
The waves rushed in and retreated, leaving lace patterns on the dark sand. I walked along the edge of the shore, stepping back when the water rushed forward, gathering what kelp the storm had tossed up, letting the rhythm of the work quiet my mind.
Then I saw him.
A shape on the sand, dark against the pale stones. At first I thought it was driftwood, or perhaps a seal washed up by the storm. But as I drew closer, I realized it was a man—sprawled facedown at the water’s edge, his clothes strange and sodden, his hand still clutching the hilt of a sword.
The sea had brought me something after all.
I dropped my basket and ran.