Callum nods, solemn. “When Janet left, she carried you in her belly.” He looks pained as he says it. “I thought you knew. I’m sorry. I wouldnae have spoken so carelessly.”
I give a distracted wave. “No, it’s good for me to know. It’s not your fault. It’s my mom’s fault for not tellingme…anything. Ever.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose as I flop onto my back, cutting off the tears. “It always comes back to her.”
She was pregnant. With me. And my father was some man named Gregor MacGregor.
Before I can stop myself, I blurt, “Oh no.” I gape at Callum, terrified to even say the words. “You and I aren’t related, are we?”
“Och, no!” Callum looks as scandalized as I’d felt. “Gregor was my distant clansman, no more.”
“Gregor,” I repeat, still reeling. “A man named Gregor MacGregor was my father.”
“Aye.” Gently, he adds, “You’ve the look of him, you know. Around the eyes. Though yours are far lovelier.”
I can’t process the compliment. “I’ll never see for myself,” I say. “No pictures, no nothing. And now he’s dead.”
“I’ll never know any of my relatives. All I have is Poppa—” My voice goes flat. “No, I don’t even have him. Poppa’s not really mine.”
“Blood kin or no,” Callum says emphatically, “I’ve no doubt you’ll always have your grandfather. This won’t change a thing for him. From all you’ve said, the man’s as steady as the tides.”
I inhale weakly and meet his eyes with a nod, hearing the truth in his words. “Yeah. He loves me regardless.” I force a self-deprecating laugh. “So I guess there’s one person who cares about me.”
“Only the one?” he asks in a rasp. “Truly?”
My universe shrinks, narrowing until it’s just Callum and his eyes, focused on me.
I’m not brave enough to hear what he might be saying. I’m too raw, and this conversation has been bruising enough already. I especially don’t have the courage to answer him.
I look away. “I wonder what he’s doing now. Poppa, I mean. It’s mid-November, right? I guess he’ll have to make the Thanksgiving turkey himself this year.” Weakly, I add, “I can probably forget about finishing the semester.”
“He might not even ken you’re gone.” Callum is trying to reassure me, but it does the opposite.
“Oh,” I say, swallowing back the renewed ache in my throat, “I guess he’s not even born yet.”
The thought that I’m living my life, and all the while Poppa is frozen in some strange temporal suspended animation…it’s too horrible.
The sun drifts behind the trees, and a sudden chill makes me shiver. I scrub at my face, feeling fresh resolve.
“I need to get back to him.” The words practically explode from me. “Blood relation or not, he’s my family.” I watch Callum, waiting for a reaction—an insight or some essential truth. Maybe I’m waiting for him to protest.
He doesn’t.
Callum has such a unique way about him. Warm, vibrant, open-hearted, guileless. I’ve come to rely on it. Adore it, actually. I don’t realize how much until that blazing intensity recedes from me, vanishing behind the fog of his gray eyes.
“I know,” he says in a voice so even, so toneless, I barely recognize it. His voice is steady, but something in his eyes dims, like a candle flickering out. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get you home. I swear it.”
And just like that,the days begin to slip away.
Callum visits Donag more often, picking through theirconversations like a beachcomber sifting through sand, piecing together scraps of information like fragments of a shattered seashell.
Meanwhile, I move through my days on autopilot, my mind half here, half already gone. The weeks blur together in a cycle of chores and quiet preparations. I start squirreling away anything that might come in handy for travel: oats, nuts, smoked meat, dried apples.
I thought the weather was bad before, but as Callum promised, it’s gotten worse. A constant, bone-chilling damp penetrates everything. Each day, it seems I’ve barely finished lunch when the sun begins to pass out of sight, turning the sky from one shade of bleak to another.
But my cloak helps, and at least I’m no longer starving all the time. With Callum’s encouragement, I’ve prepared several more meals, though once Aoife found out what we were up to after hours, I had to bribe her with my quiche recipe to keep kitchen privileges.
More than ever, Callum is a fixture in my life. A constant. A comfort.
