“I was telling her that lavender doesn’t need much fussing over.” She looked at him. “She said,like me.”
Noah was quiet for a moment.
“She said it plainly,” Ava said. “Nae sad. Just matter-of-fact. Like she was simply observin’ somethin’ true.” She thought about it. “I think she’s decided she’s all right. I think she’s been decidin’ it for months, and today it just came out.”
Noah set his book down. He was looking at her with that expression e that had taken her a long time to understand wasn’treserve or distance but was, in fact, the closest he came to saying things he didn’t have words for.
“Thank ye,” he said.
“Ye daenae need to thank me for that.”
“I do,” he said it plainly. “I daenae ken how to do what ye do with her. I never did.” His voice was even. “She’s different because of ye. This castle is different because of ye.”
Ava looked at him steadily and didn’t argue, which was something she was gradually learning to do—accept what was true without immediately searching for a counterargument.
“Come here,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m readin’.”
“Ye werenae. Ye were starin’ at the same page for ten minutes before I came in.” She held his gaze. “Come here.”
He came. He sat on the arm of her chair, which was not its intended use, and she leaned her head against his arm, and they stayed like that for a while in the warm library, quiet with the fire burning low and the rest of the castle going about its evening entirely without them.
Outside, somewhere down the corridor, she could hear Esther’s voice. Reading aloud to herself, the way she’d started doing lately, practicing the sound of words in the air.
Her stutter was still there, but she no longer stopped when she felt it coming. She pushed through it now. She’d decided the stutter was just part of how she talked, and that was that.
Ava listened to her read.
This is it. This is the thing. Nae the handfastin’, nae the dress, nae any of the occasions Caitlin was so eager to arrange. Just this, a warm room, a child reading aloud down the corridor, a man sitting badly on the arm of a chair because ye asked him to.
This was what she’d been afraid to want too much.
She decided she was done being afraid of it.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“Christ.”
The paperwork had not stopped for the killing.
This was something Noah had not anticipated, or perhaps had not allowed himself to think about.
That the morning after would still find him sitting at his desk, working through the accumulated correspondence. And the morning after that, and the one after that, because the clan didn’t pause for grief, guilt, or whatever else filled his chest when he thought about William.
He had written to the relevant parties.
He had the body handled quietly and with dignity, which William had not earned, but that Noah offered anyway because it was the right thing to do, since Esther would be old enough to understand someday, and he wanted to do it the right way.
He had told Elliot, who had said nothing for a moment and then saidaye, Laird,with the particular quality that meant he understood everything that wasn’t being said.
He had not told Esther. Not yet.
She knew William was gone. Had been told simply that her father had left and would not be coming back, which was true in the only way that mattered to an eight-year-old.
She had received this information, looked at Noah steadily, and then gone to find Ava.
He had watched her go and thought that she already knew. On some level, she had always known that her father was not a man who stayed.
