Come she, whose beauty time cannot outlast.”
The last words fade into silence, but their echo vibrates in my bones. Callum opens his eyes, and there’s somethingdifferent in the way he looks at me now. Like he’s seeing both who I am and who the spell was summoning, and finding them to be one and the same.
The corners of his mouth lift in a gentle smile, so different from the solemn way he’d recited the incantation the first time. Back then, it had been an explanation. Now it feels more like…appreciation.
I try to lighten the moment, though my voice comes out shakier than I’d like. “Good thing you didn’t get any other red-headed nineteen-year olds.”
“Do you wish we had?” The words are light, but there’s worry in his eyes. “Tell me truly. Are you terribly devastated to be here?”
“Devastated?” I hold Callum’s gaze as I consider my reply. Devastated, yes. But there’s another feeling too. I’m discovering something, which is like the opposite of devastation.
“I miss Poppa,” I say, and while it evades his exact question, it is the truth. “But otherwise, my life in the future wasn’t so very magical.”
It gets me thinking. Does my mother have power in her blood? “How did my mother know to ask for soapwort? Isshea witch?”
He hesitates, like he’s not done with thedevastatedthing yet, but then he answers, “Donag would have you believe it. She says Janet bewitches all she sees.” He shrugs, and I’m momentarily thrown by how modern the gesture is.
“Though, as I understand it, ’tis only the MacGregors who’ve magic in their blood. But,” he adds with a wink, “witch or no, if I were to tell it plain, I confess, I always found your Janet a wee bit frightening.”
I chuckle. “You’re not the only one.” My smile fades. “There’s so much I don’t know about her. It’s kind of upsetting to think she was pregnant before me. That she had someone else first.”
Someone else she didn’t keep.
The warmth drains from Callum’s face. His mouth opens, then closes, as if the words have dried up in his throat. He pushes himself up on one elbow, and something in the way he looks at me—like he’s seeing a wound he hadn’t noticed before—hollows me inside.
“Oh, Rosie-love. No.” His voice comes out hoarse, barely above a whisper.
The silence stretches between us, heavy as stone. A gust of wind sweeps across the heather, and I shiver, though I’m not cold.
Callum’s jaw tightens, his eyes locked on some distant, unknowable point. Like he’s watching something awful play out on the horizon. “Janet never got her soapwort.” He swallows hard, like each word cost him something. His gaze drops back to mine, and I see the pain there—for me, for what he’s about to say. “Youwere the bairn she wanted to slip.”
The world tilts. I dig my fingernails deep into the dirt trying to ground myself, but my body feels far away, like I’m watching from somewhere outside it.
“She never got the chance,” Callum continues, his voice gentle as a prayer. “Donag sent her away that night.”
The sky above us suddenly seems too vast, too empty. I press my palms flat against the ground, trying to anchor myself as the truth sinks in. The heather beneath me no longer feels soft. It might as well be thorns.
I wasn’t just an inconvenience to my mother—I wastheinconvenience. The mistake she tried to erase before I even existed.
Callum’s hand hovers near mine, not quite touching, as if he’s afraid I might shatter.
Maybe I will.
Chapter
Twenty-Five
“Wait.” The word barely makes it past my lips. My brain is short-circuiting, my poor synapses sparking and misfiring, struggling to process what Callum just told me.
Janet. My mother.
Pregnant. In the past. With me.
I stare at him. At the sky. At nothing.
Everything feels off-kilter, like the ground beneath me has shifted a fraction of an inch. Enough that I can feel it, but not enough to stand firm.
I try again. “When she traveled to the future, my mother was pregnant. With me.”
