Page 60 of The Highland Ghost’s Virgin

Grisselle stood on the slope, one hand braced against the cold cliff face, her cloak dark with spray. She didn't look at the water; her eyes were fixed entirely on him.

He turned back to the sea.

She picked her way down the wet granite anyway, stopping a foot away. Neither of them spoke. He didn't tell her to go back, nor did he offer a quick deflection. He stood with his eyes on the water and let her share the silence.

"You've been down here every evening," she said.

"The tides run hard this time of year. The boats need watching."

She looked at the boats. They were pulled well up the strand, lashed tight, nowhere near the waterline. She didn't point that out. She looked back at the water instead, following the line of his gaze out to the dark shelf, and was quiet for a moment.

"What's out there?" she asked.

"Water."

"Alpin."

He felt it, the shift in her voice, the way she said his name when she was done with the surface of a conversation and wanted what was underneath.

His jaw set. He watched a swell build three hundred yards out, gather itself, break white against the point. "The anniversary is in four days."

She didn't ask which anniversary. He hadn't told her the date, but she'd been in this castle long enough to know that October did something to the air of it, that Greer went quieter and Isobel watched the door and Dougal found reasons to stay near the hall rather than the armory.

"Of his death," she said.

"Aye."

Another swell came. He tracked it from the deep water in, the way it built and moved and spent itself on the rocks.

"It's not just grief," Grisselle said. She said it carefully. "It's something else. Something you carry different from grief."

He didn't answer.

"The way you look at the water," she said. "It's not the way someone looks at a place they've lost something. It's the way someone looks at something they owe."

The wind came off the point hard, and she pulled her cloak tighter with one hand. He didn't look at her.

"He died getting me out," Alpin said. The words came flat, stripped of everything. Not a confession, just a fact he was too tired to keep folded up. "He got me to the surface. Got me to the rock at the point. Held me there until the timber drifted close enough to hold onto." He paused. "He dinnae make it back. The water was too cold by then. He'd been in it too long."

She said nothing.

"Me father went into the water two years after. Grief, the clan said. I say he went back looking for him." The scar on his neck went white in the cold air. "And I've stood on this shore for twenty years, and I have a keep that's standing and a clan that's fed and a sister who's safe, and every morning I wake up, and it's still a debt I havenae settled."

He stopped. He hadn't meant to say that much.

Grisselle's hand came out of her cloak pocket, and for a moment he thought she was going to touch him. She didn't. She wrapped both hands around the front edge of her cloak instead and held it against the wind.

"What would settling it look like?" she asked.

He looked at her then, sideways, just for a second. Her face was turned toward the water, her hair wrecked by the wind. He looked away.

"I daenae ken," he said, which was the most honest thing he'd said about it to anyone.

She nodded once, slowly, as though she'd expected that answer and it told her something useful regardless.

They stood there another minute, the water coming and going against the rocks, the sky pressing lower. He could feel her thinking beside him, working through it.

She didn't say anything; she looked at him instead, a long, even look.