Because she learned the hard way that hesitation is its own kind of answer.
He sits on the edge of the bed and thinks about the night they spent together.They only slept together one night, one perfect, impossible night, and still the room feels altered, as if the air remembers and is offended by the return to emptiness.
He should be angry.
He tries to be.
But anger requires a villain, and Callum can’t make Isla one.Not when he can trace every step of her decision back to a single moment: the look on her face when she asked him to choose her without flinching.
And he didn’t.
It wasn’t even a refusal.That would have been cleaner.Easier to forgive.
It was a pause.
A heartbeat of uncertainty.
A single breath where the castle won.When the stones he’d desired overcame his need to choose the woman he loved.
Callum presses the letter to his chest and closes his eyes.
He can still hear her voice from the music room, steady, defiant, quietly breaking.
I won’t stay somewhere that teaches me to disappear.Someone who doesn’t choose me.
Stone taught her that men vanish.That love is conditional.That control can wear the mask of protection.
And Callum, God help him, had stood there with a lifetime of loyalty to this place lodged in his ribs and had expected her to understand.
He picks up the legal papers, scans the crisp signatures, the formal language.The words are cold, efficient, final.They feel like a transfer of property and a transfer of guilt.
This is what she left him.
A castle.
An inheritance.
A choice he didn’t make.
He sets the papers down, hands shaking slightly.
He needs to breathe, but the air in this room tastes like old regrets.He stands and walks to the window.The grounds spread out below, damp and gray, the road leading away already scrubbed clean by distance.There are no tire tracks left.No visible proof she was ever here.
Only the absence.
Callum grips the windowsill.His knuckles whiten.
He has spent most of his life believing that staying was strength.
Stay when it’s hard.Stay when people leave.Stay when you’re unwanted.Stay because leaving means you’re weak.Leaving means you’re like everyone else who walked away.
Keir stayed away.
And called it love.
Isla left.
And called it survival.
