“I grew up with love that came with rules,” Isla continues.“With expectations I didn’t get to negotiate.My mother decided what was best for me and called it protection.My father stayed away and called it mercy.The castle shows neither.”
Her voice tightens.“Both of them took something from me and told themselves they were being kind.”
Callum’s chest aches.
“I can’t live inside that again,” she says.“I can’t love someone who needs me to soften myself so they don’t have to decide.”
“That’s not what I’m asking,” he says hoarsely.
“But it’s what you’re doing,” Isla replies.“Every time you hesitate.”
She steps closer now, close enough that he can feel the pull of her.
“I love you,” she says quietly.“But I will not become negotiable.We support one another, or we walk away.”
Silence stretches between them, thick and charged.
“And I won’t stay here within these stone walls,” Isla finishes softly.
Callum’s heart pounds.
“Say you choose me,” Isla says, voice trembling.“Say it without flinching.”
He wants to.
God, he wants to.
But the castle is not just stone to him.It is the place that kept him when no one else did.The only thing that never left.
His silence lasts a heartbeat.
Two.
Isla’s face stills, all emotion draining into something quiet and devastating.
“There it is,” she whispers.“You choose the castle over me.”
“I love you,” Callum says, the words tearing out of him.
Isla closes her eyes.When she opens them, she looks wrecked.
“I love you too,” she says.“That’s the problem.”
She turns toward the door, then pauses.
“I don’t regret last night,” Isla says quietly.“I don’t regret choosing you.”
Callum swallows hard.“Isla?—”
She looks back at him, eyes shining.“No, it’s more than that.It’s a place that teaches me to disappear.”
And then she leaves.
Callum follows her only as far as the doorway.
He watches her walk down the corridor, her back straight, steps steady, already carrying the weight of a decision he doesn’t yet understand.
The castle swallows her, and Callum understands too late what she sees when she looks at it.It belonged to her father, and her father left her.In her mind, the walls and the silence are the same thing, both reminders of how love can vanish without warning.
