She faces him again.
“Stop turning him into a tragic figure,” she demands.“He was my father.”
Callum exhales slowly.“And he was a man who believed the damage he could cause outweighed the good he might bring.”
She shakes her head.“That’s cowardice.”
“Sometimes,” Callum says, “it’s fear masquerading as mercy.”
The room tightens around them.
“This changes how I see you,” Isla says suddenly.
Callum’s chest tightens.“How?”
“You defend him,” she says.“You see his choice as a sacrifice.I see it as abandonment.”
He nods slowly.“Both can be true.”
“I don’t know how to live with that,” she says.
The letter crumples slightly in his hand.
Isla turns and walks out of the room.Callum stands there, not knowing what to do.
The truth has done what it always does.
It hasn’t healed them.
It’s split them, just enough to hurt.Their fragile beginning seems to be unraveling, and that frightens him.
Chapter22
Callum doesn’t go after her right away.
The door closes somewhere down the corridor, the sound swallowed by stone and distance, and he stands there in Keir’s bedroom with the letter still in his hand, the words blurring on the page.He tells himself she needs space.That chasing her now will only make things worse.That if he gives her time, they’ll find their way back to each other once the initial shock settles.
He tells himself a lot of things.
The truth is simpler and harder to face.
He doesn’t know what to say that won’t make this worse.
The letter lies open on the bed, the paper creased where Isla’s fingers tightened, where his own grip faltered.Keir’s handwriting stares up at him, controlled, deliberate, written by a man who believed that if he chose his words carefully enough, he could manage the damage.
Callum folds the letter slowly and places it back into the envelope, not sealing it.Nothing about this feels finished.He sets it on the desk, straightening it as if order might bring clarity.
It doesn’t.
The castle feels different now.It did last night too, but then it was softened by warmth, shared music, shared breath, the sense that for once something good wasn’t about to be taken away.
Now it feels watchful.
Callum leaves the room and moves through the corridors without direction at first, following instinct more than thought.He hears voices somewhere below, staff going about their day, unaware that something fundamental has just shifted.
He finds Isla in the music room.
She’s sitting at the piano bench, hands resting flat on the closed lid, not playing.Her shoulders are tight, her spine rigid, like she’s holding herself together through force of will alone.
