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Her hesitation gives me the certainty that she has come here because the alternative is worse.

Eighteen.

I picture youth not yet hardened into caution and feel the cold weight of what it must take for a lass that young to come to my mother asking for secrecy and ruinous mercy.

“What’s she called?” I ask, looking for some fact that makes her more than a shadow in a cloak.

“Aileen Fraser. Well…” Her nose scrunches as she corrects herself. “Aileen Fraser MacGregor, I suppose now.”

The name turns my stomach. At once the whole thing feels nearer, darker, and I understand why it cuts her so deeply.

“She was married off to a distant cousin of mine—Ewan MacGregor,” Ellen says, and the name comes out like she’s spitting something bitter from her mouth. “A despicable man with enough shared blood to make it sound respectable.”

There’s a tremor in her voice that isn’t fear so much as revulsion.

“He’s anythin’ but,” she adds. “Takin’ a bride ten years younger, as if that makes him a man instead of what he truly is.”

The MacGregor clan was once well-regarded. They were built on reputation earned the slow way, through decency and duty, through men and women who held themselves to a higher standard. Knowing a brute like Ewan adds fresh shame to that name is an offence in itself.

“A vile thing,” she says, the words clipped. “A disgrace to the name.”

Her eyes shine; she blinks once, hard, fighting tears with everything she has.

“What’s he done?” I ask.

I steady her shoulders beneath my hands. She draws in against my palms, bracing for what she’s about to say.

“He beats her black and blue, James.”

The hallway narrows to a single hard line. I force a calm I don’t feel because there’s no enemy in front of me to strike, and striking the wall won’t undo what’s been done.

“He beats her,” she repeats, voice stripped bare, “and he rapes her.”

She swallows hard, then rushes on as though she must say it now before her composure gives way.

“And when he isnae doin’ that, he’s drinkin’ the day away,” Ellen adds, contempt lacing every syllable, “and sleepin’ around in brothels.”

Each word makes Aileen’s situation uglier, and with it the rage churning in me. I think of vows spoken in a kirk, of hands joined, of the sacred weight of a lifetime of promises. Then I think of how easily a man can hide behind holy words and still be welcomed among decent people.

“There are men who take a wife the way they take possession,” I say, each word set carefully in place. “Not to honour her, or keep her safe, but because the world has decided they may do as they please once a ring is on her finger.”

I draw a slow breath, forcing the fury into something more exact.

“A man who uses marriage that way has stripped himself of every claim to decency,” I continue. “He’s not fit company for honourable men, not fit presence among women, and he’s not right to breathe the same air as the woman he’s destroyed, never mind the same marriage bed.”

Ellen looks as if she might shatter under the helplessness of it all.

“She came here because she’s desperate,” Ellen says. “She doesnae want his child in her body. She cannae give him anything else. Refuses to be tied to him forever in that way.”

The words hang between us, stark and unfinished, and I hear what she doesn’t say as clearly as what she does.

“And what then?” I ask quietly. “Does she mean to live like this forever?”

I can tell she understands this desperation can’t be sustained indefinitely, and that it has a cost that compounds.

“I dinnae ken,” she says, and the answer breaks something loose at last. Her voice wavers, then collapses entirely. “I dinnae ken...”

The tears come, sudden and ungovernable. She bows her head as if ashamed of them as they fall, shoulders shaking beneath my hands.