Page 17 of Fierce Highland Longing

And that was one. It went down easy. I stopped, and my whole body thanked me for stopping.

We went north along the track. The grass was flat with the wind, and the sheep didn’t move for us, same as always. There are eleven of them on that headland, and not one has ever given me the right of way.

“Why do they not shift?”

“Nobody’s ever made them. Four hundred years of sheep on this hill and nobody’s once made them.”

“That’s a management problem.”

“It’s a Scottish problem.” He got a hand on the wire for me where the fence sags. “You’d want to see them in a gale. They stand facing it. Every one, same way, like a row of stones.”

“Do you stand facing it?”

“I’ve nothing else to do with weather.”

I laughed at that, and he didn’t seem to understand why, which made it better.

The light was going gold over the water the way it does out there at five in the afternoon. Three days till the big tide, he’d said on Tuesday. The email was sitting on my laptop with four days left on it, and I hadn’t opened it since the fire.

I counted the swell coming in. Eight seconds, nine, eight. It broke on the rocks at the foot of the cliff and hauled out and came again. You can set a watch by it. I’ve stood on enough headlands waiting for light to read a sea’s rhythm inside ten minutes.

Tavish’s color was up. Weight on him. He took that path like a man who’d never sat down on a wet step in his life.

The gray was still at the corners of his mouth. I checked. It hadn’t moved.

“There’s something I need to say to you.”

He stopped walking. He didn’t ask what. He stood there with his hands down and waited, and gave me all the room in the world.

My hand went to my throat for the camera strap and found my collar instead. I took it down and put it in my pocket, and the eleven words sat in my mouth and got heavier the longer I held them, and he waited until I was ready.

“You should get a coat that fits.”

He got the shoulder of it between two fingers and shook it. “It’s Isla’s husband’s.”

“I know. It’s terrible.”

“He was a wider man.”

There was a pause.

He let it go. He’d decided to let it go—I could see him decide it—and I’d have given a lot to know what was behind that, and I didn’t ask that either.

At the top the path runs out along a shoulder of rock, and the wind comes over the lip hard enough to lean on.

We stopped there because he stopped.

Talking was finished. You can’t do it in that wind without shouting, and neither of us shouted. My hands went up and buttoned my coat at the throat.

The swell came in. Eight seconds. Nine.

I don’t know how long we stood. Long enough that the light changed. Long enough that the not-talking stopped being a gap in the conversation and turned into the thing we were doing. I needed to say the eleven words, and I spent the time standing there instead.

He was closer than he had been. I hadn’t moved, and I didn’t see him move.

I turned my head, and he had his eyes on me already.

Nobody has looked at me like that in six years. Daniel used to watch me the way you watch a thing you’ve already bought. This was not that.