No good would come from lashing out at her.
The woman he had known and promised to love, cherish, honor, worship . . .
Thatwoman?
She had vanished as surely as if she had never been.
She existed only as a figment of memory. A wisp of thought and a kaleidoscope of color.
The irony.
He had too much of memory.
She . . . too little.
And now they faced a future not unlike the ocean before them—
A gray expanse extending to the horizon, the crisscrossing lines warning the wise to venture no further into the deep.
What if Jamie—hisJamie—truly was dead after all?
14
Eilidh was delighted by two arrivals the following morning.
The first was Mrs. McKay from the nearby village—a rosy-cheeked, white-haired widow who was only too happy to act as a chaperone.
The second was a letter from Simon, who had received her direction from the Gillespies before they left.
I find the days long and tedious without you, Miss Fyffe, he wrote.
She smiled. Here was a true gentleman—one who respected the formalities of gentility and did not give way to overly familiar terms of address without permission.
The rest of his letter was similarly soothing.
Mother sends her regards. She hopes that you will return soon, as summer is always the most glorious time of year. Reverend Smith has been taken with gout again, and so I find myself preaching more. With each sermon, I imagine you here, in the pews, looking up at me in your earnest way. It is easy to envision our life together.
Ah, Simon.
Itwaseasy to envision their life together.
He would continue as curate and replace Reverend Smith as vicar when the man retired in a few years. Eilidh would be a diligent wife, visiting the poor and assisting Simon with his sermons, all the while tending to their own children and household.
It was the future her parents had wanted for her—respectable, genteel, secure.
She ached for the peace of such a life.
A life that existed as placidly as an English lake in summer.
The life of a lady.
Master MacTavish—she steadfastly refused to call him Kieran, even in her mind—was more akin to a Scottish loch in the midst of a winter squall: tantalizing in its wild beauty but utterly terrifying.
As for the staggering revelations from the day before . . .
She had lain awake half the night, thoughts spooling obsessively in her head.
Whyhadshe married Kieran MacTavish on a summery December day in Sydney? Had she truly loved him, as the Brotherhood and MacTavish himself insisted?
