Leah froze and stepped back, pushing out of his arms.
They stared at one another for several long heartbeats.
“Go home, Fox.” She walked around him.
Behind him, the door closed with a quiet click that sounded suspiciously like the death knell of their marriage.
“Ye need taebathe yourself.” Leah shook Malcolm’s shoulder.
Her brother raised his head off the cluttered mess of his desk, fixing her with a bleary gaze, eyes bloodshot, hair unwashed, whiskers long and matted.
He was the ravages of grief personified.
“Aileen wouldn’t want ye to be like this,” Leah continued. “She would take your own sheep shears tae ye.”
Malcolm laughed, a bitter crack of sound.
“Och, you’re wrong, sister.” He leaned back in his chair and then kept leaning until his head hit the wall behind him, as if holding his skull upright was simply too difficult. “Aileenwouldwant me tae be like this. To grow a beard of mourning and bury myself in sorrow. She would wish me tae feel the pain of her loss, to mourn her as thoroughly and deeply as I loved her.”
“That simply isnae true, brother, and well ye know it. She would definitely want ye to remember your way around a razor and bar of soap.”
“Where is your husband?” Malcolm asked, attempting to divert the subject.
“Gone.” Leah busied her hands with gathering up the crockery and cutlery atop a side table.
“Gone?”
“Aye. He returned to Laverloch three days ago. He’s only in the way here at Thistle Muir.” Leah set the items on a tray.
She didn’t wish to contemplate Fox leaving. To recall the stern set of his shoulders as he swung himself into the saddle and rode off into the morning mist.
He hadn’t looked back.
“Ye let him go?” Malcolm sat up and thumped his fist on the desktop.
“Aye, I did.”More like ordered him to go, she declined to add. “I have grown weary of commanding his attention and affection. Without me forcibly tethering him, he appeared content tae leave.”
Leah swallowed back tears.
She had wept more in the past two weeks than she had in the previous decade.
There was simply too much to grieve.
Aileen’s loss rattled, abrading a hollow void in Leah’s chest that, ironically, felt suffocating.
Leah attempted to escape the feeling by immersing herself in the numbness of routine—organizing the farmhands, balancing the dairy accounts, responding to Ethan’s letters and assuring him that she did not need his help.
But even numbness eluded her from time to time.
Yesterday, Leah had been helping Mrs. McGregor in the kitchen and opened a cupboard door to find Aileen’s blue apron hanging inside. A flour handprint stood in sharp relief against the darker muslin, hauntingly stark. Aileen’s hand, resting on the curve of her belly.
Mrs. McGregor had found Leah on the floor, curled into the stone wall, clutching the apron to her mouth to stifle hergreitingsobs.
This was the worst part of loss, Leah thought. The endless ambush of emotion. The sense that the worst had passed and thenbam!Something unexpected—a sound, a smell, an image—would bring grief crashing down again.
But today, Leah had burrowed deep within her numb shell. Today, she could push thoughts of Aileen and Fox aside until she had the emotional fortitude to deal with them.
“Ye should be with your husband.” Malcolm reached for the whisky bottle. “I can see tae myself.”
