Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Before ye go.”
Noah stopped with his hand on the great hall door. Breakfast had wound down, the last of the servants clearing the far tables, and he'd assumed the morning was done.
He turned. Ava was still at the table, her cup in both hands.
Esther had left ten minutes ago, already chattering to Caitlin about something she'd seen in the garden, her voice carrying down the corridor bright and easy — a sound he still hadn't entirely gotten used to. The hall felt quieter without her.
The morning light from the east window caught Ava's hair where it had come loose at her temple, and he had been trying not to notice that, or the way her dress sat across her shoulders, since she'd walked in an hour ago. He'd managed it with mixed success.
Her expression was one particular quality of someone who had rehearsed what they were about to say and was now committed to it regardless of consequences.
“Aye?” he said, “Esther and I are goin’ to the loch this mornin’. “We’d like ye to join us.”
The hall had mostly emptied, the last of the servants clearing platters from the far end.
Noah looked at Ava. Then at Esther, who was sitting very still beside her with her eyes fixed on the table and her hands folded in her lap with the careful precision of a child pretending not to care about the answer.
“I have reports to go through,” he said.
“Ye always have reports.”
“The eastern border accounts need checkin’,”
“Noah.” Ava set her cup down. “The accounts will be there when ye get back. The mornin’ willnae.” She looked at him steadily. “It’s a fine day. We’re goin’ to the loch. Ye could come with us, or ye could go read about the eastern border.”
He looked again at Esther, who was now studying her folded hands with intense focus.
“The loch,” he said.
“Aye.”
“But we’ll be back by noon.”
“By noon,” Ava agreed, with the equanimity of someone who had expected to negotiate and was pleased to find it unnecessary.
He told himself on the way up to change his boots that he was going for Esther’s sake.
Ava is right about the accounts, they’ll keep. This is about Esther.
He told himself this with some conviction, but the small flutters in his heart said there was more.
Esther was waiting in the courtyard when he came down, standing half behind Ava with her fingers curled into the fabric of Ava’s skirt.
The morning light was bright and clear after two days of rain, with the stones still damp underfoot, and the air carrying the distinctive freshness of a Highland morning following a storm.
He saw the moment Esther noticed him properly.
Her shoulders rose, and her chin dropped. She did the thing she always did, assembled herself together, making herself small and quiet, trying to take up less space.
Then she didn’t. She straightened up, raised her chin, and in a voice barely louder than the breeze, with just a slight catch at the start, she said,
“G-good mornin’, Uncle Noah.”
Noah went completely still. Esther had never so boldly looked him in the eyes and spoken so confidently. “Good mornin’, Esther,” he said. He kept his voice level with some effort. “Ye look well today.”
Her eyes searched his face with the wariness of someone waiting for the other shoe to drop, the correction, the impatience, the disappointment. When it didn’t come, something in her gradually unknotted.
“Ava s-says the loch has fish,” she offered.
“It does. Great fat ones that are very difficult to catch and very smug about it.”
Esther blinked. Then, carefully, the corners of her mouth moved. “Smug fish?”
“Extremely. They’ve had years of practice.” He held out his hand. “Shall we go see?”
She looked at his hand. Then, with the solemnity of someone making an important decision, she placed her small hand into it.
He didn’t look at Ava. He didn’t need to.
He could feel her watching from a couple of steps behind, and he could sense, without being able to quite identify it, the warmth and contentment of her attention, carefully kept in check.
He kept his eyes on the path ahead and walked with his niece toward the gate.
The loch was half a mile from the castle, past a stand of birch trees that had started to turn gold at the edges with the first signs of autumn.
Esther walked between them on the way out, her hand still loosely in his, her steps getting easier the farther they moved from the castle walls.
She pointed at things as they walked, including a cluster of mushrooms at the base of a birch.
"What are those?"
"Chanterelles." Noah crouched beside her. "See the color? Golden all the way through. They're safe to eat. Mrs. Ross uses them in the autumn stew."
Esther examined them with the focused intensity of someone filing information away for later.
She straightened, moved on, then stopped abruptly to crouch again — this time over a rock half-buried in the path.
