Still everyone had greeted him, crowding around to be the next one to hug him. Vin in particular had appeared overjoyed to see him. Fiona, her belly rounded with her own child, had clung to him, giving in to tears he’d rarely seen from her. They’d genuinely missed him. He’d been surprised.
Prim had been right as usual.
“How is he?” James asked his oldest brother, Francis, joining him in the library after a refreshing bath and a change of clothes.
He’d already paid his respects for Ilona, still laying out in the family parlor. Though ten days seemed a long delay, it wasn’t unheard of. Family and friends invited to the funeral would need time to travel, and Colin had only just relented from the grief that had delayed the burial this long. The funeral would take place the following day.
He’d gone up to see Colin when he’d arrived, as well. Hardly a word had passed his brother’s lips. He looked pale, forlorn.
Devastated.
Everything he’d ever feared.
“As good as you could expect.”
“So, not well then.”
“No.”
James nodded and swirled his Scotch around his glass.
“It’s a terrible thing. Have you seen Nan yet?” Francis asked, referring to Colin and Ilona’s newborn daughter.
“Not yet.”
Joy and sorrow warred with one another on his brother’s face. “She’s a wee thing but she has her mother’s sunny nature. I’d swear she’s smiling already.”
“She’s only two weeks old,” reason compelled James to point out.
Francis just shrugged. “I’ll take a smile where I can find one at this point.”
James couldn’t begrudge him that. “He reminds me of Father already,” he found himself saying.
The comparison ate at him. He slipped his mother’s locket out of his pocket, turned it over and over again in his hand, remembering those last days. He didn’t want to see the same thing happen to Colin, to see him waste away for the sake of heartbreak.
He didn’t want it to happen to any of them.
Or himself.
The thought of Prim dying laid him to waste inside. He couldn’t imagine what he would do if she died. Yet, he might find out one day if he persuaded her to marry him. Life was a precarious thing. People died all the time for a variety of reasons.
But logic couldn’t sway grief, he knew he’d be distraught if something happened to her. And he wasn’t even in love with her. He couldn’t begin to imagine his brother’s desolation. Colin had worshipped the very ground Ilona walked on, just as she had adored him.
Francis rocked back in his chair, drinking from his glass. “Aye, I’ve seen it too, but what can we do but let him know we are here for him?”
James joined his brother in drink and silence for a few long moments.
“Do you ever think,” he began slowly, “that it’s better not to love at all?”
His brother gazed at him with eyes so much like his own. But there was a light in Francis’s he’d never seen in his own.
“I can’t agree with that when loving my Eve has been the greatest achievement of my life.”
James shook his head, looking down into his drink once more. “But look at him, Francis. Recall the way Father was after Mother died. He was lost to us all the moment she passed away. He might have still been alive then, but he’d left us all. Left us without a father. Fiona was just a wee bairn. You were more of a father to her than he ever was. Is that going to happen to wee Nan? Is Colin going to waste away before our eyes? Forget he has a child who needs him?”
“That won’t happen.”
“I don’t think you’d be able to stop it if it did,” James pointed out. “I don’t know. They had such a short amount of time together, not more than a few years, but I look at Colin and I can see that happening. Just as it did to Father. I look at him and wonder…”
