Page 89 of Auctioned to the Cruel Highlander
“What? What is it?” Ciaran’s voice came right behind her.
She didn’t want to speak, lest she jinx. She adjusted the angle again and?—
There.
She went still. “Oh, dear Lord.”
“Ava?” Ciaran called, concern now evident in his voice.
Ava felt her heart pound hard in her chest. She knew where she ought to look. She had always known. Yet seeing the place alive above her, real and immediate, made her pulse flutter. She stepped back from the telescope, then leaned in once more as if her own eyes might be deceiving her.
Nay.
The alignment was right. The timing. The place in the sky. Everything her mother had written in her old books and notes rose up whole in her mind.
“It cannae be… Oh, good God, ’tis happening.”Her voice came out as a whisper.
She turned to Ciaran, her eyes wide with shock.
“’Tis happening,” she said again, her voice stronger now. “If that is what I think it is, it is happening.”
Ciaran came closer. “What is it?”
“The comet.” She was almost laughing in disbelief, joy, and fear that if she stopped speaking, it would vanish. “Me mother saw it once when she was a girl. She never forgot it. She used to say she had seen many fine things after—balls and London rooms and the sea in summer and a hundred other pretty sights—but none of them struck her as that comet did.”
His gaze stayed on her face.
Ava took a breath and steadied herself enough to continue speaking. “She said it made her feel the world held things larger than just what we concerned ourselves with. She used to say that if she achieved nothing else in life, she wanted at least to see that comet once again.”
Ciaran’s eyes moved briefly to the telescope, then back to her. “And ye kept her notes.”
“Aye.” Ava turned back to the instrument and laid one hand on its brass tube with more care than before. “After she died, I kept all of it.”
She swallowed once. The excitement stayed, but something deeper had joined it.
“It changed after she was gone,” she murmured. “When I was little, it was only one of Ma’s stories. Afterward, it became something else. A thing she had loved. A thing she had waited for. A thing she had left behind without meaning to.” Her fingers tightened. “I think I began waiting for it because it was one way to wait with her.”
Ciaran said nothing. He stood there and listened, which was what she needed from him most.
“She had a whole life,” she continued quietly. “Marriage, children, duties, disappointments, ordinary tiredness—all the things that crowd a person into thinking only of what is in front of them. Yet she kept room for this, too. For the thought that one beautiful thing might return after years. I could never quite forget that.”
Ava looked back at him. Her face felt warm, and her eyes stung.
“I always thought that mattered more than the comet itself. She kept believing she might see it. She kept looking up. I loved her for that. I still do. And I always felt that if she could carry such hope through all the hard parts of life, then I ought nae become the sort of person who stops looking.”
Ciaran’s face contorted with an emotion she felt before she could name. He looked at her as if she had given him something heavy and living and a little dangerous.
She looked away and quickly bent to the telescope once more. One look was enough.
“Oh, we shall miss it if we stay here talking.” She moved at once, her skirts gathered in one hand, excitement taking her whole body with it. “Come.”
“Ava.”
“It is there. Truly there. Come.”
She was already halfway to the door. Ciaran followed without argument, which only made her hurry further.
They went down from the tower, through the passageway, and out into the night, leaving the castle behind them.
