Esther laughed at the goat. It was a real laugh. Open, unguarded, the kind she’d been producing more often these past weeks as if she’d been practicing and had now decided she could do it without checking first whether it was allowed.
After dinner, Ava took Esther upstairs, as was the habit, and Noah sat for a while with Elliot over the last of the wine.
“She’s happy,” Elliot said.
Noah didn’t ask which one he meant.
“Aye,” he said. “She is.”
Elliot looked into his glass. “Ye did that.”
“Ava did that.”
“The two of ye did that.” He set the glass down. “I kent yer mother, Noah. Nae well, I was young. But I remember what she wanted for this clan. What she wanted for ye.” He paused. “She’d have liked this.”
Noah said nothing for a moment.
“Aye,” he said finally. “She would have.”
They finished the wine in silence, which was the particular kind of silence that belonged to men who had been friends long enough that nothing needed to be said to be understood.
Outside the window, the last of the evening light was going out of the sky.
Noah looked at it and thought that this was what it was all for.
Not the title, not the land, not the long years of fixing what his father broke. This. A table with people at it, a child’s real laugh,a woman upstairs putting his niece to bed as if she had always belonged here and always would.
He pushed back his chair and went to find them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
She had been to his chamber before.
That was the thing she kept returning to as she stood in the hallway outside. She’d been here before; she knew what was behind this door, and it hadn’t been like this.
It had been urgent and half-decided and threaded through with the particular tension of two people who had not yet said the things they needed to say.
This was different.
She knocked anyway, even though she suspected it wasn’t necessary because he was the one who had asked her to come, and she was pretty sure he heard her footsteps on the stone.
But it felt right, to knock, to wait, to be let in. To arrive rather than to simply appear.
“Aye,” he said.
She went in.
The fire was built high, throwing amber light across the room.
He was standing by the window, his back to the glass and his arms crossed over his chest, watching her the way he always did. Steadily, with the particular attention of a man who had decided something mattered and was no longer trying to hide it.
She closed the door behind her.
“Ye knocked,” he said.
“I always knock.”
“Nae always.” His mouth moved slightly. “There was the incident with the account books.”
