Chapter 20 #2
He shifted his weight onto his elbows, lowered his shoulders onto his back, and stared straight up at the blue sky.
After a quiet moment, Chloe followed his lead, lowering herself down onto the grass.
They lay stretched out on either side of the sleeping child, watching the heavy white clouds drift slowly overhead.
“That one,” she said softly, pointing a finger after a long while.
“Which one?”
“The large, heavy one. Just to the left of center.”
A brief pause settled over them. “It’s a cloud,” he muttered flatly.
“It’s a boot,” she corrected, her tone playful. “Look closely at the heel of it.”
He looked. She could feel him looking beside her, could track the exact silent second his mind mapped the shape she meant.
“It’s a hound,” he said.
“It is absolutely nae a hound.”
“The long part at the front is the snout.”
“The long part is the leather leg of the boot.”
“Boots daenae have legs.”
“This one does,” she insisted, turning her head slightly toward him. “It is a proper Highland boot, and they are always made very tall.”
The sound that rumbled out of his chest was low, brief, and completely unbidden, and it was a real, true laugh.
She felt it more than she actually heard it, the slight, vibrating shake of it traveling through the fabric of the wool blanket between them.
She kept her eyes locked firmly on the drifting cloud.
She did not dare look at him. She was deeply afraid of what her own face might reveal if she turned to look at his smile.
“The next one?” he murmured after a quiet moment.
“A sheep,” she said instantly.
“Aye,” he agreed, his voice rough and warm. “That one actually is.”
Chloe laughed, a bright sound in the quiet air. He said nothing more, but she felt the deep, radiant warmth of him lying beside her.
Looking at the sky, she understood with absolute clarity that this, this exact moment right here, lying on a blanket in a sunlit meadow with a sleeping babe between them and a cloud that was either a boot or a hound, was costing him something immense.
It was costing him in the way that truly good things cost, when you have spent your entire life completely unused to them.
She kept her eyes on the pale blue sky.
She did not say a single word about it. She simply lay there in the grass and let the summer afternoon be exactly what it was.
The cloud overhead parted at the edges. It lost its argument against the sky, dissolving into something shapeless and indeterminate.
“There was a place,” Edward said. The words cut through the quiet. He had not decided to say them. They came from somewhere deep below the level of decision, pulled out by the warmth of the afternoon and the steady, breathing weight of William sleeping between them.
“A field,” he said, keeping his eyes on the sky. “Smaller than this. Further from the castle.” He swallowed, his throat dry. “I used to go there when I needed to get away from me father, when things were…” He stopped. Chose differently. “When I needed to be somewhere else.”
The meadow held the words. Beside him, Chloe said nothing. She did not reach for the silence or try to fill it. She simply lay there and let it exist.
“The grass was longer there,” he said, his voice dropping lower. “In the summer, ye could lie flat, and the whole world disappeared. Nothin’ above ye but the sky.” A heavy pause stretched between them, thick with the scent of crushed heather. “It was the only place I could feel good. Safe.”
His jaw closed. A sudden, sharp spike of adrenaline hit him as he realized what he had been about to say. The words ‘the only place he could not find me’ sat right at the back of his teeth where they had no business being.
He looked at the sky and shook his head.
“It is nothin’ worth rememberin’,” he said.
His voice came out level. That was something.
“That’s twice now,” Chloe said.
He went still. “Twice what?”
“Twice ye’ve started tellin’ me somethin’ and stopped halfway through, like someone put a hand over yer mouth.”
“There was nothin’ left to tell.”
“There’s a whole field ye just described to me in more detail than most men give their own weddin’ day.” She kept her eyes on the sky, just as he had his. “I am nae askin’ ye to finish it. I am only sayin’ I noticed.”
He kept his eyes up for one more moment, then rolled to his side and pushed himself upright, brushing the grass from his palms with more thoroughness than was necessary.
The meadow came back into sharp focus. The wildflowers, the wicker basket, the hills dark beyond the tree line, and the castle in the distance with its flags just visible above the rise.
He stood. Brushed his hands again.
Behind him, the silence changed quality. He did not turn to look at her. He did not need to. He could feel her watching him.
That was the problem. That was precisely the problem.
“We should go back,” he said to the hills. “Before William wakes and decides he is unhappy about it.”
He turned and crouched beside the sleeping child. He slid one large hand beneath the boy’s head and the other beneath his back, lifting him in smooth, careful motion. William stirred, made a small, indignant sound, and then settled against Edward’s chest.
Edward straightened.
Chloe was sitting up now. She had her knees drawn tightly to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. She was watching him.
He looked at William instead. He focused on the small creased face against his shoulder and the dark lashes.
“The blanket,” he said, because he needed to say something to break the friction.
Chloe unfolded from the ground. She shook the blanket out with two efficient movements, the wool snapping briefly in the breeze, and folded it over her arm. She picked up the basket. She did all of it without a word and without hurry, and she did not look at him, which was its own kind of answer.
They started back across the meadow.
William’s breath was warm and even against his neck.
The afternoon had gone softer, the light beginning its long, slow lean toward evening, the wildflowers moving in the wind on either side of the path.
It should have been easy to walk through.
It had been easy an hour ago, when he had been lying on his back, counting clouds and saying things he had never said to anyone, and apparently deciding that was fine.
It had been fine. That was the problem. It had felt entirely, dangerously fine.
He had spent fourteen years understanding the specific architecture of his own survival: which doors to keep shut, which rooms to avoid entering, and which questions to ignore without pausing.
He knew its geography with precision. He had built it himself, stone by stone, in the years after the room, his father, and the event he refused to think about directly, only around.
One afternoon in a meadow should not have been sufficient to misplace any of that.
He adjusted William against his shoulder.
Chloe walked right beside him, the basket over one arm, her eyes fixed on the path ahead.
She was close enough that the sleeve of her dress occasionally brushed his bare arm.
The rough linen dragged against his skin.
She did not move away from it. Neither did he.
Her fingers moved first, barely, just enough to slide against his. His hand turned to let her, an answer he had not examined before giving it. By the time they reached the stile, her hand had settled fully into his, and it stayed there.
At the gate, she slipped free just long enough to hold it open, then took his hand straight back the moment they were through.
Neither of them said a word about any of it. They crossed the last stretch of open ground with her arm looped through his free one, her hand warm in his, the castle rising grey ahead of them in the early evening light.
The castle appeared before them in the early evening light. He looked at the gray keep and felt the familiar, closing sensation of walls returning. The known weight of stone, duty, and everything that made up his real life settled back into its proper place around him.
He should have felt relief.
He looked back at the gate they had just come through.
The meadow was already out of sight behind the rise, the blanket, the flowers, the place where he had lain on his back, and the afternoon had made him careless.
His wife had arranged all of it, not because she was required to, but because she had wanted to give him something and had asked nothing in return.
He walked on. He did not look back again.