She worked it loose with both hands, turned it over, and held it up to Noah with complete seriousness.
“It looks like a face,” she informed him.
He looked at the rock. It did, in fact, look somewhat like a face.
“Aye,” he said. “It does.”
She pocketed it. He watched her do this and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he was enjoying himself.
Ava walked on Esther’s other side and said almost nothing, which he was beginning to realize was a deliberate tactic. She’d set this up, and now she was giving it space to unfold.
He found he was grateful.
The loch suddenly spread out from the trees, wide, grey-blue, and still, with the far shore lost in the morning haze.
Esther stopped at the edge of the trees and looked at it with her mouth slightly open.
“It’s b-big,” she said.
“Aye,” Noah agreed. “Bigger than it looks on the map.”
“There’s a map of the loch?”
“There’s a map of everything. Come, I’ll show ye where the fish like to hide.”
He didn’t realize until he heard Ava’s quiet exhale behind him that he had made a promise about showing Esther something. That he had assumed, without thinking, that there would be a next time.
A map, a lesson, and a walk out here again in different weather.
They settled on a flat stretch of bank while Ava lay out what she’d apparently packed without mentioning. A cloth, bannocks, cold meat, two apples, and a small jar of something that turned out to be honey. Esther immediately became very interested in the honey.
“Ye planned this,” he said quietly enough that Esther, who had crouched at the water’s edge to look for the smug fish, wouldn’t hear.
“Aye.” Ava didn’t look up from the jar. “Was I wrong?”
He looked at Esther, who was now narrating something in a low voice to the surface of the water.
“Nay,” he said. “Ye weren’t wrong.”
Ava turned back to the jar of honey. Not quickly enough, he might have caught the corner of her mouth before she got it under control.
She pressed her lips together and said nothing, which was, he was beginning to understand, how she looked when she was pleased and had decided not to make anything of it.
They ate with Esther between them again, sitting cross-legged on the cloth, honey on her bannock and a look of profound contentment on her face that Noah was quite sure he hadn’t seen before. Not like this. Not this relaxed and unguarded.
She ate without watching him. Spoke without measuring the words first.
When she reached across him for the second apple, she said, “Excuse me,” routinely, the way a child does when they feel safe enough not to think about manners because manners have simply become part of how things are.
“She hasnae eaten like this before,” he said quietly to Ava.
“She eats well most mornings now.” Ava handed him a bannock. “Took about a week before she stopped leavin’ half her plate.”
“She was leavin’ half her plate?”
“She was worried about takin’ too much,” Ava said it simply, without making it into something he was supposed to feel guilty about. Just a fact, offered so he’d know. “She’s better now.”
He processed this in silence.
Later, Esther discovered that throwing small stones into the shallows caused the ripples to meet in interesting patterns. This completely occupied her.
Noah and Ava sat back and watched, and the silence between them had none of the charged quality of the study two nights ago.
It was, strangely, simply comfortable.
“She greeted me,” Noah said.
“She practiced for two days,” Ava said. “I wasnae supposed to tell ye that.”
Noah said nothing for a moment. He looked back at Esther. At her small, serious face, still fixed on the ripples, entirely unaware her secret had just been betrayed.
Something flickered across his face that he didn’t manage to hide before it showed. He turned away, facing the water again.
“I willnae tell her ye told me,” he said.
“She’d be mortified if ye did,” Ava agreed, with no remorse whatsoever.
He looked over at her. She was watching Esther with the gentle attention she always wore when she thought no one was looking at her, unguarded, warm, and completely genuine.
The morning sun had caught her hair where it had come loose at her temples.
“Ye’ve done somethin’ I couldnae,” he said. “In two years of tryin’.”
“Ye were tryin’ from the outside.” Ava’s eyes didn’t leave Esther. “She needed someone to come in. Ye made it possible for someone to come in. That’s nae nothin’, Noah.”
He considered arguing the distinction. He didn’t.
“Thank ye,” he said instead.
Ava turned and looked at him then, and her expression did something brief and complicated that he didn’t have a name for. Surprise, maybe, or something quieter than surprise.
