Chapter 22 #2
“Fathers,” Edward said, the words slipping past his teeth before he could call them back.
His voice was lower than the sea, gravel-rough and harsh.
“They have a particular way of lookin’ at a child.
As though we are nothin’ but clay to be broken and rebuilt until we fit the shape of their own failures. ”
Chloe’s gaze softened, her eyes tracking the rigid line of his jaw, the hard, defensive set of his shoulders that had returned the instant she began to speak. “Edward?”
He looked out over her head, his eyes fixing on the white line of the horizon where the dark clouds were beginning to bruise the sky.
“There was a field,” he said, his voice stumbling over the terrain of the sentence, the rhythm awkward and unpracticed.
“The one we went to yesterday. That was where I usually hid from me father. He believed… He had a firm conviction that pain was the only true language a boy could understand. The only tool sharp enough to shape a son into a laird.”
The words felt massive and threatening, like loose boulders shifting on a steep hill. He felt cold sweat break along his hairline. He was about to tell her. He was about to open the door he had spent his entire adulthood shielding with iron bars.
His breath hitched. Words trapped behind his teeth, as the sudden, terrifying realization of how close he was to the edge made his heart pound against his ribs. He could not do it. He could not hand her the key to the cellar.
Chloe reached up. Her movement was deliberate, unhurried, giving him every opportunity to pull back, but he stayed perfectly still as her fingertips brushed the rough wool of his lapel. She did not press for the rest of the story. She did not ask him to finish the broken line.
“Some memories…” she said, her voice a quiet anchor against the wind.
“Deserve nothin’ more than to be left behind in the dirt, Edward.
We think we must carry them because they made us, but they only remain with us for as long as we keep our hands clenched around them.
People, even the ones who hurt us, only stay in the room for as long as we refuse to close the door. ”
He looked down at her face, his throat tight, his chest burning with a truth that was far more terrible than anything she had imagined.
What he could not tell her was that it was not his father’s cruel memory that haunted the dark corners of his study. It was not the leather strap, or the long hours in the cold, or the biting shame of an eleven-year-old boy left alone in the dark.
It was the moment he had ended it.
He could still feel the specific, heavy balance of the iron in his palms. He could still hear the wet, heavy thud of it striking the side of his father’s head in the middle of the night, the sudden, terrible silence that had taken the room afterward, and the way the old man’s eyes had stayed wide and staring at the ceiling while the blood pooled black in the rushes.
He had told no one what happened in that room, and no one had asked too closely. The old Laird had been feared by his own household long before Edward ever raised a hand to him, and not a soul under that roof seemed inclined to mourn him properly.
The truth about that day spread anyway in a keep full of servants who'd heard the old Laird's temper through the walls for years, unconfirmed and unkillable, and Edward took the seat behind the desk the very next morning without a single tear.
That was the blood at the foundation of the architecture. That was the monster that lived behind the closed door.
He looked at Chloe now. At the clear, honest light in her eyes, the gentle way her fingers rested against his chest, the absolute trust she had given him when she let him lift her from the sand.
He knew, with a sickening, absolute certainty, that he could never bear the thought of those eyes looking at him differently.
If she knew what lay beneath the surface, the warmth at the edge of his world would vanish, replaced by the same cold horror he sees every time he looks too closely into his own mirror.
He stepped back, his hands dropping from her waist, his fingers curling into tight, bloodless fists at his sides.
“The wind is risin’,” he said, his voice level, flat, and completely devoid of the heat that had just burned through him. “The horses will be gettin’ restless on the ridge.”
Chloe looked at his hands, then back to his face, her expression quiet and unhurried. She did not look hurt this time.
“Aye,” she said softly, pulling her cloak tighter around her throat. The wind caught a loose strand of her hair and dragged it across her mouth.
Edward reached up before he’d decided to. He tucked the strand back behind her ear, his knuckles grazing her cold cheek, and did not immediately take his hand away.
She went still under it. His fingers found the loosened clasp at her throat instead—her cloak had come half undone in the fall—and he did up the button himself, slow and deliberate, his eyes on his own hands rather than her face.
“There,” he said, low.
Neither of them moved. The wind tore at both of them, and neither one minded it.
Then she came up on her toes, and he met her the rest of the way. The kiss was unhurried, nothing like the near-thing in the meadow, nothing stolen or interrupted. A choice, made slowly, by both of them, the sea roaring past, and neither one in any hurry to stop it.
He was the one who finally drew back, his forehead resting briefly against hers, his breath uneven.
“We should nae keep them waitin’,” he said.
She almost laughed. “Ye said that already.”
“Aye.” He did not move. “I am workin’ up to meanin’ it.”