Malcolm watched it all flicker across her face as she read the engraved lines.
Her eyes raised to his, tinged with understanding.
“Would you like me to leave you in peace?” Her quiet consideration erased his good sense.
“Nae,” he said, voice perhaps gruffer than he intended.
They stood, staring at one another, listening to the breeze that rustled the birch trees and tugged at Viola’s skirt.
He couldn’t pretend like being here with Aileen was of no import.
Her gaze said she understood this.
Finally, she looked away, chest rising and falling on a deep breath.
“I cannot imagine what it would be like to lose a child and my spouse in one dreadful day,” she said.
“I hope ye never do,” he replied. “’Tis a hellscape I wouldnae wish upon my most spiteful enemy. It’s the sort of pain ye never recover from, I ken.”
Aileen’s screams of agony still haunted his dreams. Or worse, the unearthly silence that had followed. When Malcolm had clutched her still body to his chest and howled his pain into her hair.
No. Those memories had no place in this sun-drenched place.
He studied Viola, memorizing the creamy skin of her cheekbones, the ethereal brightness of her pale hair.
“Would you . . .” She paused on a swallow, returning her eyes to his. “Would you tell me about her? About your wife? I would like to hear.”
The kind compassion in Viola’s expression battered his chest.
But her kindness also, perversely . . .irkedhim.
A rather immature sliver of his heart wanted Viola to dislike hearing him speak of another woman.
Did she see him in a fraternal light? As merely Ethan’s older brother and nothing more?
And why was he chafing against that very idea? It wasn’t as if Viola Brodure would ever see him asmorethan that. Even if Malcolm wished it.
Which, he reminded himself for easily the thousandth time, he emphatically did not.
“What can I say about my Aileen?” he began, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “She was nearly the opposite of yourself. A miller’s daughter with very little education beyond basic reading and writing. We were friends as children and that friendship developed into a deep love as we grew older. I never even glanced at another woman. My Uncle Leith in Aberdeen—the one who fostered Ethan from an early age—was nearly apoplectic when I married her. It was already bad enough that my father was a mere gentleman farmer, but for me to sink even lower and marry a woman whose father was a common laborer . . . well . . .”
Malcolm didn’t know why he said the words as he did. Maybe to remind himself how ridiculous his infatuation with Viola Brodure truly was, how utterly unequal they were in social class. Her uncle was Viscount Mossley, for heaven’s sake.
If Viola sensed any of Malcolm’s self-doubts, her expression did not show it.
“She must have been remarkable, to so capture your heart,” she said.
Silence for the space of three heartbeats.
“Aye.” Malcolm cleared his throat, but words stacked up on his tongue, demanding an outlet. “Aileenwastruly remarkable. Clever, despite her lack of book learning. Quick tae laugh. Even quicker to defend a friend or solve a problem. She was brave and strong and I loved her with everything I had. Her loss is a heaviness that never ends.”
He looked away, swallowing against the hard knot ofgrieflongingsadnesslodged in his chest.
A pair of robins quarreled in the tree above his head, their bickering echoing through the kirkyard.
Viola regarded him with those bluebell eyes of hers. As if seeingintohim.
“Ethan wrote a poem about that once, did he not? About grief?” she asked.
