“No! Ye are both—Jamie and Eilidh. A whole person—the woman I love!”
“Am I?” Her eyebrows flew upward. “Is the woman you love still your true love if the life that made her that person no longer exists?”
“Pardon?” He flinched, her question akin to cold water being flicked in his face. “What do ye mean?”
“Just that. Ye loved me as Jamie, as a woman who had cast off society’s strictures and brashly laid out a new future for herself. Forces shaped her, cajoled and molded her into that person. But I don’t remember any of those forces—the sea, the people, the man Jamie loved. Instead, I am the same woman shaped bydifferentforces.” She tapped a finger to her breastbone. “I am a woman who has experienced terrible fear and loss without yourself and the rest of the Brotherhood as protectors. I am the woman you loved, broken and battered and utterly altered.”
Something harsh lodged in his throat. It tasted of futility and loss.
“I disagree,” he said. “Ye keep acting like Eilidh and Jamie are two different people. You’ve been at this for weeks now. But why? Why do ye persist with this dichotomy?”
“Because Jamie did things I would never have done! And tomorrow I may learn, definitively, that Jamie was a killer! She did all these things, leaving me—the memory-less woman I am now—to face the consequences for her behavior!”
He said nothing more.
She was not wrong.
But then, neither was he.
She pressed her fingertips to her forehead. “Perhaps you and I were once right together.” She shook her head. “But I cannot say that anymore.”
“And Simon the Sassenach is right for ye?! You dinnae even trust him enough to tell him the entire truth of us. The man isnae capable of understanding your complexity or your past—all the days and hours of living that have brought you tonow.”
But even as he said the words, Kieran doubted them.
The look in Simon’s face in the parterre garden rose in his mind. The expression of a man who adored a woman and would do right by her.
“EvenIdon’t understand who I am now,” she shot back, answering his thoughts. “How can ye fault Simon in this?”
“Ye know who ye are, Eilidh. Ye always have.”
She paused, wrapping her arms around her waist. “What do ye mean?”
“Just this—the wishes of our hearts make us who we are. In short, we are what we want. So I ask ye—what do ye want? Ye asked me what I envisioned for our future, and I told ye. But if ye remove the specter of memory from the equation, what do you envision for yourself?”
“Why do ye ask me this?” She threw her hands up. “I cannot see past the ‘specter of memory,’ as you put it. It’s a fog, clouding everything. I feel like this choice ye are presenting me—yourself or Simon—is utterly hypothetical. The most likely scenario, with or without my memories returning, is that I hang for blowing upThe Minerva.Thatis the future facing me.”
She stared at a point beyond his shoulder, looking so lost, so alone.
His arms ached with the lack of her.
Silence.
“And so . . . I don’t know what I want,” she whispered, voice almost . . . disbelieving. “I cannot choose between a future with yourself or one with Simon. It’s all too clouded.”
Kieran drank her in.
She was so agonizingly beautiful.
His wife.
The choice of his heart.
And even now, even as Eilidh, she was still the one he wanted at his side.
But . . .
He knew what he needed to do.
