Page 74 of Owned by the Scarred Laird

“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.

21

The study had not changed. Same desk, same cold stone, same smell of tallow and old leather. He closed the door behind him and told himself that was enough.

He sat down, picked up the mill steward’s letter about the eastern wall repair, and read the first line three times without retaining a word of it. He set it down, added a block of peat to the fire, and stayed crouched in front of the grate longer than the task required, watching it catch.

Her laugh kept coming back to him—the wool blanket. The plum jar was sitting crooked in the corner of the basket. The way her whole face had changed when he had sat down without objecting, before she had had the chance to hide it.

Nay one has done this before.

He’d said that aloud to her. He had not meant to, same as he had not meant to say the rest of it, the field, the grass, the only place he’d ever felt good, before he caught himself and shut the door on it.

He picked the letter back up. Read the first line a fourth time.

‘It was the only place I felt good.’

The one place his father had never bothered to walk to. Edward had not been worth the trouble. That had been the one mercy of it.

He pressed the heel of his hand flat against his chest and stared at the ceiling instead of the letter.

The knock, when it finally came, was unmistakably Mrs. Donnan’s. Two measured, solid strikes, neither tentative nor presumptuous.

“Come.”

She was carrying a fresh batch of tallow candles. The ones resting on the desk had burned dangerously low without his noticing.