Callum had assumed it was discipline.
Now he wonders if it was fear.
“What did he say about me?”Isla asks suddenly.
Callum meets her gaze.“He didn’t talk about you at all.I learned about you the day he died.”
Pain flickers across her face, quick as lightning.
Silence again, thick and breathing.
Callum takes a slow step forward, stopping on the other side of the piano.“I keep asking myself,” he says quietly, “how a man can save one kid and abandon another.”
Isla’s head turns sharply.
Callum holds her gaze.“It doesn’t fit.”
Her voice comes out thin.“Maybe he recognized that you were in danger and needed rescuing.”
Callum nods once.“From a place that would’ve ruined me.”
Jealousy flashes in her eyes, raw, naked, and then regret hits her instantly.
She inhales sharply.“I’m—” She stops, jaw tight.“I’m sorry.”
Callum shakes his head.“Don’t apologize for wanting what you should’ve had.”
Isla flinches like that’s worse than an insult.“Stop.”
Callum falls silent.
Isla’s hand curls on the piano’s edge.“I don’t want to be seen like this,” she says, voice shaking despite her control.“I don’t want you to understand me.”
“Why?”Callum asks.
“Because then you’ll pity me,” she snaps, heat flaring again.“And I refuse to be pitied in my own father’s house.”
Callum’s jaw tightens.“I don’t pity you.I just don’t understand why Keir did this.”
“Everyone looks at me with pity in their eyes.The servants, the press, even you,” she shoots back, then closes her eyes, as if the words are a betrayal.She exhales.“God.I’m sorry.I’m just… tired of being the only one who didn’t get him.”
Callum’s chest aches.
Isla opens her eyes again, gaze fierce and guarded.“I listened to the tape because I needed something real,” she says.“And all I got was melody.”
Callum nods.“That’s real.”
“It’s not enough,” she whispers.
“No,” Callum agrees.
Callum’s gaze catches on the fallboard above the keys.For a moment, he sees a different scene: Keir in this room, palm on that same polished wood, staring at a photograph he kept hidden like a sin.Callum had found it once by accident, a little girl, missing front teeth, grin bright enough to hurt.Keir had snatched it back with a sharpness that felt like fear.
Until this past week, Callum had never known who that child was.Now he realized it was Isla.
Callum almost tells her.
The words rise to his tongue,He had a photo.He kept of you.Not in the ways that mattered, but?—