Then she smiled. Not the careful, controlled smile she wore when navigating something. The real one, the kind that reached her eyes before she’d decided to let it.
He looked at it a moment longer than he should have. He had seen it twice before. That specific smile—unguarded and quick—and both times he had filed it away without questioning why.
He was examining it now, briefly and against his better judgment, and what he discovered was that he wanted to see it again. That he was already, unintentionally, thinking about what it would take.
He looked back at the water.
“Ye’re welcome,” she said. And then looked back at Esther.
Ava’s hands were still warm from the honey jar when Esther fell down.
Esther moved further along the bank, chasing the point where the stones transitioned to grass, and then her foot hit the wrong rock at the wrong angle, causing her to go sideways with a sound that wasn’t quite a cry.
Noah moved before Ava fully processed what she had seen. He covered the distance in four strides, dropped to one knee beside Esther, and had his hands on her in the same motion. Checking carefully, he ran a quick, practiced assessment over her arms, knees, and the twisted ankle.
“Are ye hurt?” His voice was low.
Esther’s face was scrunched tight against tears that hadn’t decided yet whether to fall. “M-me knee,” she managed.
“Let me see.” He pushed the hem of her skirt back gently, checked the scraped skin. “Nae deep. It’ll sting for a bit, and then it’ll feel better.” He sat back on his heel. “Ye’re a brave lass, aye?”
Esther looked at her knee, then at him, and then reached for him.
It was the smallest gesture. Both arms going up, the universal language of a child who needed to be held.
Ava watched Noah go very still for just a fraction of a second, the way a man does when something catches him off guard in a part of himself he’d thought was defended. Then he gathered her up.
Esther pressed her face into his neck and sniffled, and he said nothing, just held on.
She trusts him. She’s terrified of disappointin’ him, and she trusts him completely. She kens he’ll catch her.
Ava remained in place, a few feet back, and sensed a shift in her chest like the slow, unstoppable pull of a tide.
She had been telling herself a simple, honest story for weeks now.
She was here for Esther. She cared about Esther.
Every feeling she experienced in this castle—every warmth, confusion, and inconvenient awareness—could be seen as a woman who had found a child worth fighting for and a household she wanted to belong to.
It was a good story. It had held up well.
But watching Noah hold his niece in the morning sun by the edge of the loch, his jaw pressed against her hair, his shoulders relaxing from the tense posture they’d kept all the way from the castle.
Watching him be, without armor, simply a man who loved a small girl and hadn’t quite figured out how to show it until someone came and made it easier, changed it all.
Why are ye so determined?
The question she’d asked herself in Caitlin’s company surfaced again, quiet and unwelcome.
Ye’ve gone further than the job asks. Further than Esther needs.
For who?
She knew the answer. She had known it for longer than she was willing to look at it directly, which is why she had been so careful not to.
Ye’re nae built for this life, Ava Harris. Ye’re nae a lady. Ye cannae be what this requires. And wantin’ something doesnae make ye fit for it, no matter how much ye—
She stopped the thought there.
Esther pulled back from Noah’s shoulder to look at her scraped knee again, wearing the evaluating expression of a child assessing their own damage.
Noah said something low that Ava couldn’t hear, and Esther shook her head and then looked past his shoulder to where Ava stood.
“Ava,” she called. “Come see.”
Ava came. She crouched beside them both and looked at the knee with the appropriate gravity the situation required. She agreed that, yes, it was a very respectable scrape, and yes, it would probably leave a scar, but nothing too notable.
Esther found this satisfying.
Noah caught Ava’s eye over Esther’s head. His expression was unreadable, as it was when he hadn’t sorted out something in his mind yet.
He was close, crouched at the same level as her, close enough that she could see the line of his jaw and the breadth of his shoulders and the careful way his hands were still resting on Esther’s back.
She was aware of all of this in a way that was entirely inconvenient, given that she was supposed to be looking at a scraped knee.
“Right,” she said, in her most practical voice. “Shall we pack up and head back? I think this adventurer has earned Esther her afternoon rest.”
Esther, to Ava’s considerable relief, did not argue.